Hello again from your friends in Japan!
Well, darn it all. When we fixed the site after the downtime on Sunday, the script that updates the individual J-List product pages each hour wasn’t properly restarted. This means that all the great products we posted on Monday didn’t actually show up on the product pages (although they did if you clicked the “show all products updated within the last three days” link, or used the search feature). Some customers were confused — where were all the new products we’d posted on Monday? Well, everything is fixed now, and with today’s newly added items, there are twice as many great new products for you to check out.
Japanese as a language has many elements not found in English, which can be challenging to students of the language. One of these areas is the Japanese system of polite language (keigo), which is used occasionally in extremely formal situations and in business speech. There are two basic functions of keigo: to raise the level of the person you’re talking to (called “exalting” speech); and to lower your own level (called “humble” speech). There are actually different verbs to use depending on the subject in a polite sentence, so if you said, “What will you eat, Sensei? I’m going to eat sushi,” you’d use different verbs for the two occurrences of “eat” depending on the subject of the sentence. There’s a complex version of this used in business speech. If someone from an outside company calls, asking to speak to your boss, you’d use exalting speech to refer to the caller, but humble speech to refer to your boss, as he’s a part of your “uchi” or in-group, compared with the person calling from outside.
Related to Japanese polite speech is the honorific “o” that goes in front of some words, to give them a higher status. Words like money (okane), relationships like mother or grandmother (okaasan, obaasan), and so on — it could be translated as “honorable” in English, but of course it’s never translated blatantly like that (thank God). It’s interesting to notice the patterns of words that take this “o” — words having to do with death or Buddhism tend to take it (otera = temple, okou = Buddhist incense), yet words related to Japan’s Shinto religion usually don’t. English loan words never get the special “o” prefix, either. Adding the honorific “o” to words sort of “softens” the word, so words related to children or babies tend to take it (omaru = child’s toilet, omutsu = diapers, oshiri = a cute word referring to a person’s rear end). Men often put the honorific “o” on the word for the female sexual organ, which is the only “bad” word in Japanese (e.g., the only word they wouldn’t let you say on TV). The word is “manko,” and in “honorific” form, “omanko.”
Transliteration is the act of translating a word from one writing system into another, and due to differences in English and Japanese, this can be a challenge. For one thing, there are long and short vowels in Japanese (the last syllable in Kyoto is the short vowel “to” but the first syllable in Tokyo is a long vowel, “toh”). Because writing extra letters in translated names and words only cause confusion to English speakers, the long vowels are often ignored when the word is written in English. For example, instead of writing the first name of Panasonic founder Kounousuke Matsushita with all letters, you could get away with writing “Konosuke” and it wouldn’t make a difference how the name was pronounced by anyone. The Japanese dating sim games we sell at J-List are called “bishoujo games” which means “pretty girl games.” Should this word be transliterated as “bishoujo” or with a short vowel, e.g. “bishojo”? There’s no difference in pronunciation in English, and shorter words are easier for people to remember, and yet “bishoujo” is the more common spelling. The name of Yuka, the popular swimsuit idol who has turned into one of Japan’s most famous celebrities, would be more accurately written “Yuuka” (since it’s a long vowel). Which is better? If accuracy is what’s important, we have to all start writing Tokyo as “Toukyou” and Osaka as “Oosaka,” but no one wants to do that, I’m sure. Incidentally, the J-List search engine is “smart” and will bring up results whether you search for, say, “yuuka” “yuhka” or “yuka” — the search engine maintains a list of “search synonyms” and checks against that list when you perform a search for products.
For the new update, we’ve got some excellent products from Japan for you. They include:
- First, for fans of Fist of the North Star, we’ve got a splendid PVC figure for you of Shin by Kaiyodo, with 27 points of articulation, very cool!
