Hello again from all of us in Japan!
One of my first instances of “culture shock” upon arriving in Japan was seeing Japanese toilets. While most toilets in homes or restaurants are the standard Western toilets you are used to, many in public places are Japanese style, which means a toilet without a seat — just a long, oval toilet that you squat over. Using them is quite a challenge, especially the first time, when you’re not sure which direction you should face (for the record, face the raised part). For some reason, all the toilets on trains are Japanese style, which means that if you ever have to take a long journey by train in Japan, you’ll have to contend with a seatless toilet while on a jerking, moving train. Japanese universally prefer seatless toilets to the sit-down kind, because no matter how dirty the toilet may be, no sensitive area touches your body. Toilets here have handles that move two ways, with the characters for “small” and “large” on them. If you’ve only got a little, turn the handle towards “small” to let a little water out. Later, I learned that the words for No.1 and No.2 in Japanese are shouben (or “small convenience”) and daiben (“large convenience”), which solved the riddle of the small/large characters on Japanese toilet handles.
Soon Japan will enter its rainy season, a month-long period when it will rain most every day and be very gloomy. The rain is funny, too — rain during rainy season falls in larger drops, which seem to be designed to get you extra wet when you’re running out in it. In fact, the word for rainy season, Tsuyu, is written “plum rain” because the raindrops are the size of plums falling from the sky. We bought our car, a Mazda Bongo Friendee, which has a foldable table and chairs inside, specifically with rainy season in mind. Rather than moping around the house during weekends, we can take the kids out in the car to have an in-car picnic, even if it’s pouring outside.
Apologies for my SOV/SVO goof. That’s what I get for working too hard. English is indeed a SVO language (subject, verb, object). As they say in Japan, “Even monkeys fall from trees.”
For the first update of the new week, we’ve got another excellent volley of items from Japan for you, including:
- First, we have new magazines, including some excellent amateur, kogal and hitozuma magazines for you
- We have some great new photobooks for you, including the great new hardcover work from Maiko Kazano, showing her erotic “Memory of Nineteen”
- For fans of older magazines, we’ve got more classic and premium back issues in stock for you, including some issues of Boyes, which are always very rare and in demand (see them on magazine page 2)
- For bishoujo anime fans, two item, the Bishoujo Anime Collection art book capturing virtually all hentai anime in the past 3+ years, and a beautiful second La Blue Girl erotic art book
- Also, we have new and restocked erotic manga, as usual, including some excellent new works we think you will love
- We have some great new erotic DVDs for you, starting with a great erotic new performance by Sally Yoshino as the “enslaved secretary” (region free)
- SOD’s Deep’s label does its bid for Korean-Japanese relations with a new erotic Korean AV release (subtitled only in Japanese, unfortunately) (region free)
- For fans of sexy anime cosplay erotica, enjoy the Sexy Girl’s Cosplay War by Big Morkal (region free)
- Another very nice title, Aika Miura is a “female prisoner” in a very erotic hardcore bondage release (region free)
- The sweet and lovely Hikari Kisuki has charmed J-List readers in her nude magazine appearances, and now you can buy her softporn from Eichi Video (region free)
- For fans of “OL” fetish, i.e. office ladies who look so sexy in the workplace, enjoy the new release from Dream Ticket (region 2)
- Another great Indies release, Super Violent Shoot, puts three “semen girls” against dozens of men in a festival of bukkake (region 2) — comes with a free packet of “love love lotion”!
- Finally, for M’s Video Group fans, enjoy another incredibly beautiful, hardcore video release from this, the most famous name in bukkake in Japan (VHS)
- Finally, we’ve gone through and discounted many of our indies and pro adult videos, so you can get them for a great price, and free SAL shipping too!
- If you love Japan’s elegant Race Queens as we do, we’ve got some new items for you
- We have more cool items in the series known as “The Dog,” including really cool stickers of your favorite doggie!
- For Totoro fans, see the very soft, very touchable Neko Bus plush we’ve just gotten in stock
- Also, really cool new Sailor Moon dolls (with outfits you can change), and a very rare and very cute Cardcaptor Sakura poseable figure from Bandai
- We’ve restocked many popular toy items, including the Japan-only Hot Wheels from Bandai, as well as the very cool sushi lights (little sushi keychains that really light up!)
- Look for more Hello Kitty items, too, including the popular toy refrigerator and food set, as well as a Hello Kitty herbal garden and very fun “popping straw” set
- We’ve got many new snack items in, including new delicious fried rice mix, new Pocky (both large and small)
- We gotten in fresh stock of the very cool Tomy “mini car” toy cars, which are standard Hot Wheels scale — they are so unique and fun to play with
- If you ever loved Ultraman (as I did), we’ve got some very cool items for you — recreations of the most famous battles from the Ultraman universe, with our rubber hero fighting famous monsters
- Finally, look for other very cool items, including a Thunder Bunny contact lens case (but we’ve got very limited stock), new bento boxes and sets, sushi and onigiri makers, and much more! Enjoy all the new items!
We’re happy to announce that we’ve been able to find a new manga distributor, which helps us get books for you faster and more efficiently. Since Japan is a very regulated and organized place, still with many levels of distributors between end-user and manufacturer, we hope our new distributor will help us bring many more items to you.
Although we’ve gotten more stock of delicious Pocky in today, the stock we have now is just about our last before summer arrives. Unfortunately, Pocky melts in the heat and high humidity of Japan’s summer, and so we don’t reorder it in the summer months. If you’d like to get some of our delicious Pocky, you should hurry!