Greetings from J-List April 13, 2000

Hello again from Japan, that wacky place where “yes, that’s so” always means “no.”

Well, the Season of the Sakura has come to Japan — all throughout the country, millions of cherry blossoms are exploding in wonderful shades of pink and white. What better excuse to take a few hours off work, break out the portable gas range and have chicken fajitas and yakiniku (Korean barbecue) under the falling sakura petals? This custom is called hanami in Japan, and we’re big fans of it here at J-List. See our “sakura special report” at http://www.myjapan.net/peter/sakura2000.html . You can see all of us — even Kaori drinking beer! — as well as Jose, the newest addition to the J-List team.

One of the problems with living in a foreign country where English isn’t spoken is maintaining one’s native language. I don’t actually forget English, of course, but there are the occasional difficult word that, when I go to access in my brain, I find isn’t available. I mean, there isn’t much use for words like gynalogical or irreplaceable when you live in Japan and talk with Japanese who have learned ESL (that’s English as a second language, in English teacher-speak).

Tonight’s update is a very good one indeed. We’ve got:

• New magazines, and more magazines, including the excellent new Birei, Men’s Master (great for Minori Aoi fans) and more
  
• All-new photobooks, including the mysterious Nishio Etsuko’s very artful and erotic photobook
  
  More copies of some of our most popular items, including Kanazawa Bunko’s 4th Photobook, Wakana Sena’s “Dahlia, Ozawa Madoka’s Fairy Sketch, and Horiuchi Nana’s popular book
  
• Because we sold out in less than a day, we’ve got more stock of the love Crystal Card AV collectible cards
  
• For our yaoi fans, two very nice yaoi anthology manga
  
• Many great new special-order videos, including items by Aoi Minori’s Loving Raw, Honjoh Sayuri’s excellent Mejiri, Fujitani Shiori’s comeback video, and a super compilation video featuring performances by *8* lovely gals, including the incredibly rare Ariga Miho (see special order videos page 1)
  
• On our anime & toys page, we’ve got T-Dog 2000, a wonderful robotic toy dog that moves around your room, avoiding obstacles and walls, as well as fresh stock of the hard-to-find Princess Mononoke & Moro figure
  
• Fresh JPOP CDs!
  

We’re also happy to announce that we’ve gotten our first stock of the excellent and much-requested Star Wars Episode 1 on Laserdisc. The LD release of the film is an extremely high-quality one, in CLV with wonderful high-quality video and full THX sound. The movie is the wide edition, in English, with Japanese subtitles, and they’re sealed in plastic bags for collectors. The run will likely be short for this product, so let us know quickly if you want us to get you one. (They’re going for around $150 on eBay as I write this.) Each one comes with a special pack of Japanese postcards, too.