Hello again from your good friends in Japan!
When foreigners come to Japan for the first time, one of the first cultural differences they run into is the Japanese custom of taking shoes off before going into a house. Japanese homes (and some offices, such as J-List) have a lowered area at the front door called a “genkan,” where you leave your shoes before going inside. After you’ve lived here a little while, it becomes second nature to open the door, kick off your shoes (or if you’re the obsessive type, neatly arrange them so that they all line up), and go inside. Seeing foreigners on TV wearing muddy shoes on plush, clean carpeting starts to look really weird after a while. To the Japanese sense of cleanliness, anything having to do with your feet is dirty under any circumstances — actually, the “genkan” where you leave your shoes in modern Japanse homes was much larger hundreds of years ago, and livestock were kept there, so that the humans living in the house could benefit from the warmth of the animals. Because you have to take your shoes off a dozen times a day in Japan, you tend to get very good at choosing shoes that can be put on easily.
The Japanese also have some interesting customs when it comes to their cars. First of all, auto theft is quite uncommon here, so it’s not at all rare to see someone leave his beautiful Nissan Fairlady Z parked in front of the “conbini” (convenience store) with the car unlocked and running. The idea that his car might be stolen just doesn’t enter into the thinking here, so it’s perfectly safe. Japanese cars have the steering wheel on the right side of the car, as in England, and the Japanese have perfected the art of starting the car without getting in it (since the ignition is easily accessible on that side of the car). When stopped at a light at night, it’s considered good manners to turn your headlights down to “park” so you don’t blind the person in front of you, and when someone lets you go ahead of them in traffic, flashing your emergency lights at them once or twice conveys your thanks. Japanese love their cars, and there are many interesting products that allow drivers to deck their vehicles out, including bizarre and interesting accessories, gaudy air fresheners, and for those with a lot of money to spend, funky custom lights for the outside of your car, such as special flashing lights that replace your normal brake lights. Great for picking up the girls.
Announcing the Big 2001 Doujinshi sale! To say thanks for your past support this year, we’re having a big sale on hentai doujinshi. Effective immediately, we’ve got the following discounts :
Order 2 doujinshi, get $1 off each (for a total of $2 off)
Order 3 doujinshi, get $2 off each (total $6)
Order 4 doujinshi, get $3 off each (total $9)
Order 5 doujinshi or more, get $4 off each book
All doujinshi hentai comics we have in stock are part of the sale, including the new ones we’re posting today. The discount will be applied when we process your order and send you the total (the discount won’t be recognized by the shopping cart, but we’ll factor it in before processing the order).
Also: announcing the 2001 Year-End Bishoujo Game Free Shipping Sale! Until the end of the month, we’ll give free shipping to U.S. and Canadian customers on our massive lineup of English-language bishoujo CD-ROM products, when you buy two or more at a time. All products are part of the sale, including JAST USA and Milky House CD-ROM games, as well as the excellent products from Peach Princess, Hobibox Europe and Himeya. This is a great chance to get the titles you’ve been wanting, and save some money, too.
The past few years has seen a massive blooming of “indies” (independent) adult video in Japan, by companies like Soft on Demand, which are separate from large AV studios like Kuki, Uchu Kikaku, and Alice Japan. We’ve got some excellent news for fans of authentic Japanese indies AV, because recently, J-List has been able to form relationships with new Japanese AV distributors which will enable us to carry many new indies video products in the future. While we’ve always had a very close relationship with Soft on Demand — we sell so many SOD videos and DVDs that Tomo was invited to attend a special retreat at the company, where he met Kurumi Morishita, Nanase Nanami and Tohjiro himself — we haven’t been able to get products by companies like Moodyz, Aroma, Audaz, Waap and Wanz Factory. Well, this will be changing soon, so fans who have been requesting these products will have something to look forward to. Tomo asked me to mention if you want to special order products from these companies, he can get most anything, so please email him. One caveat, however: unlike Soft on Demand, which is embracing DVD in a big way, most of the products put out by these other indies AV companies are available on VHS only, or on region 2 DVD. We’ll make sure these titles are available to you on both formats as much as we can.
More improvements to the J-List site are coming soon. We’ll be upgrading our check-out system soon to an improved one, which should hopefully solve some of the problems some have experienced with the current system. We’re not sure when the new system will go live, and I’ll try to give advance notice in case there are any problems with it. As always, if there’s ever a problem with the J-List ordering system, you can always use the secure email form to send us your order.
For this evening’s update, we’ve got a very nice volley of new products, including:
- First of all, the excellent game Love Love Show is shipping! This is a really unique game from Hobibox Europe and Love Gun, a very complex and fun game that’s actually three games in one. An excellent and 100% uncensored bishoujo game for the English-speaking world (and yes, you can get it with free shipping with our special sale)
- For fans of lovely adult video idols from Japan, we’ve got the new issues of Best Video and Video Boy, both very nice “all purpose” adult video magazines that follow all AV idols, both professional and indies (independent), for your enjoyment
- We have some nice erotic photobooks for you, including the erotic Kumano Pooh-ko’s “Seduction,” and the very lovely Minami Yui’s “First Eros” erotic photobook
- Also: fresh stock of K.O., the deluxe photobook for fans of O.K.
