Hello again from Japan!
In Japanese, the word “sake” refers to all alcohol, as well as the rice wine that it’s most famous for. Alcohol is a big part of Japanese society, a lubricant that allows people to remove stress and deal with the pressures of this “vertical” society (with many levels above and below you). The Japanese have some great unwritten rules when it comes to alcohol, too. For example, if you’re out with your co-workers drinking, it’s perfectly permissible to get anything off your chest about your boss, and be critical of him — if you overstep the normal bounds of what is okay to say, it’s dismissed the next day because alcohol was involved. If you make a fool out of yourself in front of your female co-workers, it’s also generally forgiven the next day. And Japan is the only country I’ve seen where you can go to work with a mild hangover and receive nothing but sympathy and understanding. Japan is a very flexible place in some ways.
Want to know a Japanese joke? In Japanese, the word for Prime Minister is “souri,” which sounds like the English word “sorry” (kind of like “don’t touch my mustache” sounds like “Dou itashimashite” (you’re welcome). “Sori,” a similar-sounding word, means “razor.” Japanese kids say stupid things like, “I’m sorry, hige sori [beard shaver], jori jori [the sound of rough, unshaven whiskers].” If you’re ever talking to a Japanese person, and they apologize to you for something, come back with “hige sori, jori jori!” and watch them jump out of their shoes. (Remember that ‘o’ in Japanese is always pronounced “oh,” and not as an “a” sound as we sometimes use it in English.)
For tonight’s update, we’ve got some very nice items for you, including:
- First, several great new magazines, including the new issue of Video Boy (features Hagiwara Mai and Kuru Kuru), a new issue of EX CD-ROM, and more
- For fans of MPEG CD-ROMs, check out the new issue of Club Indies, an excellent magazine and Video CD (with footage from 40 titles)
- If you love Japan’s very nice bishojo games, check out the newly posted issue of Colorful Pure Girl, featuring information and lots of color pictures from dozens of hot H games from Japan
- Like Japan’s excellent photobooks? We’ve got several great new offerings for you, including a great photobook featuring the lovely Hosokawa Fumie, as well as fresh stock of several popular sold-out items
- Also back in stock on the photobooks page, the popular Azumi II, the hit photobook featuring Kawashima Azumi
- Leg fetish and Race Queen fans should check out the Internet Idol & Race Queen photobook, on the leg photobooks page (very sexy Japanese legs)
- We haven’t posted any high-end S&M and bondage photobooks to the gouka-bon page for a while, but we’re making up for it with some really beautiful and erotic photobooks on that page, including a fantastic book featuring the sizzling Ikeno Hitomi
- For manga fans, we’ve got a half-dozen all-new books, including some really rare and special items — and we’ve also got fresh stock of some excellent manga volumes that had been sold out in the past
- We’ve posted a few nice single issues of dojinshi to the dojinshi page, too
- For our region 2 DVD fans, we have a nice treat: a super *120* minute DVD featuring fantastic “chikan” (men groping women on a crowded train) performances, with 10 different lovely gals being molested
- Never to forget our Soft on Demand-loving customers, we’ve got two new videos from our favorite Indies AV company: “Puchi Angel,” a document on the sexuality of the lovely “school uniform girl” Sakuma Yumi , and the new SOD collection of their innovative adult products for the middle of 2000.
- We’ve got a major update of stock on our Japanese snacks page, with fresh stock of many of our most popular items, posted
- We’ve got fresh stock of the surprisingly popular miso soup packets (both wakame and clam versions), along with a new item: driedwakame seaweed, a very healthy item which you can eat in a variety of ways (including in miso soup)
- We’ve lowered the prices of our interesting anime snacks — we’ve got Card Captor Sakura keychains and very cute “mini-stationary” that’s great to play with
- We’ve restocked several of our popular “Wacky” items, including Japanese “warming packets” which keep you warm in the winter, cool “socks glue” used by high school students, Japanese vocabulary word cards (great for studying anything), the “hair catcher” that protects your shower from unwanted hair, fresh stock of our unique Hello Kitty toilet paper (the 1977 design edition) and more
- Finally, newly posted on our Wacky Things from Japan section are Hello Kitty erasers, a new “From Africa” Japanese notebook (very high quality, and with funny English on the front, too), a Korean “akasuri” scrubber to remove dead skin from your body in the shower, and a cool item: fingernail tattoos!
We’ve been making some adjustments to the way we send out this email, to accomodate the new searchable J-List Updates database at my personal homepage (http://www.peterpayne.net/). If you’ve experienced any weirdness with the way our emails appear in your mailbox, please let us know, and we’ll see what we can change.
