A few notes about the new J-List website:
- remember, subscriptions (both magazine and snacks) are currently off the site but will be restored soon, all subscriptions are still live and will be processed normally
- customer history will be imported from the old system over the next week or so (so don’t worry)
Driving in Japan is an interesting topic which I thought I’d write about. While you can generally get along without a car in large cities thanks to trains and subways, out in places like J-List’s home prefecture of Gunma (“if there’s a bright center to Japan, Gunma is the prefecture that it’s farthest from”), you definitely need a car to get around…preferably a Toyota AE86. To buy a car in Japan you head down to your city’s local dealership, which is always operated directly by Toyota, Nissan, etc. rather than a third party dealership as in the U.S. (The old Saturn brand was GM’s attempt at adopting this direct sales model to the U.S.) After your car is ordered, you wait three weeks while they make it in the factory — to drive the car home that day would feel “cheap” to the Japanese. One reason people buy new cars in Japan is a tax-and-inspection fee that’s required every two years which costs $600-1500. It’s unpleasant to pay this fee, so many Japanese use it as an excuse to look at new cars instead, which helps keep the domestic economy humming. When you buy a car, you’re required to show proof that you have a parking space for it, which can run you $250-400 a month in Tokyo. In case you wondered, gasoline currently costs US$1.05/€.89 per liter, or US$3.80 per gallon.
It can be fun to study how Japanese names work. The family name comes before the given name, of course, so it’s always Hatsune Miku in Japan, never Miku Hatsune. This name order is used for Japanese only, however, never for foreigners. Western customs like middle names or suffixes are never used in Japan, and part of the attraction of characters like Arsène Lupin III or Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière is that they have exotic names that are far removed from “boring” Japanese ones. Married couples always take the same family name, since to marry someone is to symbolically be “adopted” into that family. The wife usually takes the husband’s name, but it’s not rare at all for the reverse to happen, which is what Gendou did when he married Ikari Yui in Evangelion. It’d be hard to imagine a neighborhood in the States where everyone was named Smith, but nearly everyone who lives around our house has the same last name as us, Yanai, and nearby there are patches of houses where everyone is named Hosoi or Ishida, yet no one is related to anyone around them. One amusing aspect of living in Japan is hearing people with names like 田中 Tanaka (“in the rice field”), 山田 Yamada (“rice field on the mountain”) and 中村 Nakamura (“in the village”) argue vehemently that their ancestors were samurai warriors despite their agrarian sounding names.
Great news! We’ve gotten the first volley of awesome 2016 calendars in stock today, and we’ve posted them to the site now. Enjoy Studio Ghibli’s gorgeous original art calendar, Sword Art Online, fabulous idols like Ai Shinozaki and Japan’s most famous cat.
