Hello on a warm but windy Saturday from your friends at J-List!
Soccer fever continues to grow in Japan as we approach the World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and Korea, and soccer fans in Japan are getting more and more excited (our own Harumi-chan is one). The sport has managed to work its way into about a quarter of all TV commercials shown in Japan. To the Japanese, the most “kakko ii” (KA-koh EE, which means “cool”) player is by far Nakata, who quit Japan’s soccer league and is now a world-class soccer player in Italy. He’s also fluent in Italian, and video of him speaking at press conferences are aired almost nightly here. Japanese love to have one of their own accepted internationally, especially in Europe. Remember that part of Peter’s Unified Theory of Japan is that they secretly wish they were part of Europe — why else would they make the DVD region codes for Japan and Europe the same? You can see pictures of Nakata at his official site here: http://nakata.net/official/
Part of coming to live in Japan from the U.S. means getting used to the metric system, the system in use pretty much everywhere in the world except America. It’s quite easy, really — you just learn to gauge what centimeters, meters, kilometers, and kilograms are in your mind, and you’ll be used to it in no time. I’ve lived in Japan so long now that I only know my shoe size in centimeters (26.5 cm), and I don’t know my weight in pounds at all (not that this is always a bad thing). They also use the Centigrade scale for measuring temperature, which means that when it’s 3 degrees outside, it’s just a little above freezing, and when it’s 40 degrees in the summer (with matching high humidity), it’s time to get indoors and find some industrial strength air conditioning.
The poor cherry blossoms are really taking a beating this Spring. Blossoming a full 17 days earlier than the normal date due to warm weather, they were subsequently frozen by below-zero temperatures, doused with cold rain, frozen and rained on again, and now we’ve got a strong wind to blow the flower petals away. We’d better hurry and do our “hanami” (flower viewing) before the fleeting existence of the sakura disappears for good this year.
We’ve got lots of nice items for you this weekend, including restocked manga, DVDs, various reduced priced magazines, anime toy items, and more. Incredibly, J-List has over 2000 items in stock (sometimes we can’t believe it ourselves), so there’s almost certainly something really special waiting for you in our product pages. Remember that you can view the most recently updated items on the J-List site via the “three days link” on the J-List main page.
Remember that J-List offers two ways to get great magazines sent to you each month. First we have 6- and 12-month subscriptions to magazines like Urecco, Bejean and Gokuh, with 1 or 2 months free with your pre-payment. We also offer “revolving subscriptions” to other magazines on per-month basis — we’ll send you the latest issue before it’s even put on the Japanese newsstands each month, until you ask us to stop. We have subscriptions to great anime, manga, bishoujo game and anime character, toy and hobby, JPOP, Japanese fashion, and other magazines available.
That’s all for today’s update — we hope you are having a great weekend, wherever you are in the world!
