Hello again from Japan, where the opposite of “red” is “white.”
Christmas is approaching fast, and Japan is getting ready for the holiday in traditional Japanese style. Christmas is a nice, warm time in Japan, but to be honest, foreigners living here get frustrated with how superficial everything can seem. It’s a time of plastic battery-operated Santas that are made in Japan, and of Christmas parties, and foreigners living in Japan are apt to be asked to don “Santa wear” (a Santa Claus suit) and play Santa for Japanese kids — I’ve done this a half-dozen times at least. Christmas is never an easy time to be away from home, and gaijin living in Japan are apt to be extra sensitive and homesick around this time of the year.
Much more important to the Japanese than Christmas is New Year’s Day, which is a quiet, solemn event for most Japanese — first of all, you clean your house from top to bottom, so you can start the new year off right, and replace the toothbrushes with new ones. You decorate your house with kadomatsu (decorations made of bamboo and pine, which we happen to have for sale on the J-List site today by happy chance). At night on December 31st, you put your legs in the kotatsu and watch Kohaku (“Red-White”), a 3 hour TV special featuring everyone who’s anyone in the Japanese music world, and eat toshi-koshi soba (“cross into the near year” noodles), which are supposed to make you live a long time. In the U.S., Christmas is a solemn event, and New Year’s Eve is time for loud parties, but in Japan, that’s reversed. I imagine that Japanese living in the U.S. are extra lonely around the new year because the customs are so different.
The J-List site was down for a couple of hours on Sunday, for upgrades to the server. Sorry if you were affected by the problem. Things seem to be running smoothly on the server now. Meanwhile, on the mail sever front, several customers did get multiple copies of our December 6 mailing. We’re working on the problem now and hope this mail doesn’t reach anyone multiple times.
Our efforts to get our stock of calendars down continue, and we’ve lowered prices yet again, to almost ridiculous levels. Also, because it’s hard to choose a calendar with a small scan from a thumbnail, we’ve opened all the calendars and taken pictures of some of the pages inside, so you can see more clearly how beautiful the pictures inside are. We’ve still got over 100 anime, JPOP, swimsuit idol, race queen and nude Japanese calendars. In addition to the reduced prices, get free tubes if you buy 2 or more.
For the first update of the new week, we’ve got some extra nice items for you, including:
- First, we have some excellent new adult magazines in for you, including the new Beppin School, a very special issue (and one which we’re probably going to run out of quite soon)
- People told us they loved our $5 and $6 magazine sale, so we’ve posted another dozen or so nice backissues of popular adult magazines like Bejean and beppin School and Video Boy to magazine page 3 — it’s you last chance to get some of these issues, which are out of print permanently
- We have new photobooks for you, including both nude and sexy swimsuit model photobooks
- We’ve got some nice leg fetish items in stock, including the very nice Mini Suka Deluxe April 2001 issue, great for fans of Japanese “low angle” erotic photography
- For manga lovers, we’ve got more manga for you, including several new volumes posted, as well as fresh stock of some very popular past issues, including some popular “dick girl” themed manga that many customers enjoy
- Our doujinshi sale is proving very popular with customers. You can save $1, $2, $3 or $4 per doujinshi if you buy 2, 3, 4 or 5 or more doujinshi at a time. We’ve even added some great new books (very limited stock, I’m afraid) to help you pick
- For DVD fans, we’ve got a huge volley of new offerings, starting off with a great Zamen (sperm fetish) collection DVD and a “best selection” of jukujo (older models, aged 25-34)
- For loves of lesbian themes, enjoy SOD’s latest Deep Kiss offering, Deep Kiss vol. 13, featuring 130 minutes of incredibly intense female kissing, followed by Les Animal, a very erotic indies offering from DMN
- If you love cute-as-a-button Japanese girls, we suggest you check out Ai Kuraki’s Let’s Do Sex in Club, loaded with dynamite sexual imagery
- Finally, for region 2 capable customers, Kurumi Morishita stars in a new kind of production by SOD, a “sell cinema” (similar to V cinema) in which Kurumi and her female staff run a traditional Japanese in “zenra” style (all nude)
- J-List makes available a wide range of adult and non-adult magazines which you can get sent to you each month, automatically, while they’re still in newsstands here. Newly added to our revolving subscription page for adults is Monthly Mujin Comic, a fantastic 550+ page hentai manga you can get each month
- For anime fans, especially those who dearly love the cute female anime characters, we offer a monthly subscription to Otomex, the “new style heroine magazine,” which covers anime and game girl characters, especially the pretty ones
- Christmas is almost here, but more important than Christmas is New Years’ Day (Oshogatsu), and we’ve decided to carry a large selection of very nice New Years’ decorations for those who want to decorate their home or car in Japanse style. We’ve also got some good luck charms for traffic safety — see these on the “Traditional wacky things” page
- Winter is approaching fast, and in Japan, the cold “kara-kaze” winds are really chilling everything. To combat the cold, we’re carrying the very popular Japanese hand-warmers we had last year. Just pop open one of the packets and it will become warm in a few minutes, and the heat lasts for up to 18 hours (really, it does!)
- On our “cute things” page, we’ve got fork and knife sets for Ojamajo Doremi and Masked Rider Agido, and some cool chopsticks for fans of the silly Japanese character Bad Badtz-Maru
- For anime card collectors, be sure to check out the Inuyasha card game, featuring beautiful printing and laminating
- We have some wacky new signs, including a deluxe Japanese signplate that says “please take your shoes off here”
- We’ve got fresh stock of the delicious Tsubu Tsubu Pocky strawberry flavor, with real bits of fresh strawberries in them
- For fans of our Japanese chewing gum, we’ve got a new flavor, Lotte Strawberry Gum, as well as fresh stock of Japanese Ume (plum), La France (pear) gum and Black Black (spicy caffeine gum)
- Finally, look for a wacky heart-shaped ice cube tray, some Japanese oil paper to clean the oil from your face (with real flakes of gold inside), more wacky Japanese ear cleaners with light, and more!
By the way, remember that J-List has a price-matching policy. If you see the same item we sell at another site (as long as they’re based in Japan, as we are), we’ll meet or beat any price of theirs. When requesting a price match, please us the comments field of our order form, and provide the URL — thanks!
