Hello again from that fun and wacky place, Japan.
Before I started J-List back in 1996, I was an English teacher, and spent several years teaching ESL — that’s English as a Second Language to us teacher types. Although teaching English was often very challenging and difficult, it was fun because I got to meet so many Japanese people of all ages, and learn from them. I was immediately surprised by the strong impression that America was a “free” country, unlike Japan — although none of my students had much idea what free really meant. One of my students wrote, “Japanese teachers always want children to be the same. But America is more free. They don’t have school uniforms and strict, strange rules.” By far the biggest question I was asked was, Did I have a gun when I lived in America? Of course the answer was no, but Japanese were interested in America’s fixation with guns. I remember struggling to explain English grammar in ways that were useful to my students. They wanted explanation of gerunds and particles and infinitive verbs, and me saying “Mm, that sounds right to me” is not what they wanted to hear. If you are interested in seeing some of the collected (and silly) writings of my former students, I’ve posted some on my personal homepage at http://www.peterpayne.net/
Each country has what the Japanese call a “kokumin-sei” or “national personality” — the various things that the French do, or the British, or Americans, which each group generally has in common. A major aspect of the Japanese national personality is called “seiyou suuhai shugi” which means “worship of the West,” a hopeless desire to be like America and Europe. This is expressed in many ways, but mostly in the way they imitate the West, both in various institutions, as well as in less subtle ways. Tokyo Tower is, of course, a giant recreation of the Eiffel Tower (they made it 33 meters higher), and the large mountain range going through the main island of Honshu are known as the Japanese Alps. The current Crown Prince of Japan supposedly lives in a palace that is perfect scale model of Versailles in France. If you go to Chiba Prefecture, you can see “the Dover Cliffs of Japan,” an area that is said to resemble the beautiful Dover Cliffs in England. And one day I was walking up the Spain-zaka (“Spanish Hill”) in Shibuya, in Tokyo, and I realized that they had lifted the name from the famous Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Japan’s great love and respect for America and Europe manifests itself in interesting ways.
For today’s update, we’ve got a lot of great items for you, including:
- First, we’ve got some excellent new magazines for you, including new amateur and hitozuma (young wife) and more
- For fans of kogals, those outrageous girls who dress in outrageous outfits and wear bizarre makeup, we’ve got a new Cho Very Good photobook filled with famous AV idols
- We’ve got the new Mini Skirt Deluxe in stock, however the last issue we had sold out in record time — we hope the 20 copies we have last long enough for you to get yours
- Also for leg lovers, we’ve got the lovely Just Fit photobook of Natsumi Shiose, with many great fetish themes
- We’ve got a special treat for fans of classic and premium adult photobooks, some classic and very rare issues of Nowon from the mid-1990’s
- For photobook fans, look for the new hardcover photobook of Ai Kurosawa, as well as restocking of several popular items for you
- For hentai manga collectors, we’ve got wonderful stock of several new large breast, bukkake, and “naughty tentacles” fetish manga, along with several back-in-stock books, too
- We have many great DVDs for you, as usual, starting with the very nice Bondage Battle 2 starring three “beautiful solders” who battle for your enjoyment (code free)
- A new Masterpiece of Soft on Demand is in, featuring clips from 73 tiles made in the last third of 2001 by the excellent company (code free)
- From SOD’s Deep’s label, a stellar Big Bust Fruit DVD, featuring the very chesty Miku Sakuragi
- For fans of Bauhaus’s uncensored soft porn DVDs, enjoy the lovely Megumi Ohsawa and her hair nude DVD (code free)
- We have another very nice M’s Video Group bukkake video for you, for true fans of these extremely rare works (VHS)
- For lovers of Shinobu Kasagi, the white-hot indies star, we’ve got a bizarre new production with lots of hardcore, shot at bizarre camera angles (code 2)
- If you are a fan of bikini sex fetish themes, enjoy the great All Bikini Summer Gals special from Kuki (200 minutes!) (code 2)
- Finally, we’ve restocked several items, Miyu Azuki’s popular No Cut, Aika Miura’s Between the Semen, Mirai Hoshizaki’s dynamite How to Perfect, and the excellent Chaos
- For anime fans, we’ve got some cool toy items in, including very rare Macross 7 transforming toys, a die-cast metal Valkyrie VF-19, soft vinyl “completed figures” of Princess Mononoke and more
- For Hello Kitty lovers, we’ve got several nice items, including a deluxe tissue holder, a fun Kitty letter set, a deluxe Kitty piggy bank, and more
- We have the ultimate in fun coffee cups, a ceramic cup with lid that perfects mimics the famous Japanese ramen brand Cup Noodle
- For fans of our increasingly popular Japanese snack and gum pages, find all kinds of newly posted items, including delicious cola hard candy, Van Houtern cocoa candy, delicious super sour Shigekix in grape flavor, and a Japanese treat that you really should try, cheese-kamaboko
- Also: a rare item, Kanebo’s unique Choco Gum, chocolate gum
- We’ve always liked carrying the bizarre and fun stickers with Japanese messages on them, such as “It is forbidden to urinate here” and we’ve got several back in stock for you
- Finally, look for other fun items such as an all-new sushi maker, super hot springs powder for your bath, Japanese bowls and other items for your kitchen, and more!
J-List carries many delicious snack items, and one of our favorites is Pocky. Pocky is basically a straight pretzel stick covered with delicious chocolate, strawberry, whipped green tea cream, or just about anything else. It was introduced by the Glico food company and is a major “category killer” in the Japanese market, often imitated but never bested. J-List carries an excellent selection of Pocky flavors for you to enjoy, so please see our excellent selection (if you buy 10 or more boxes of one type, you get a 15% discount). Please note that we can’t carry Pocky and similar chocolate products in the summer, due to the heat and humidity in Japan. We’ll be closing out our selection of Pocky over the next month or two, so if you wan to try some, you should hurry.
