A new anime season has descended on us all, and I’ll be doing my best to keep up with the new shows. This time around we’ve got a bouncy new Kyoani title, more of the military/elf anime Gate, plus a few other shows I’ll be checking out. Last night I started the new Dagashi Kashi, a unique story about a boy named Kokonatsu (Coconuts) whose father runs a shop for dagashi, candy and related snacks from the Showa Period (1925-1989), which virtually every Japanese grew up eating. Kokonatsu’s life is made more complex when a flamboyant girl named Hotaru enters the scene, eager to tap his knowledge of sweets. While many of the specifics of dagashi won’t be known to viewers outside Japan, it’s not hard to pick it up as you watch, and you can browse J-List’s wonderful selection of traditional Japanese sweets and eat them as you begin each episode.
The new show’s formula — setting the story in an extremely rural town, making use of snacks that viewers feel nostalgia for — is one we’ve seen before, for example in the excellent Non Non Biyori. While stories like that highlight the simple charm of living in a rural area — though walking 2 hours to the nearest convenience store isn’t for me — the reality is that over the coming decades Japan is going to undergo some big changes as its population drops. Every year at Coming-of-Age Day the media reports on the number of new adults entering society, and this year’s number is 1.21 million, a 50,000 reduction from last year. Over the weekend several international media sources picked up the story of a lonely train station in windswept Hokkaido that serves just one passenger, a high school girl who rides to school every day. She’s set to graduate this year, though, and the station will then close for good.
J-List has had a great calendar season, shipping out thousands of awesome anime, traditional photo, actress/model and ecchi calendars to customers all over the world. To help you help us clear our remaining stock, get $10 off any calendar order of $35 or more, with any combination of single or multiple calendars, using code CALENDAR10. (You also get the usual 10% off for 2 or more calendars.) Choose from Free!, Studio Ghibli, Girls und Panzer, and 50+ other titles! Several calendars only have 2-3 copies in stock, so browse now!
