Hello again from Japan, home of such baseball teams as the Daei Hawks and the Hiroshima Carp.
Japanese is an interesting language, filled with interesting features and quirks. One of the reasons why Japanese seem to have such thick accents when they speak English is that Japanese is a syllabic language with a limited range of sounds that are used. There are only five vowels in Japanese (A I U E O, the same as in Spanish), versus up to 11 in English, and because sounds always come in syllables — ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, for example, never k by itself)
Words that are difficult for Japanese to pronounce correctly include words like jewelry, which have a lot of phonetic twists and turns. The words “curb” and “curve” are both used in Japanese as English loan words, but the difference between the two words becomes very vague in Japanese. Ear and year, and east and yeast become quite difficult for Japanese to catch or pronounce. The other day I was tormenting poor Tomo with the words crash, clash, and crush, which all become exactly the same in Japanese.
In Japan, whenever you go somewhere, you’re required to bring back a souvenir of your trip, called an “omiyage.” I brought an espresso machine for the office, and now the J-List staff members have caught the coffee bug in a big way. At least six times a day the sound of milk steaming can be heard. Starbucks is all the rage in Tokyo these days, but in rural Gunma Prefecture, where we are, there’s no good coffee to be had for love or money. So we’ve got a little piece of Starbucks at work.
For the weekend’s update, we’ve got some really great items, including:
- First, fresh stock of calendars! We’ve posted fresh stock of many of our most popular calendar items, from World of Sushi to Japanese Gardens to the nudes of the lovely Hazuki Riona to the excellent Japanese imagery of Morita Haruyo
- For magazine fans, find back-in-stock items on the discount magazines page
- We have excellent new photobooks, including the lovely *first* photobook of Minori Aoi, the lovely good girl of the Japanese AV world
- Also for photobook fans, we’ve got a super new issue of the popular Photoshot, filled with lovely glossy photos of your favorite AV idols and models (including Kawashima Azumi)
- We’ve got limited stock of Bug Bug, the premier hentai news magazine
- For leg fetish lovers, we’ve got a super issue of Mini-Suka Max, featuring the dynamite Izumi Maki (also known as Matsukawa Ayumi) — Mmmm
- For fans of Japan’s erotic DVDs, we’ve got two excellent items: Hirosue Nao’s dynamite “Mermaid” erotic DVD offering, and Lesbian Girls’ School, a wonderful lesbian DVD title
- We’ve got back-in-stock items on the dojinshi and manga pages, too
- Also very cool, we’ve got the first DVD release of the G-Taste anime (!), featuring the wonderful artwork of Yagami Hiroki — it’s a region 2 DVD, so it’s on the region 2 DVD page
- For Japan adult video fans, we’ve got two killer new videos in: Akina Riko’s “Lovely Poem of Riko” and the extremely erotic debut video of busty Oura Anna
- For anime fans, we’ve got a rare item — a sample “Dolby Demo LD” for Tenchi In Love (rare)
- By request, we’ve got more stock of what is far and away our most popular “Wacky” item, our authentic Japanese loose socks
- And finally, a cute twist on the popular T-Cat/T-Dog robot pet toys we’ve carried — T-Zaurus, a robotic toy dinosaur that move around your room, turns when he hits a wall or other object, and more!
Okay, that’s all for now…