- Also for photobook lovers, fresh stock of a perennial classic — Santa Fe, the massive nude photobook released by 1990’s actress-idol Rie Miyazawa that shocked Japan
- We have tons of great new erotic manga for you, both new volumes as well as fresh stock of popular books that we couldn’t keep in stock — check out the manga pages now
- For yaoi fans or fans of Japanese homosexual culture, we’ve got limited stock of Badi, the Japanese “gay life magazine” (we’ll carry more items like this on the yaoi page if there are requests)
- Kicking off or big doujinshi sale, we’ve got a new volley of very nice doujinshi for you, with some unique and rare items, at major savings because of our sale — see the dozen or so new items on the J-List site before they start to sell out
- For DVD collectors, we’ve got some great new titles by Soft on Demand, including famous AV director TOHJIRO’s self-produced sex offerings in which he gives up filming gorgeous girls having sex with AV actors, and has sex with them himself — 150 minutes of good action in the Blue Desire DVD
- 16 lovely Japanese kogals agree to play rock, scissors, paper — if they win, they get money, but if they lose, they have to get undressed inside the Magic Mirror Bus
- There’s a new 2-in-1 release by Deep’s, Get Panty (which features guys adept at convincing kogals to give them their panties), and Peroman (in-street oral sex)
- We’ve got an excellent new indies erotic hardcore DVD for you — an excellent erotic performance by Rinka Yaguchi with the bizarre title of “Embezzle my Honey Pie”
- For those with players that can read region 2 DVDs, either separate players or the DVD drives in their computers, we’ve got a nice item: a very erotic Bunko Kanazawa/Ryo Takami title featuring some outrageously erotic themes
- Also for region 2-capable customers, two excellent new Night Shift Hospital DVD releases by Tachibana Seven
- DVD fans should look through all our pages for some extra-good bargains that we’ve posted, including many discs that come with free shipping, too
- Finally, for adult AV fans, we’ve got a dynamite new series of Crystal Card nude AV idol cards, featuring many lovely girls from Crystal Eizo
- Newly added Japanese snack and food items include a new toasted shreaded ika (squid) snack that goes great with beer, and delicious Japanese “ochazuke,” a food containing green tea, nori, and salmon you sprinkle over rice, then pour boiling water
- Popular new Japanese sign plates include a new No Smoking sign plate, as well as a very nice “It is forbidden to wear shoes here” sign plate
- For anime fans, some special items: first, a super-deluxe extra-large “completed model” made of die-cast metal of the coolest ship from the Yamato/Star Blazers universe, the Andromeda, the flagship of the Earth Defense Fleet
- Then, a new Kubrick Evangelion toy, featuring the Eva-03 Production Model, a figure of Kouji, and a figure of one of the Angels
- New “cute” items include a silly but cute toothbrush holder, and fresh stock of our Hello Kitty straws and spoon/fork set
- For fans of our bento (boxed lunch) related items, see several new items, including fresh stock of the little cutter that turns a small sausage into a little cute penguin — great for eating lunch, Japanese-style
- We’ve got wacky Japanese notebooks for you, with funny English printed on them, as well as study notebooks useful for anyone trying to learn hiragana and katakana, the two basic Japanese writing systems
- Finally, on our wacky things from Japan “traditional items” page, which is always popular with J-List customers, find a very nice bamboo cup that would be great for drinking tea, as well as an authentic bamboo soba dish, and more!
We receive questions about some Japanse CD-ROM and VCD/DVD products and how they work with English equipment, and so we’d like to answer some of these questions. In general, all bishoujo and game CD-ROMs you see at J-List are made for Windows, and should have no problems playing on supported OS versions. If you are interested in some of the magazines that come with one or two video CDs (MPEG-1), these are also very easy to play. On Windows, you can play them with any Video CD player, which are readily available online; for Macintosh in OS 8-9, use the standard Quicktime player. Video CDs also play in most DVD players, although the quality is closer to VHS than full DVD.
For those interested in the high-quality and features of DVD, 99% of the DVDs that J-List carries are “region free,” so you can play them without worrying about handling the special region 2 codes. A few adult DVDs (they’re located on a special page), as well as all Japan-released anime and hentai DVD titles, are always zoned for region 2 (Europe and Japan). To view them in the U.S. or Canada, you need a region-free DVD player (see the top of the region 2 DVD page for several links to ones we recommend), or else you can set your computer’s DVD player to view region 2 discs (although you can only change this setting 5 times on most DVD drives). Personally, I’ve gotten hundreds of hours of use out of the region-free DVD player I bought for myself, and since certain DVD titles from Japan are simply unavailable in region-free format, we recommend getting a region-2 player if you’re interested in those items.
We’ve placed links to some sample movie clippings from Soft on Demand’s titles. The titles are in Windows Media format. To find some of the products that have movies available, you can search for “sample movie” in the J-List search engine.