- Also great, we’ve got stock of the super-cool Studio Ghibli plush keychain characters, two sets of six great plush toys from Mr. Miyazaki’s movies
- If you love anime on DVD, enjoy vol. 2 of She, The Ultimate Weapon, a positively wonderful anime series from Japan (region 2)
- Also for fans of anime DVD, we’ve restocked our Hayao Miyazaki films (Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Laputa) along with restock of the wonderful Japanese release of Akira — and all DVDs are fully subtitled/dubbed in English (region 2)
- For fans of traditional Japanese beautiful things, find a super bamboo chopstick holder with chopsticks, and a great set of miso soup bowls, and more
- J-List carries over 100 kinds of Japanese snack, food and gum, and we’ve got new items for you today, including delicious corn and rice snacks, onigiri mix, traditional Japanese hard candy, miso soup, and more!
- For lovers of Yu-Gi-Oh, something that’s very popular in Japan right now — cool set of the cards for the Official Card Game that comes in a fabulous metal tin to hold your cards
- For Hello Kitty fans, find several cool items, including a Kitty purse that’s just too cute, a set of super Sanrio character stamps, a super pouch with “British Kitty” on it, and more
- And another popular item, fresh stock of one of the best-selling products in J-List history, the Hello Kitty vibrating shoulder massager
- If you like Hamtaro, we’ve got some great items in, including the very popular “Hamtaro Cutting Note” (little notes that are perforated, you can pull one off easily)
- Finally, look for other great items, like cute kitchen timers, new funny signs in Japanese
For our adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products. They include:
- For fans of extremely high-quality Japanese nude magazines, enjoy the new Bejean, an oversized magazine with superb photos and famous models like Mai Hagiwara and Misa Nishida
- We’ve got other magazines too, including Hip de H! (all-anal magazine) and fresh stock of low-cost discounted magazines, too
- For fans of Japanese bondage and bold photography, enjoy the very sexy Akira Watase in EX Gachiire
- Also for photobook collectors, you won’t want to miss Love Hearts, a “pictorial magazine of so cute and so lovely girls” as well as Race Queen Toshimi Horiguchi’s super sexy first photobook offering
- Also, from Shin Yamagishi, the fabulous sexy photographs of Kaori Ohara, taken with extremely sexy and bold camera angles
- We love AG, the manga magazine of “art, sex and CG culture” that features erotic Japanese manga faithfully translated to English (including hentai stories by Shiwasu no Okina, one of our favorite artists). See vol. 6 of AG in stock on our site now!
- If you love doujinshi, we’ve got two great new ones for you from the “Androgynous Only Circle” that makes the Great Works of Alchemy, all dick-girl hentai books
- Also, we’ve got a huge offering of positively wonderful erotic manga from Angel Comics, Plaza Comics, Fujimi and more
- We’ve gotten in fresh stock of several popular comics, too, including Celamic Garden, Nami SOS, and the Yui Shop series — note that stock is limited on some of these items
- Also, a very romantic and erotic yaoi comic in stock
- For fans of Japan’s erotic DVDs, enjoy several great new offerings, starting with the best of Million vol. 2, with 240 minutes of their most erotic works on one disc (and the price is great) (region free)
- Also very cool, see Akira Watase as the erotic female teacher in a super fantasy of sex education (region free)
- For fans of extremely erotic lesbian AV, enjoy “Le-zu-bian,” a superb offering from the famous U and K (region 2)
- We’ve still got a huge selection of items in our 25% off January DVD sale. Choose four of these items and get 25% off when checking out. There are over 300 items you can choose from, and you can find them all by searching for “January sale” on the J-List site
- Finally, Tomo has added a bunch of restocked DVDs to the site for you. Please check out all the new items we’ve got for you!
Remember that J-List carries all the legendary Viper games that have been translated into English, and we’ve got them all in stock in our San Diego location, ready to go out to you. The Viper games are unique because they feature full flowing on-screen animation, which adds much to the game play. The excellent titles by Hobibox Europe we’ve got you are include Viper M1, Viper M16, Viper Limited Edition (shooting game with uncensored pictures), Viper Paradice (cool 3D board and card game), and more!
