Hello again from your friends in Japan!
First of all, we apologize for the problems we had with the non-adult version of the J-List site after Monday’s update. Due to a bug in our product importing script, nearly all the J-List products were not showing up when viewed from the non-adult pages, including the newly-posted high school uniforms, all our wacky Japanese T-shirts, and so on. What’s more, some adult products were appearing when customers clicked the link to see all new products posted over the last 3 days. The problem has been fixed, and everything is back to normal. We’re very sorry for the mistake!
It’s said in Japan that America is a horizontal society, and Japan is a vertical one. Unlike America with its ideas of total equality between races, sexes, and so on, Japan is quite happy having up-down relationships in which one individual is higher in rank than another. You can see this in the concepts of “senpai” and “kouhai,” which translate as a senior or junior in a school or organization. Senpai/kouhai relationships come up in anime a lot. For example, when a student enters the first year of high school, the students who are in higher grades are his senpai, a word which combines the concepts of “upperclassman” and in many cases is almost like a mentor. Everything that passes between a senpai and a kouhai will be colored by the idea that the first is higher in rank than the second — even the language they use with each other will very different, with the younger student using “keigo” or polite Japanese, and the older student using informal language. The concept of senior/junior exists in organizations and companies, too — even right here in J-List. For example, when Tomo came to J-List, Kaori became his senpai (since she’d worked here longer), despite the fact that he was older than her. Despite the Japanese using these up-down relationships in their daily life, Japan is ostensibly a classless society, with around 80% of the country reporting that they believe themselves to be “middle class” despite obviously differences in their income.
I was driving in Maebashi the other day, when I saw a sight that really brought home some of the challenges Japan is facing at the dawn of the 21st Century. A chain of toy shops that had gone bust during the long Japanese recession (assisted by Toys R Us, whose business in Japan is booming), and the shop I saw had been replaced by a company selling Buddhist altars and gravestones — important products in aging Japan, to be sure. It was amazing to see lines of Japanese-style gravestones and varying sizes and styles of altars lined up where children’s toys had once been sold, and it signified to me how much Japan had changed in the past decade, and how it would continue to change still.
Incidentally, a Buddhist altar is an altar that is kept in the house of the oldest son of each family (in my house, my wife’s mother is the oldest daughter, so our altar is kept at our house). When a person dies, their name is written on a beautiful wooden tablet (which costs $10,000 to make by the way) and put inside the altar to assist them in the afterlife in some way that is frankly incomprehensible to my gaijin mind. In some sects of Buddhism (such as Tendai), an actual statue of Buddha is placed inside the altar, but in the sect practiced by my wife’s family (Nichiren), there is no statue. In Nichiren Buddhism, the main focus is not on Buddha (i.e., the Indian mystic named Siddhartha Gautama who attained enlightenment 2500 years ago), but is instead about remembering and worshipping one’s ancestors, since without your ancestors you wouldn’t exist. Because the house that has that family’s Buddhist altar is considered the “main house” (in Japanese, jikka) for that family, Buddhist altars actually help keep families together, since family members return regularly to their “main house” for New Year’s Day and other religious events. If you want to see what a (non-Nichiren) altar looks like, see this page: http://www.josyuya.com/english.html
For the new update, we’ve got lots of nice new items for you. For our general-interest customers, the new items include:
- First, we’ve got stock of the very cool Thunderbirds toys from Konami, a series of seven toys that you put together easily — and boy, are they cool
- For anime fans, we’ve got some rare issues of anime magazines from the mid-1990’s, with Tenchi Muyo, Macross Seven and more
- Newly added snack and food items include delicious new hard candy (including some great Hello Kitty candies in a cute container), more Japanese miso soup, and fried rice
- Also: fresh stock of popular items like Pucca Chocolate (chocolate-filled fish crackers), Bisco (cookies for babies or adults), Fruit of the Bubble (very fun Japanese bubble gum), Black Black caffeine candy, and more
- Speaking of Hello Kitty, we’ve got some very rare Hello Kitty postcards books, and other cute items such as Hamutaro pocket tissues, and more wacky Japanese food erasers
- Do you love Ultraman? We’ve got two cool Ultraman figures that are very poseable and also make Ultraman beam sounds when you press their chests
- For fans of Star Blazers/Yamato, we have a very nice 1/6 scale figure of “Fuhrer Desler” (known as Leader Desslock in the English show)
- Avoid the agony of not having enough chopsticks for guests with our packages of disposable chopsticks
- Just in time for summer, we’ve got stock of Japanese mosquito incense, spiral-shaped coils that emit a pleasing smoke which positively defines “summer” to people living in Japan — it also keeps mosquitoes away
- We’ve restocked several of the Japan-release DVD titles we carry, including the English-dubbed and -subbed My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service (both excellent animated films by Mr. Miyazaki)
- We have a very interesting Japanese clock with the old names of Japanese months in place of the numbers (very cool)
- Also, more stock of funny English notebooks, Japanese kanji practice notebooks (for students), cute cotton swabs for babies, and more.
