Greetings on this lovely Monday afternoon, from J-List.
Something I’ve noticed about Japanese from my first months here: every few months, they’ll get the urge to move everything around, just for a change of pace. Well, today was our day to be Japanese and move everything around, taking the opportunity to do some serious cleaning while we were at it. My new dual 800 mhz Power Macintosh G4 arrived, so we’ve been moving computers, rerunning ethernet wire, and generally making things work better. It’s much better to have things clean around here…
Everyone knows that the Japanese take their shoes off when they go into a house. To the Japanese, shoes, and anything to do with the feet, are inherently “dirty.” When you enter your own home, you take your shoes off at the lowered foyer, called “genkan” in Japanese, and leave them there. If you have a lot of shoes on the floor of the genkan, you can store them in the handy and stylish shoes holder, which stores your shoes for you. (This is a good thing. Like American women, Japanese women love to accumulate shoes, my wife included.) Leaving your dirty shoes near the front door means that the house is much cleaner, and much easier to keep clean. For inside the house, Japanese always wear slippers, and if a gaijin goes to a Japanese person’s house, the Japanese person will give him slippers to wear, even if they’re much too small for his feet. It’s always sort of “funny” to see people in American TV and movies wearing shoes indoors (kind of like seeing Pocari Sweat for the first time). Although we try to “live like Americans” when we go to the U.S., most of my Japanese family (including myself) quietly leave our shoes near the front door when back home.
One interesting thing about Japanese, at least in rural areas like we’re in: they don’t move. Japanese tend to stay on the same land for the most part, especially if they own land that their family has owned for a long time. In the U.S., people move all the time, because of job changes, children born or growing up and leaving. This cause people to shift into natural “bands” based on their demographics — wealthy people in one area, moderate people in another area, and so on. In Japan, this doesn’t happen: for the most part, it’s not uncommon to have very wealthy people living near moderate farmers, and so on.
For the first fine J-List update of the week, we’ve got some very nice items for you, including:
- First, some excellent Japanese erotic magazines, including the very nice Amateur Girl, and a beautiful Photoshot-format deluxe item for fans of those kawaii sailor uniforms, Bloom vol. 3
- If you’re a fan of amateur sex and magazines with Video CDs inside, check out Amateur Hamedori Paradise, featuring the lovely Nana Hosho, 2 hours of AV action, and more
- Always popular with customers, we’ve got new $5 and $6 magazine items on magazine page 3
- For photobook lovers, we’ve got some very nice hard and softcover items, including Miho Ariga’s busty comeback photobook, and the erotic nude of the sulking Aiko Kawamura
- Doujinshi fans often express frustration that we’ve only got single issues of so many of the books we offer. Well, we agree, and so we’ve got new doujinshi for you from the Okachimentaiko folks, and there should be stock enough for everyone (for a while, at least)
- Also for doujin fans, a fresh batch of doujin-soft, including some fantastic hentai CG collections and more (only single copies of these are available, unfortunately)
- For fans of Japanese erotic manga, we’ve got some excellent new volumes posted, as well as fresh stock of several favorites that had been sold out
- If you love the very interesting world of Japan’s yaoi comics, featuring incredible artwork and sexual themes (because “boy’s make exciting drama”), check out the new issues of b-Boy Zips we’ve posted to the yaoi page
- For DVD lovers, we’ve got some nice new offerings for you as well: A “coupling” of rape play (Race Queen/Teacher with glasses) from Soft on Demand, and for fans of erotic anime cosplay, Izumi Morino performs sexually wearing some of anime’s best costumes
- Thanks to those who pointed out the error with the Honami Seki Strawberry Diaries vol. 3 — the image has been corrected (and what a lovely image it is)
- If you love Japan’s sexy Race Queen idols, check out a super Best Of Race Queen DVD by SOD, featuring such popular RQ’s as Miho Yoshioka, Yinling (from Taiwan) and Momo Miura — this DVD is code-free, too (like nearly all the DVDs we sell)
- For fans of anime’s best robot heroes, we’ve got fresh stock of the Giant Robo keychain/phone strap/camera strap, on the anime toys page
- On Wacky things -> Wacky stickers & signs, find more interesting Japanese sign plates, including “it is forbidden to wear shoes here” (for people who are living in Japanese style, by taking their shoes off), as well as a classic Japanese emergency exit sign
- For fans of Japanese notebooks and stationary, we’ve got two spiffy square-back notebooks that have very high-quality paper, and funny English on them, too — see Wacky things -> Notebooks, study aids
- People tell us they like the traditional Japanese snacks we’ve been offering, so we’ve got more: four different varieties of interesting Japanese traditional hard candy
- Finally, we’ve got a great restock of Hello Kitty toilet paper (both types), Hello Kitty printed chopsticks (one of our strongest selling ‘wacky’ items), a stylish Japanese whistle, and more!
We’ve moved J-Mate (www.jmate.com) and CM-Watch (http://www.cm-watch.com) to a new server, and have updated both sites. We’re still checking for bugs and problems, but if you haven’t been by these two sites, our gifts to you for making J-List a success, stop by and see how things are running.
