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Greetings from J-List February 22, 2002

Peter Payne by Peter Payne
23 years ago
in Your Friend in Japan

Hello again from your own little window to Japan!

A very big change is coming for my family: my son is starting Elementary School, and that means that many things will be changing. Japanese compulsory education (Elementary and Junuir High School) is standardized on a national level, through the mighty Ministry of Education, and from the upper reaches of Hokkaido down to balmy Okinawa, Japanese schools are designed to one thing: output standardized, happy Japanese kids that can get along and be happy in Japanese society. To that end, the various elements of schools and learning, from textbooks to desks to what teachers do and how they do it, are made uniform throughout the country. My son must do exactly what everyone else does, starting with walking 1.2 kilometers (about 3/4 of a mile) to the school every morning, wearing an official school-approved school backpack called a “landoseru” (which comes from the German word Raenzel), writing with approved pencils and notebooks, wearing a school-approved bright yellow hat, and so on. It’s not just my son who will need to conform to a whole new world of changes, though. My poor wife now has to interact with a whole new group of people, from teachers to other parents, and do everything expected of her as a mother in Japan. She will constantly be worrying (perhaps unnecessarily, but who can say?) about our appearance in the eyes of others, which is known as “hito no me” (hee-toh no meh) in Japanese. Among other things, she has to get up extra early and be a crosswalk guard, waving a yellow flag to alert cars that young children are walking along the road.

Recently we’ve been on a big hot springs kick, and every Sunday for the past few weeks we’ve gotten into our Mazda Bongo Friendee (similar to an MPV, but taller, and the roof opens to give you another compartment) and going to various onsen towns around us. Japan’s various traditions of bathing are quite famous all over the world, and rightly so. Most Japanese take baths in the evening, although younger people replace this tradition with a shower in the morning. In Japanese homes, the actual bath-room is a bath and a separate tiled area outside the bath, with a drain for water to escape (Japanese are amazed that we refer to the toilet as “bathroom” since it’s totally different). You always wash your body thoroughly before getting into the bath, and never use soap or shampoo inside the bath itself, as the water will be reused by other family members, and saved for several days. All baths here have heaters to allow you to re-heat the old water, and ours has a one-touch computer that will fill the bath to the pre-set temperature and level for you. If you’re a parent living in Japan, you always take your kids in the bath with you and wash them. This warm concept of mother or father taking a bath with their children is called “skinship” by the Japanese, a Japanese term that serves its purpose well. Japanese are great fans of public baths (sento) and hot springs (onsen), too. Since the water is “everyone’s water,” everyone must wash thoroughly before getting into the baths, although I’ve seen quite a few old men who skipped this step. As a foreigner living in Japan, I consider myself an “ambassador of goodwill” and what not, so I make sure I follow the rules even if not everyone else does. The Japanese are famous for bathing with men and women together (kon’yoku), but this is actually very rare, and I’ve only encountered a combined bath once in all my years in Japan. If you are interested in learning more about Japan’s hot springs culture, I recommend Peach Princess’s excellent game Tokimeki Check-in!, which accurately captures the spirit of a traditional Japanese hot springs inn, from yukata to the ping-pong tables that seem to be required at all Japanese onsen hotels.

Unfortunately we continue to get a small per cent of customers with ordering problems. It seems that some users using the normal checkout (not the express checkout) make orders and receive the automated “thank you” email from the J-List database. Unfortunately, the orders never reach us on our end, and are thus never processed. If you have made an order through the J-List website in the past couple of weeks and never received updates about its status from us, please email us and we’ll figure it out for you. Thanks!