For our adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products. They include:
- First, several new magazines, including the new issue of the oversized Gokuh, featuring incredibly sexy photos of Hikari Kisugi, Hitomi Hasegawa, Misa Nishda and many more
- Also new amateur and “nampa” magazines, for fans of Japanese amateur girls in love hotels
- We have a new DVD Bishoujo Club magazine + DVD combo in stock, too (lots of sample material)
- We have several new nude photobooks, including a rare treat for fans of Russian nude models (whose books are largely available only in Japan, go fig), and a great new Yellows photobook featuring the excellent nude photography of Akira Gomi
- Also: for fans of Japan’s high school uniforms, there is an exhaustive study of them in the new High School Uniform Catalog, including photos of very pretty models wearing uniforms from Japan’s most famous schools
- We have a super array of new manga for you, including new hentai comics by Tsukasa, IC and Angel Comics, as well as freshly restocked books
- Also: a rare treat, we’ve got some extremely rare doujinshi in stock, including rare hentai works for Star Blazers/Yamato (!)
- For our DVD customers, we have a bunch of new titles in stock, starting with “Nao Oikawa will Assist your Masturbation” by the excellent Soft on Demand (region free)
- For fans of cosplay, see give top-notch stars in a very nice costume fetish release by Deep’s (region free)
- Girls who strap on pretend cocks and act like guys are popular in Japan now, and Nao Hirosue’s “Penis Venus” is a bold new release from Dogma and Tohjiro (region free)
- Kuki’s “My Sister’s Panties” series has been one of their strongest series ever — now see 4 hours of the best footage on a new DVD (region free)
- Japan’s hentai anime is famous for outrageous things like foot-long tongues coming out of demons’ mouths and huge, tentacle-like penises — now you can see Sally Yoshino in a new DVD that aims to capture this in live-action (region free)
- For indies DVD fans, see the lovely Mirai Hoshizaki in Delivery Fuck (just call her up and she’ll come to your house right away — oo!) (region 2)
- One of the most famous of the small indies studios is Milky Pudding (Milky Purin) — they’re famous for their small-budget style productions which have very high values. See scenes from 100 of their most famous productions in a new DVD! (region 2)
- We mentioned Kaori Shimizu’s “Black men and Japanese girl” DVD release last time, but it was accidentally not posted — we’ve posted it now though
- Finally, we’ve restocked several indies and pro titles, including the FERA World Fuck soccer parody, Moodyz Musume, and the excellent Fetish Lesbian.
The J-Mate site has been updated again, with new reviews (the lovely SOD Racing Gals DVD and Ai Kurosawa’s softcore sex DVD) and recent English interviews with Shinobu Kasagi and Hitomi Hasegawa. J-Mate is a great place where you can learn more about Japan’s AV culture and get information about some of the bishoujo games, DVDs and other products available at J-List. The URL is http://www.jmate.com/
