Hello again from your friends in Japan!
Influenza is on the rise in Japan, and schools all around the country are closing to keep it from getting any worse. More than half the students in my son’s elementary school class were out sick, so the school closed for the rest of the week. Although my son was sick last weekend, he refused to stay home from school on Monday, insisting that he was well enough to go. I can see that attending the first grade for a year has already instilled the “Japanese attendance ethic” in him.
There’s a wacky thing that Japanese do to money: fold a 1000 yen bill so that Souseki Natsume (the 19th century novelist who adorns the Japanese 1000 yen note) makes sad or happy faces, depending on which way you look at the bill. We’ll teach you how it’s done so you can amaze your friends with this great Japanese trick. First, take a bill and make an outward fold where each of his eyes are. Make an inward fold through the middle of his face, so that his eyes are higher than his nose (like little mountains). If you look at the bill from above, the face will look sad; from below, and he’ll look happy. Virtually all Japanese known this silly trick, and would be surprised if any non-Japanese knew it. To see pictures of what it looks like when done with Japanese money, look at this picture: http://www.jlist.com/c3/souseki.jpg . If you don’t have any Japanese bills lying around, it should work pretty much the same with other bills, too. (Souseki Natsume, author of many famous novels in the Meiji Era, is the face on our wacky “I am a Hentai” T-shirt, in case you were wondering who he was.)
Near our house, we can see the Sphinx, the Statue of Liberty, and many other interesting wonders of world. These are pachinko parlors, a major source of entertainment for many Japanese men and women in Japan. An odd game which I don’t pretend to understand, you basically buy a bucket of balls for $50, then sit for hours trying to hold a controller in just the right position to make most of the balls go into certain holes in the pachinko machine. Since “gambling” is illegal in Japan, except for certain events like horse, boat and bicycle racing, you don’t win money if you get more balls than you started out with — you get valuable prizes which you redeem for cash at a shady building next to the pachinko parlor. Pachinko is quite a competitive business to be in, and operators (who always seem to be getting involved with some crime or another) work very hard to bring in the newest machines in — with little video screens or cute anime-style characters printed on them, for example. They have interesting names to attract customers, like one near us called Al Pacino. Despite the efforts of the pachinko industry to make the activity seem like a friendly and family-oriented thing to do, pachinko always seems to go hand in hand with the yakuza. Pachiko maker Sankyo is trying to change that image, and has hired Nicholas Cage to do its TV commercials. (See them here: http://www.tokyodv.com/feature/popmenNICKTHUMB.html)
Japanese good luck charms, called “omamori” (oh-ma-mo-ree) in Japanese, are quite famous and are popular with foreigners when they visit Japan. Sold in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, each omamori good luck charm is for a certain type of luck: success on a test, for example, or easy delivery for a mother about to give birth, or success in love. We’ve got some cool Japanese good luck charms in stock for you today — check them out!
For the new update, we’ve got some excellent products from Japan for you. They include:
- First, we have two dynamite photobook and DVD combinations featuring lovely swimsuit idols Chisato Morishita and Sachie Asaoka, great for fans of Japanese idols
- Also, a dynamite item for fans of Japan’s famous Race Queens, who promote F-1 racing and all kinds of company products and look great while doing it
- For anyone who wants to try their luck with a Japanese good luck charm, we’ve got a cool series of cute Buddhist charms that will bring you luck in various areas, including study success, love, money, and more
- For fans of Japanese snacks, we’ve got several new items including Detective Conan gummi snacks, berry flavored chocolates, and a rare item we recommend for anyone honoring Japan’s “White Day” on March 14, White Kit Kat
- Also various restocked items, including Korean bibimbap mix, miso soup, and super tart Japanese “sour hard gummi” that are really fun to eat
- We’ve got some great anime toys for you, including a deluxe cold cast resin figure from Final Fantasy X
- For Kubrick fans, a really special item: a deluxe set of four figures from Edward Scissorhands, featuring Edward, Kim, the Ice Display and a shrubbery
- Takara’s Blythe dolls, based on the original toy series from the 1970’s, continue to sell well, and we’ve got another elegant and fun doll in stock for you
- For Sailor Moon fans, some cute soft stickers that are fun to collect and stick on things
- For those embarrassing times when you don’t have enough chopsticks for your guests, we’ve got a deluxe pack of 80 pairs of disposable chopsticks for you
- Japan has many unique Japanese things, and one that we like are the Japanese “hooked” ear cleaners, which are great for cleaning the insides of your ears
- For fans of Japanese kitchen items, we’ve got lots of stuff for you, including Japanese rice and miso soup bowls, various bento restocked items, and more
- We love Japan’s cute idols, and idol trading cards, too — see fresh stock of Luna Nagai’s popular card series
- For fans of the truly wacky, we’ve got fresh stock of the
- Finally, we’ve got a cool camouflage pencil case to match some of our recently posted items, handy extension cords for computer users, a great way to separate egg yolks from whites, Totoro keychains. more Japanese maps, and much more!
