J-List will be at the San Diego Comic-Con this year in booth 4929, in the “Anime Alley” part of the dealers’ room. We hope you’ll come by our booth and check out all the great products (and free stuff) we’ve got for you. If you can’t be at the show, never fear, since we’re continuing our site-wide 10% off sale for you!
Desserts in Japan can be a little different from what you might find back home. One popular treat in Japan is coffee jelly, sweetened coffee flavored gelatin that’s really good with whipped cream on top — Starbucks even sells a Coffee Jelly Frappe in the summer which I love. Another popular dessert in Japan is プリン purin, an egg custard/flan pudding with caramel sauce on top which was unknown to me before I got here. Nata de Coco is a well-known dessert in the Philippines with firm, chewy squares made from coconuts, and it’s so popular in Japan that the country buys almost the entire crop the Philippines produces. Western cakes are big too, and most cake shops are small, highly professional outfits run by a pâtissier who’s trained for several years in Paris. Finally, there are many kinds of ice cream in Japan, from matcha (green tea) and azuki (sweet Japanese beans) to variations on Italian gelato and “soft cream” (what soft-serve ice cream is called here), although my personal favorite is vanilla with a little matcha syrup on top.
I happened to see that today was my 7th anniversary on Twitter, and thought it’d be fun to ask my followers to throw out random questions that I’d answer here. Here are the questions and my answers:
Are there actually Tsundere Cafes? I’ve heard these actually exist.
Maid cafes have been a thing since the start of the 2000’s, but to keep the novelty from wearing off, the industry has to constantly re-invent itself. Maid cafes give way to cat girl cafes, then imouto cafes, and so on. There was at least one tsundere cafe in which the waitresses verbally abuse you for taking too long to decide what to order, then apologize and lovingly ask you to come back again soon as you leave.
What sort of Western TV is popular in Japan?
Western shows have always been popular in Japan, and my wife grew up watching Bewitched and Charlie’s Angels. (Fun fact: the magical girl genre owes its existence to Bewitched and the popularity of Tabitha, Samantha’s young daughter who could do magic.) These days everything from Nurse Jackie to Sherlock are shown on NHK or Wowow with Japanese subtitles.
How many black people do you see in Japan?
In rural cities far from U.S. military bases, black people are honestly quite rare in Japan, though there are always some guys from Kenya working at trendy shops in Harajuku. I once went to my usual onsen public bath in Gunma and was surprised to see a tall, athletic black guy walking around the bath area, who turned out to be a college basketball player from the U.S. who was visiting his girlfriend’s hometown. I can tell you, it takes a bit of courage to be the only white gaijin surrounded by 50 Japanese in the public bath, but to be the only black guy in such a culturally unique place really took bravery.
Are there really mixed onsen baths with both guys and girls, and have you been to one before?
I’m quite a furo-bito, or an aficionado of hot springs, since Gunma isn’t the most exciting part of Japan to live in. I’ve searched high and low for the legendary kon’yoku or mixed bath, but except for closed baths you rent and use with your family, I only found one.
Where can we find the panty vending machines?
Like many aspects of Japan, vending machines that dispense female panties have been made a lot more famous by the “lens of the Internet” than they should be. In reality, they’re almost entirely urban legend, and I’ve never come across one.
Do you know anyone that owns a gun in Japan?
Gun ownership is tightly regulated, but it’s possible to get a permit to own firearms. I had a friend who loved Remington rifles so much he named his high performance bicycle shop after the company, and had a large collection of rifles. And an American friend of mine got his hunting permit, since there are bears in the part of Japan he lives in.
Will you be attending the San Diego Comic-con? Then be sure and visit our booth (#4929, in the “Anime Alley” section of the dealers’ room) to get some cool free stuff, including our trademark J-List pocket tissues, we’ve got a great gift just for visitors at the show: an original hachimaki headband that that proclaims your status as an オタク (otaku), hand printed in Kyoto. Free with a purchase from our booth at the show!
J-List will be at the San Diego Comic-Con in a big way, with tons of awesome T-shirts, English-translated visual novels, sexy figures, plush toys, Tentacle Grape, and other items that we’ve spent all year preparing for you. We decided to extend last week’s sale for another week, giving all the fans not lucky enough to be in San Diego a chance to save some money. So through the end of Monday, California time, you can get 10% off any J-List order using code CONSALE. (As usual, the code can’t be used for items like iTunes cards, subscriptions and so on, sorry.)
