Greetings from your friends in Japan, at J-List!
Today is Hiroshima Day, the 56th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. My son, who is half Japanese, asked us about it this morning, and my wife told him that America dropped the bomb to try to get Japan to stop fighting. It was kind of an out-of-body experience for a moment there: American me, sitting in Japan, talking about Hiroshima with my Japanese family (while eating Pokemon Pop-Tarts®, no less). As a child of 6, he’s used to thinking of conflicts in terms of the “good guys” (ii hito) vs. the “bad guys” (warui hito), like Star Wars or Yu-Gi-Oh. He wanted to know which side was the “bad guys” during the war, but it was kind of hard question to answer.
I’ve talked with many Japanese in the nine years I’ve lived in Japan about the war, and I’ve had many interesting discussions. Almost all Japanese are glad that Japan lost the war, since it paved the way for equalization of Japanese society and real Japanese democracy. Once, in rural Toyama Prefecture, I was drinking with an old man who started sobbing: “Why did giant American bring war to little Japan?” In Hiroshima, they have a beautiful memorial park and museum commemorating the atomic bombing (you can go and see the famous “A-Bomb Dome”), but they treat the event like a lightning bolt that came out of nowhere, without nine years of warlike history on the part of Japan preceding it. My wife said it best, perhaps, while watching Fantasia: while Japan was melting down pots and pans to get steel for their airplane parts, America had the leisure time to produce a masterpiece of that scale. What was Japan thinking? I’ve never encountered a Japanese who was angry at me over the events of World War II, and actually, I’ve encountered almost no Japanese who disliked Americans at all: it’s really the one country in the world where being a Yankee will get you a warm welcome and just maybe free beer. Happy Hiroshima Day.
For the first update of the week, we’ve got some great new items for you, including:
- First, some great new magazines, including the new issues of Video Boy and Best Video, a new Aishite Ageru (“I’ll Love You,” sperm fetish magazine), and more
- If you love the very cool DVD & Video-CD Soft Catalog, a sampler magazine with 2 VCDs including 2 hours of AV quickies and a full release title, too, we have fresh stock of the May 2000 issue
- For fans of the dynamite Anna Ohura, the massively popular AV idol with a 101 cm bust, we have her latest hardcover photobook in all its erotic glory
- Also new for photobook fans, wonderful hardcover photobooks featuring Erika Ito and Satomi Yoshida
- Of course we have lots of new manga volumes for you, including erotic offerings by some of Japan’s most talented hentai artists, with both new volumes and fresh stock of many popular titles (including the Erotic Heart Mother series)
- Since the doujinshi we posted last week were so popular, we have — more doujinshi for you, including hentai parodies of game girls and more!
- For fans of Japan’s erotic video, we’ve got a superb cosplay video, which features the lovely Ami Okina perform six different “naka-dashi fucks” each in a different erotic costume
- We’ve got two excellent DVDs for SOD fans, too: the Masterpiece of Tekoki-kokikoki DVD (featuring 2 hours of SOD’s best hand-job AV ever), and both sides of the wonderful Kurumi Morishita in “Omote Kurumi, Ura Kurumi”
- For collectors of AV actress cards, we’ve got fresh stock of the Crystal Card series, which keeps selling out every time we turn around
- For fans of Japan’s cool anime toys and more, we’ve got several new items, including some cool new Final Fantasy figures and an extremely rare item for Ah My Goddess fans
- For fans of Japan’s sexy idols, we’ve got an interesting new item: a photobook which includes a pull-out poster, which as four packs of trading cards inside a cardboard protector — great for fans of the lovely Haruka Igawa
- We have even more items on our Wacky Things from Japan, including interesting Buddhist prayer beads (very fashionable too as a bracelet), new wacky Japanese square-back notebooks with funny English on them (“From Africa”), and fresh stock of our most popular Wacky wooden sign ever, the “It is forbidden to urinate here.”
To see all the new products at J-List at once, click this link: http://www.jlist.com/cgi-bin/shop.cgi?function=updates&days=3
The newly added Wacky Japanese T-shirts are selling well. “Dirty American Devil” (kichiku beihei, the word the Japanese used to refer to us when we were calling them “Japs”) is the clear leader of the pack so far, with “Proud of my big root” coming in second. The esoteric design of “Hiragana Man” (a happy face made from Japanese hiragana characters, a famous doodle that all Japanese know) is picking up third place.
AMPalace, a site set up by some friends of ours, is now open. It’s a very nice news and information site dedicated to Japanese AV. We think it’s great, so check it out at http://www.ampalace.com/
We had some problems with the test mail server we were using, so we’ve gone back to the more reliable server. Very sorry if you received multiple copies of the last update (or no copies at all). We’ll keep swinging away at the mail server problem until we get it licked. If you experience any odd problems with the list, by all means please let us know — thanks!