For our adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products. They include:
- First, we’re happy to announce that we’ve gotten stock of the excellent
- For fans of excellent adult magazines, we’ve got a very nice “Million Mook” featuring erotic photos of Harumi Nemoto, the delicious sexy swimsuit idol
- If you love the Russian, East European, Canadian and other lovely AV stars, we’ve got the new Bachelor, featuring the incredibly popular Yulia Nova and many other stars
- Also, we’ve got the new Minisuka Deluxe, a dynamite perfect bound magazine for fans of mini-skirts, panties, stocking fetish and “low angle photographs”
- For hardcover photobook fans, enjoy the deluxe nude photobook of Kaori Shimamura, an amazing item for her fans
- Also, we’ve got the new DVD Baveux, a great combination magazine and DVD with 2 hours of sampler AV for you (region 2)
- For fans of erotic hentai manga, we’ve got some really nice ones, with new works from for you including the uncensored erotic manga “What?” by Youka and Fujimi Comics
- Also, in stock in our San Diego office, we’ve got Bootleg #7, a great American hentai comic that features the rest of Blue Eyes vol. 1 in English — great for Nishimaki fans
- Also for hentai fans, fresh stock of several cool items such as the complete art book for Kite and La Femme Nikita
- For DVD fans, enjoy many great titles, starting with a super 3 hours of AV action by Yuho Mita, the sultry AV star from Japan (region free)
- We love the sexy and erotic Ryoko Mitake and love her new release from Alice Japan — go on a virtual date to a Japanese ryokan inn with this lovely lady (region free)
- In a new project from SOD, sexually inexperienced girls age 18-21 experience “omanko” (the female sexual organs) for the first time, in “Innocent Girls Make a Study of Female Genital Organs” — their reactions are great to see! (region free)
- Also from Soft on Demand, there’s a great “hitozuma” (married women) fetish DVD featuring truly erotic married women aged 27-37 (region free)
- From Deep’s, a great Masterpiece DVD, featuring all their best works — 53 titles and 160 minutes! (region free)
- See the lovely Japanese AV idol “Kay” in a beautifully filmed erotic light bondage DVD, courtesy of Wanz Factory (region 2)
- Finally, a restocking of many great items, including the popular Gymnastics Girls, Big Breast Battle 8 Hours Special, Feel the Big Breasts of Nao Oikawa and more Dream Shower bukkake.
J-List has recently lowered our rates for shipping via seamail. The new rates are quite low, and are great for anyone who wants to buy a lot of stuff and save on shipping. The catch is that only printed maybe sent via the lowest seamail shipping method — if you are order other items, like DVDs or snacks, we recommend one of the other shipping methods. Seamail is also slow, taking 4-6 weeks at least.
Remember that J-List carries wacky snack and gum items from Japan, which aren’t available overseas. In addition to Pocky and other pretzle-stick-type snacks, we have the full line of Lotte’s delicious gum, including the best-selling gum at J-List, the spicy, caffeine-enriched Black Black, that was mentioned in the past issue of Wired Magazine.
Also remember that J-List has a great offer — get 20% off any four or more bishoujo (“pretty girl”) games, also known as love-sim and hentai games. We pride ourselves on having the best selection on the planet, and we carry the games of every English love-sim game company in existence. See the great items we’ve got for you!
