Hello to all from Japan on this cool, quiet evening.
Tragedy has struck J-List again, with the sudden death of Kiki, our American Shorthair cat. My mother in law found him dead in the lot behind our house (which is a liquor shop). Our favorite of our three cats, we liked him for his intelligence and the way he would always crawl into our laps. He is survived by Rin Rin and Ran Ran.
We’ve always kept cats, mainly because my Japanese family believes that if you have cats around, they die in place of the humans if there’s some bad luck in store for the family. I’m not sure if it’s a Buddhist idea, or just a belief that my family got on their own, but all I know is that right after each of our children were born, one of our cats died (which my wife calls “migawari, a passing of one life in the household as a new one comes in).
It’s one of many beliefs (one might say superstition” but I won’t, since my wife is on this mailing list) that I’m exposed to, living in a Japanese family, and I always do my best to reserve judgement as best I can. One such belief that my wife and mother follow strongly
We’ve got some nice additions to the J-List site tonight. Newly added items include:
- Two absolutely lovely soft vinyl recreations from Princess Mononoke, whose creation was overseen by Miyazaki himself, on the Anime Page
- Also on the Anime Page, a nice selection of several new only-in-Japan Hello Kitty items, for the little Hello Kitty fan in you
- New magazines, including new issues of DD Toppers and D Cup Japan (see magazine page 1), in addition to some cool older one-shot magazines (including some cool issues from 1988!)
- Hentai illustation and “digital comic” magazine/CD ROM combination items, for Mac and Windows, on the CD ROM page
- A host of new and back-in stock photobooks, including more copies of Tickle, by Horiuchi Nana, and Last Song, by Miura Aika
- For fans of really cool old things from Japan, a complete set of 13 historical magazines from the 1950’s looking back on World War II from the Japanese perspective (on the photobooks page)
Remember that in addition to our “reserve subscriptions” that allow you to reserve issues of current Japanese magazines, J-List has great 6- and 12-month subscriptions to most of our popular magazines, including Urecco, Bejean, Dela Beppin, Gal’s Dee, Video Boy and Best Video. And with your subscription, you get 1 or 2 issues, free! See the Magazine Subscriptions page for more information.
All the J-List product pages were broken during Saturday, U.S. time, due to a glitch in our scripts in Japan. Everything was up and running about twelve hours after they went down, and we apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced. Thanks to everyone who emailed us about the problems with the page. (That’s what I get for staying up til 2 am making improvements to the site…)
