Hello again from your friends in Japan!
It’s August, and in Japan, that meant heat and humidity. And for fans of baseball, it also means it’s time for the “World Series” of high school baseball, Koshien. Named for the stadium near Kobe where the games are played, Koshien is a national series of games to determine which team from each of Japan’s 48 prefectures will win the championship. There are many fans of high school baseball, and the games are televised, so fans can follow their favorite teams and players. The dream of being on a team that goes to Koshien is very big with middle-aged Japanese men, many of whom relive their own youth each year through the Koshien games. There’s an entire category of high school baseball comics in which the goal of the characters is always to go to the “dream stadium” at Koshien. (The artist of one of the most famous of these baseball mangas, Touch, happens to hail from Isesaki, where J-List is located.)
In many ways, you can sum up Japanese education with two words: inclusion and competition. Throughout elementary and junior high school, one of the main goals of the Japanese educational system is to organize all children into happy, secure units where they feel that they’re members of the group. For everyone to function in harmony with each other, each member must be more or less the same “color” as everyone else, so wild variations in individuality are quietly discouraged. In junior high school, students are forced to join clubs (tennis club, volleyball club, drama club, etc.), which further teaches them the dynamics of getting along inside a group. After junior high school, it’s time to learn about competition: students must take a difficult test to get into the high school of their choice, and there’s a lot of competition to get into the best schools (it’s possible for students to fail the entrance exam and become “high school ronins,” who go to no school while they prepare to try again next year). In high school, events like the race for the Koshien baseball championship introduces more competition, which of course culminates in the famous university entrance exams, which students must take if they want to get into a good university.
We’re sometimes asked why items shipped from Japan aren’t available through shippers like FedEx or DHL. Unfortunately, while these companies have partnered with Japanese shipping companies to serve the international market, in reality the rates these companies charge is outrageously high — FedEx wants $40 to deliver a single DVD, for example. If you want to order our unique products from Japan and are in a hurry, we recommend EMS, a very speedy mail service brought to you by national post offices. EMS rates are very affordable, and we can get your package to you in about four business days in most cases. And you can track your package on the web to find where it is. We’ve recently lowered our rates for EMS, and added separate rates for Asia/U.S./Canada, and Europe. Because the package will be delivered by your normal postman, there’s no problem shipping to PO Boxes, too. Thanks, and enjoy the new lower rates!
An artist we’ve been honored to work with is Borderline creator Sakaki Naomoto, an artist who creates CG images for distribution to fans at Japan’s famous Comic Market (these CG collections are called doujin-soft in Japanese, since they are a “software” version of doujinshi). We’ve been promoting this artist’s works for years — he created our official mascot character — and for the rest of the month, we’re offering free shipping (US/Canada) on his great collections of artwork on CD-ROM. You can now get Borderline 2 ~ Breathe and Borderline 3 ~ Frozen Beach, and we’ll pay the shipping!
For the new update, we’ve got some great items from Japan for you, including:
- First, a great item for Star Wars fans: a talking R2D2 game in which 2-4 players put “tools” into R2’s body as the game progresses — select the wrong slot, and R2 “explodes,” shooting Luke’s lightsaber from the top of his head. It’s cool, and only released in the Japanese market by Tomy!
- For Japanese toy fans, we’ve got a super-deluxe Fujiko Mine from the Lupin III universe, complete with three outfits to put on
- Also, a cute set of “trading figures” of the cute character Ruri, from Martain Successor Nadesico
- For Hello Kitty fans, a beautiful Sanrio Kitty digital watch made by Casio that’s really cool
- Hamtaro is heating up in the U.S., and we’ve got a cute item for you: little plush hamster mascots that are useful as keychains and come with delicious Ramune candy (full sets available)
- We have new and back-in-stock swimsuit idol, Race Queen and other photobook items for you, including the very sexy photobook of Yu Abiru
- For fans of our Japanese snacks, we have many new items for you, including delicious Japanese “Puchirin” hard candy, Japanese soy sauce candy (they taste better than they sound), and more
- Also, a huge restock of snack items, including Hamtaro Candy w/ Figure, delicious Ramune candy, spicy wasabi, and more
- Japan has many cool things, and one category we like are the very cool eyedrops which wake you up by stimulating your eyes. We’ve gotten in some nice new eyecare items for you, including one suitable for kids (non-stimuilating)
- We love things with funny English on them, and we’ve got some fun and functional pencil cases for you (on our “study items, notebooks” page)
- For Kubrick fans, an esoteric item: figures from the French film Amelie, that was a big hit here in Japan
- Finally, look for a little fashionable backpack popular with kogals in Japan, a Japanese “inviting cat” lucky phone strap, fresh stock of Japanese “fude-pens” (pens that let you write as if you were using a Chinese brush), Hello Kitty spoons, bento boxes, unique Japanese ear cleaners, “The Dog” items, and more!
For our adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products, including:
- For fans of Japan’s famous adult magazines, we’ve got new ones for you, including the new Gokuh, a great oversized issue filled with lovely AV idols
- For sexy photobook fans, enjoy an erotic new leg fetish photobook with lost of “costume play,” as well as an erotic rip-off of the famous Yellows series
- Also, the incredibly beautiful model “Aoba” who not only poses elegantly in a new photobook, she goes far beyond
- In a rare item, we’ve got an all-gaijin book for fans who want to see beautiful blonde Western women through the eyes of the Japanese
- For hentai manga artists, we have some great new books, including a superb one by Bijogi Junction and a dynamite new work by Takuma Harazaki (!)
- Also, a big restock of adult manga, including the Blue Eyes series from Tohru Nishimaki and the excellent Sex Beast Vaginass series!
- We’ve posted even more high-quality hentai DVD titles and boxed sets from Nutech, which ship out of our San Diego office for your
- For Japanese adult DVD lovers, we’ve got an extra-good lineup for you today, starting with a superb selection of 150 minutes of her works, from Kuki, with never before released photos, too (region free)
- From Soft on Demand, a superb new Deep Kiss Contest with eight drop-dead girls, exploring the deep eros of lesbian “deep kissing” (region free)
- Also from SOD, a wacky new “Magic Mirror” release in which girls do outrageous things inside the one-way-mirror windows of the Magic Mirror box car (region free)
- In a new offering from Dogma and famous AV director Tohjiro, Kurumi Morishita is your “M sister,” receiving whatever cruelty you want to dish out (region free)
- Also from Dogma, the lovely Ai Hiyoshi plays an erotic female doctor in a great new fetish production (region free)
- The lovely and busty Sakura Sena looks beautiful as she performs in a new release from Marx Bros.
- Finally, we’ve restocked many DVDs, including back-in-stock lesbian titles, excellent works by Soft on Demand and other studios, and several of our most popular soft porn DVD releases (Mai Hagiwara, Anna Ohura, Maiko Kazano, etc.).
We get a lot of questions about the sizes of our funny Japanese T-shirts. All our shirts are 100% cotton shirts purchased and printed in the USA, using 6.1 lb cotton, the same as Hanes Beefy T. The sizes are standard USA sizes, so hopefully it’s not difficult for you to select the size you need. Because we want to serve all our customers, J-List goes out of our way to stock all sizes for our shirts, from size S all the way up through XXXL. All sizes are in stock at all times in our San Diego shipping center, so please let us know how we can serve you?
The J-Mate site has been updated yet again, with a review of the just-posted Deep Kiss, one of their best works in the series ever. You can also read a new English interview with the director of the Deep Kiss series, Chie Sugawara. Only from J-List and J-Mate! The J-Mate site’s URL is http://www.jmate.com/
