Greetings from Japan on a very cold Friday evening.
The collision between a U.S. nuclear sub and the fishing boat Ehime Maru in the waters around Hawaii this week has caused a firestorm of U.S.-Japanese relations, and all the news shows are focusing on the reasons for the accident. It’s especially chilling because my wife and son were in Hawaii just two weeks ago, and took a sumbarine excursion in those same waters. It looks likely that the collision may help bring down Prime Minister Mori’s cabinet — Mori played golf right after hearing about the tragedy, which brought about many calls for his resignation in the Japanese Diet. Tokyo’s stock exchange rose at the rumors that he might quit, showing how little support he enjoys in Japan.
It’s often said that Japan is behind the West by about 20 years, socially. The Japanese just passed their first child seat law in 1999, so it’s easy to see examples of this — Lord knows the Japanese are behind the U.S. and Europe in every aspect of the Internet except the number of ISDN terminals installed. For movies and TV from the U.S., there’s a delay, too. Disney’s Dinosaur opened right before Christmas here in Japan, and tonight, the episode of “Ally My Love” (Ally McBiel) where Billy dies is being shown on Japanese television.My wife, who enjoys 90210 because it helps her keep her California English skills sharp, enjoys weekly episodes on Japanese TV that were shown in the U.S. two years ago.
As you can see from the J-List main page, the J-List “top 5 sellers” of several categories of things we carry at J-List. We’ll update it at the end of each week, so you can see what the most popular items at J-List are.
For this weekend’s update, we’ve got some very special items for you, including:
- First, some great new magazines from Japan, including the excellent Haaay Gachinko Musume and a previously posted issue of the excellent DVD & Video CD Soft Catalog (with nearly an hour of great sampler footage)
- For fans of rare Japanese magazines, we’ve got several excellent older magazines posted at the top of magazine page 2 (including some rare issues of Panst Dream)
- Fresh stock of two of our most popular photobooks, Cosplay Cuties and Kawai Jun’s Mirage
- A super hardcover photobook, zawa Rika and Hosho Nana’s erotic “Futari” photobook
- For collectible card and Race Queen lovers, a very high-quality card series — see the idol or photobooks pages for this set
- We have several excellent erotic manga posted to the site, by AV Comics, Tenma Comics and Colorful Comics
- For dojinshi fans, a treat — stock of three great erotic dojinshi in the “Panst Line” series
- For fans of the popular G-Taste art book and DVD series, two full sets of the very cool “real figures,” figures based on the G-Taste lovely female characters
- If you love DVD, please check out two offerings in the “Pure” series by Video Bank, featuring amateur Tokyo girls who talk about their private sexual lives and then have sex
- For fans of SOD’s excellent erotic videos, a new lesbian offering — Les Hospital Special, featuring an all-female cast headed by the lovely Sakaguchi Kana
- We’ve lowered the price of our popular “three pack” of any three hentai game titles to just $70. Now you can order any three $24.95 games and get them for $70, shipping to the US/Canada included!
- A nice item for Japan’s pretty swimsuit idol fans, the excellent idol DVD Kobayashi Mika (age 16), like all of SOD’s idol videos, zoned for “all” regions, and inexplicably, subtitled in Mandarin, Cantonese and Korean
- For fans of our Japanese snacks and food page: authentic miso soup! These individual packets of miso soup are handy and make delicious miso soup — just add hot water. With seaweed or asari (small clams)
- Restocked items on our popular Wacky Things from Japan page include more of our popular $5 dictionaries, new high-quality Japanese notebooks, and more children’s workbooks to help you learn hiragana and katakana
- We’ve added some restocked sizes to our popular Funny Japanese T-shirts — check them out. J-List carries over a dozen funny Japanese T-shirts, all made and printed in the USA, with slogans like “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” and “Hen na gaijin” (strange foreigner) in Japanese
- Finally, some cool things from Japan we are happy to bring you include a handy Japanese ‘cutter knife,’ a cool hair catcher for your bath or shower, and something I am amazed by, Mizutori Elephant, a fantastic humidity remover that must be experienced to be believed.
Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of kind feedback from readers on our updates mailing list, for which we thank you very kindly — we love Japan and aim in all things to be a bridge of popular culture between Japan and the rest of the world. We’ve also had repeated requests to post the past updates in some form, which we’re happy to announce we’ve done. A new section has been added to my Homepage, at http://www.peterpayne.net/ with all list updates from J-List since mid-1997 (317 individual updates — wow!). The site is searchable, so if you want to know about Japan’s Tanabata festival, search for “tanabata” and something will probably pop up.
Is there interest in J-List offering a service to help those outside of Japan bid on auctions on Yahoo Japan? Please give us your thoughts on this issue if you have any.
