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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)
Our kitchen is still being “reformed” — er, remodeled — so over the weekend my wife and I went out to one of our favorite curry restaurants. Curry has been a staple of the Japanese diet ever since it was introduced via England back in 1872, and today it’s thought of as a “Western” food from Europe rather than something that originated in India. The restaurant we went to was called Curry House Coco Ichiban, a national chain, and as we ate my wife said, “This is such a well-run company. You can tell they’re from Nagoya the minute you walk in the door.” She was referring to the fact that Nagoya, a large city in central Japan, is famous for its competitive business environment, and any company able to survive in that market — such as Toyota, which is also from Nagoya — is one that can probably succeed anywhere. Supposedly it has to do with the fact that land is expensive there, so people there are highly motivated to succeed so can they can buy some. In J-List’s home prefecture of Gunma, land is quite cheap, and supposedly people here are far less motivated and more lazy.
One anime I decided to watch this season is Beautiful Bones: Sakurako’s Investigation, a new series based on a series of light novels about an anti-social woman named Sakurako who has a strange affinity for the bones of dead people and animals, and her mild-mannered sidekick, a high school boy named Shotaro. Together they travel around the city of Asahikawa, Hokkaido, encountering dead bodies and/or bones and solve the mysteries of how the individuals died. It’s sort of like CSI meets Hyouka, and the quality is quite high, so far. It’s interesting to analyze how media from one country affects media in another. As anime rose to prominence, Hollywood suddenly wanted to capture what made it special, and films like The Matrix openly tried to copy themes from Ghost in the Shell. With the popularity of 海外ドラマ kaigai dorama or overseas dramas in Japan, we see that the pendulum swings both ways, as this new show is clearly heavily influenced by the Fox crime drama Bones.
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.
