Hello and greetings once again from Japan!
The Japanese have many nice things here in Japan. One of my favorite “needless items” in Japan are the massage chairs, made by National (Panasonic) and Omron. The chairs by National use little wheels and massage your shoulders and back and feel great — you select what “course” you want with a little remote control, and can make adjustments for your height (useful for gaijin). Another neat “needless item” the Japanese have come up with are the famous “washlets,” toilet seats that will wash your butt for you with a stream of warm water, then dry it with warm air. They also feature a “bidet” wash, which is a total mystery to me. I’ve heard of Japanese toilets with remote controls (ala John Cage), but haven’t seen any myself, so they might be apocryphal. The Japanese just might think of something like that though.
The Japanese can be very expressive sometimes, making new words in English that capture emotions in excellent ways. Soft-serve ice cream is called “soft cream” here, and the love between a parent and child is called “skinship.” Sometimes the Japanese take English words and turn them into sexual things — words like “fashion,” “health,” “image” and “pink” all tend to be sexual in nature. The Japanese also make up some interesting words of their own. Opening a bag of potato chips down the middle so that it opens like a flower is called “manko-ake” which means “pussy-opening.” (Remember that the only truly “bad” word in Japanese is manko — be careful when using this one.) Also, that really cute thing that Japanese AV girls do of leaving their panties on one leg while making love is called “kata-ashi-pan,” literally “one-legged panties.”
I lost about 24 hours worth of mail sent to the [email protected] address on Saturday, U.S. time. If you sent mail to that address and didn’t get a reply, please resend your mail.
For the first update of the week, we’ve got some very nice items for you, including:
- First, excellent magazines, including the new issues of Video Boy and Best Video (fans of Ayukawa Ami, the “new” Kano Mizuho, take note!)
- We’ve also got some great back issues posted to Magazine page 2, including some past issues of Apple Shashinkan and others
- For photobook fans, we’ve got a few copies of “Santa Fe” and “Liona” that sold out so fast before (but they might sell out again quickly…)
- For photobook lovers, we’ve got one of the most requested photobooks in recent memory — the excellent Strawberry Diary photobook, featuring the lovely Yoshii Manami and photographed by the famous photographer Aida Garo
- If you enjoy Japanese leg and “low lens” photos, we’ve got some new items for you on the leg fetish photobook page
- Also much-requested, two excellent “image nude DVD” featuring incredibly lovely erotic photography by Aida Garo (see the DVD Main page), including his lovely subject, “Kaoru”
- There are some new items on the high-end S&M photobook page, too
- We’ve got some excellent erotic manga for you, including the popular A4 size manga with 290+ pages — very thick and lovely!
- For doujinshi fans, see two excellent hentai Final Fantasy VII works from the excellent circle “Crimson Comics” — very erotic
- For hentai collectors, we’ve got the deluxe Fantasienne, which tons of glossy, color pages for you, and a special treat — a CD-ROM of images and game demos, too
- We’ve got fresh stock of several of the popular Yellows CD-ROMs, including Yellows 2.0 and Americans 1.0
- Finally, a new magazine + DVD item for fans, enjoy the lovely “DVD you can play with” on the magazines page
- For fans of our unique Japanese snacks, we’ve got fresh stock of several items, including the #1 selling item in J-List’s history (in terms of units sold), the spicy, caffeine-laced gum from Lotte “Black Black”
- We have fresh stock of several of our popular Wacky Things from Japan page, including Japanese loose socks, bamboo ear cleaners, and more
- We’ve got fresh stock of the popular Super Deformed Yoda and Darth Maul on the anime & toys page, which speak lines from Star Wars movies when you put them on your open hand — and they even speak Japanese!
- Finally, new items on our Wacky Things pages, include the ultimate toilet brush, a cool map of the Tokyo subway (it’d look great on your wall), a great new massage item that will make your back and neck feel great, and two great items — an incredibly cute “puffy” pink pencil case and phone holder.
I see the first Yaoi convention is coming. Yaoi fans who can get to San Francisco in September should check out the official site — http://www.yaoicon.com/
