Hello and TGIF from all your friends at J-List!
One reason I love living in Japan is that I love the food. Someone once told me that if you don’t like the food in a certain country, it’s impossible to be happy there — well, I’ve got no problems with the food in Japan, that’s for sure. Our favorite restaurants include Ran Ran, a local ramen and gyoza (aka “pot stickers”) restaurant, Gin (Mediterranean pasta and fish), Tsukiji Sushi (conveyor-belt sushi, it’s really good), and Soba-gura (a traditional Japanese soba and udon restaurant we frequent). But my family’s favorite restaurant hands-down is Mahatama New Delhi, an Indian restaurant in the neighboring city, where I happened to take my wife for our first date. Indian curries are really delicious, and the soft, warm nan bread of Mahatma is the best I’ve tasted in all my travels around Japan. Somehow we come up with an excuse to drive to Maebashi and eat Indian food just about once a week. My own favorite is the pumpkin and chicken curry Kaduh Murgh…
Part of Peter’s Unified Theory of Japan is that everything that can be different between the U.S. and Japan, will be different. In America, you make an emergency call by dialing 911, but in Japan, it’s 119. Green is blue in Japan — when the Japanese see a green traffic light, they call it blue (ao) despite all the protests of gaijin living here that the light is really green. There are very few lawyers in Japan — a couple of years ago, the Japan Bar Association had to dispatch lawyers to several rural parts of the country where there were no lawyers at all, so that people living there could have access to basic legal services. When you buy a house, it doesn’t go up in value as it does in the States, it goes down to zero almost immediately — since no one would want to live in a “used” house, only the land retains value in Japan. Finally, when you want to lose weight in America, doctors often tell you to drink eight glasses of water a day to help flush food out before it’s totally absorbed by the body. In Japan? The one thing you must not do if you want to lose weight is drink water, otherwise you’ll become a “mizu-debu” (water-fat, i.e. bloated from water). Who is to say which way is right?
We’ve made some improvements to the J-List website, improving the ways you can search for products. Now, searching for both Aika Miura and Miura Aika will bring up results, regardless of word order. If you want to find both Madoka Ozawa and Aika Miura items, just search for “Madoka Ozawa or Aika Miura” (no quotes). To find an actual string, just put what you want to search for in quotes. As always, please let us know if you experience any problems with the new search system or the site in general.
For the big pre-weekend update, we’ve got some nice items for you, including:
- First, new magazines, including the great new Dela Beppin, filled with Japan’s hottest AV idols for you
- For fans of amateur magazines, we’ve got several nice items for you, showing various fetishes from Japan
- Also, a new issue of Best Video Super Document, which shows many very interesting behind-the-scenes shots of Japan’s famous AV idols working hard at their jobs
- For fans of Japan’s unique hardcover glossy photobooks, we’ve posted some excellent works for you to check out
- Japan also boasts some of the most incredible high-end bondage photography in the world, and a new photobook featuring Mayumi Sawaki is just wonderful for S&M fans
- If you are a collector of Japan’s popular erotic manga comics, check out the new and restocked items for you in time for the weekend
- For fans of DVDs from Japan, we’ve got some great items for you, starting with a new concept from Soft on Demand: four girls are put in a glass room with several heaters. Outside it’s cool, but a throng of men await to take them sexually of they leave the box… (region free)
- In another unique Soft on Demand creation, Semen Bus, a group of four sexy “bus guides” actively service all the passengers on the bus (region free)
- From SOD’s Natural High label, the lovely Kurumi Aoyama (star of the Moodyz title Black Zamen) challenges the erotic “Buukake Circle in the Blue Sky” (region free)
- Swimsuit idol DVDs are a staple of Japanese pop culture — but Sayaka Hijiri plays an extremely horny idol, who has sex with the cameramen and more (region free)
- We’ve got another super bukkake fetish video from M’s Video Group and Kazuhiko Matsumoto, not to be missed by bukkake lovers (VHS)
- Also, we’ve got a nice update of many DVD items, with fresh stock of The Best Oral Sex and Fellatio, Kurumi Morishita’s Tekoki, The Highest Class Soap Lady, Nao Hirosue’s best Selection, and several leg fetish DVDs!
- If you love slender, sexy Japanese ladies, than we suggest you check out the excellent Race Queen 2001, a superb DVD from Pioneer that features 120 minutes of the sexiest RQ’s (including Toko Ushikawa and Yinling!)
- Also, for fans of Japan’s sweet swimsuit idols, check out several newly posted photobooks and other idol items for you
- For anime toy fans, we’ve got some great items, including a new Macross Valkyrie/Battroid from Bandai (it will go fast, we fear), and two great new figures in the “SkyLuv” Love Hina series
- Also for Love Hina fans, a great trading card collection that is just beautiful
- Our Japanese snack and food items have been selling in record quantities, we’re doing a major update — look for delicious “soba-meshi” fried rice, more green tea hard candy, my own favorite Tomato Pretzels, and several flavors of Mousse Pocky (including the very popular Green Tea Pocky)
- Also: in addition to the new Japanese Bubblicious (very different from what is sold in the States), we have fresh stock of many kinds of Japanese gum, including Black Black, Free Zone (won’t stick to your teeth), and the only-the-Japanese-could-have-thought-of-this Azalea flavored gum
- We’ve got new bento boxes, chopsticks, and other fun lunchtime items, including bento boxes especially for girls
- We have some cute items for you, including Hamutaro furikake (sprinkle it over rice) with little plastic hamster mascots, a Hello Kitty item for flower growers, cute origami, and more
- Finally, look for Japanese square scrambled egg pans, Japanese portable ashtrays, a traditional Japanese teacup with saucer, and other fun items from Japan!
In addition to the other rare and fun things J-List makes available to you from Japan, we sell “revolving” monthly subscriptions to dozens of anime, JPOP, hobby and other magazines. One of our favorites is Megami Magazine, a wonderful anime magazine filled with posters, pull-out cards, calendars and other amazing extras, all great for fans of beautiful Japanese anime and game characters. (A recent issue had 14 posters in it!) We think that great magazines like this from Japan, and we hope you will check out our Reserve Subscription pages and see which items you’d like to get sent to you each month.
Unfortunately the link to my son’s preschool graduation got corrupted by our email listserver. If you want to see the pictures of the graduation ceremony, access http://www.peterpayne.net directly and search for “graduation” (or see the “pictures from Japan” link). Sorry about that.
Thinking of buying a region free DVD player? J-List will be offering them to our customers soon, so if you are planning on getting one, hold off and see what we’re able to get for you