For the new update today, we’ve got a very nice selection of new items for you, including:

o The excellent new issue of Gokuh, which is heavily laden with lovely photographs of the top AV idols in Japan today, Manatsu Hirose to Anna Ohura to Kurumi Morishita and beyond

  • For fans of models and idols popular in the early 1990’s, some premium copies of Nowon, the “special photographic magazine”
  • We have fresh stock of some nice photobooks for you, including new hardcover nude and sexy photobooks
  • For fans of various fetish themes, see the newly posted “gouka bon” (high-end Japanese bondage and fetish photobooks)
  • For fans of erotic hentai manga, a special treat: we now stock the excellent adult comics of White Lightning Productions, including the English translations of the Blue Eyes manga series, as well as other titles. For ease in ordering, all titles will be stocked in San Diego
  • We have some excellent new erotic hentai manga for you, with not only new volumes but fresh stock of many very nice books
  • Also: for fans of yaoi comics (homosexual male/male comics that are drawn with incredibly skill) check out our new postings
  • For DVD collectors, we’ve got some nice items for you, start with a super item, Kyoka Usami Best Selection, featuring the best AV erotica from the lovely Indies AV (one of my favorites) (region free)
  • For fans of lesbian love and sex, the very deep and erotic Futari ~ Two, a new all-female production from SOD (region free)
  • We’ve got a great item from Big Morkal, featuring *4 hours* or incredibly hardcore sex with 19 different models (region free)
  • For Indies DVD lovers, see the very nice all-new production from Sally Yoshino (region 2)
  • From Attacker’s Idea Pocket label, a great 2-in-1 Angel DVD featuring the famous Shiho Fujiwara, who is active in the U.S. under the name Sakura Sena — we love her “body conscious cat girl” cosplay sex the best
  • We’ve got a dynamite new remake of “Dream Shower” for Waap by master adult video director Kazuhiko Matsumoto, of M’s Video Group
  • Finally, Tomo has received a huge order of adult DVD titles from our distributors (as in, four huge boxes worth), so you can order these titles right away, without waiting
  • For fans of our very nice anime statues, see the newly posted cold cast recreation of Ai Amano from the popular manga and anime Video Girl Ai (one of Peter’s all-time favorite manga series), a beautiful 1/6 scale cold cast figure
  • We have additional stock of the positively beautiful cold cast statue of Urd, from the Ah My Goddess universe, along with new photographs so you can see how beautiful and detailed this dynamite 20 inch high statue is
  • For AMG fans, we’ve got another treat: the new volumes of the Kodansha Bilingual Comics for you
  • We have fresh stock of several of our popular collectible card items, including Morning Musume, and the authentic Japan Sumo Wrestling collectible cards
  • We’ve seen a huge rise in Hello Kitty popularity over the past week, and have restocked many categories of Kitty-chan items, including Hello Kitty mayonnaise cups, Kitty straws, toilet paper, chopsticks, hotcake mix, and many more items
  • Yasu has been working hard to get more anime & toy items for J-List, and we’ve restocked many items, including the Hot Wheels that are only available in Japan, the cool Ichiro little baseball player figures, and the very popular My Neighbor Totoro tin toys, including the deluxe tin bus stop!
  • Also: fresh stock of one of our favorite Hello Kitty items, the culturally significant Hello Kitty Daruma and Kokeshi dolls, little Kitty-chan creations based on beautiful traditional wooden dolls from Japan
  • We’ve restocked our selection of authentic Japanese loose socks, those fun, baggy socks that high schools wear
  • For fans of Japanese food and snack items, look for a general restock of items there, with fresh stock of Sakura Drops hard candies, miso soup, dried salmon for making delicious onigiri (rice balls), and more
  • Finally, see cool ice cube trays that make wacky ice cubes, new elegant chopsticks from japan, Japanese socks for girls with smaller feet, fresh stock of our Japanese notebooks that have funny English written on them, and more!

    J-List sells many nice bishoujo games from English, which have been licensed from the original Japanese companies, uncensored, and translated into English. Two of my favorites are Legend of Fairies and Fairy Nights, two “novel type” games for Windows or Macintosh (all versions of both) in which you work your way through an interesting tale of sexy fairies and “battle mahjong.” These great story-based games are part 1 and 2 in a series.

    The J-Mate site has been updated yet again, with new reviews of items you can get at J-List. We’ve got reviews of the very nice new Kyoka Usumi best selection DVD, as well as a nice review of the very interesting Black Bukkake DVD. The URL is http://www.jmate.com/

  • Tags: bathingcarsconventioncosplaycultureeducationfamilyfoodhentaiJapanJAST USAkidsmangaonsensports

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