Well, it’s Monday here in Japan. My daughter Rina is exactly one and a half today. She’s in the J-List office right now, sitting in Kaori’s chair (for some reason she loves chasing Kaori out of her chair when she comes to visit us).
Japan is bustling about the victory of Waka-no-hana, one of the most popular Japanese sumo wrestlers, at the spring Sumo Tournament that ended yesterday. He defeated Hawaiian wrestler Musashino-maru (the guy who looks like an Italian pizza delivery boy — all of the other Hawaiian wrestlers could pass for Japanese on the street, but ). Waka-no-hana’s second straight victory enabled him to reach the rank of Yokozuna, the highest in the sport, joining his brother, Taka-no-hana, and the top-ranked American, Akebono.
The other big news in Japan is the marriage of pop star Matsuda Seiko in a small ceremony in Tokyo. Her new husband is her daughter Sayaka’s dentist. Seiko, an extremely famous star who has been a force in the Japanese music scene for more than fifteen years, has made several attempts to break into American music as well. The women many Japanese love to hate, I love her because she’s a strong, ballsey woman. She got divorced from her first husband, the actor Kanda Masaki, earlier this year.
There are lots of new items for you all today. First, there are new JPOP CDs (about 25 singles), including great ones by TRF, My Little Lover, Matsutoya Yumi, and more. Then, we have new items on the anime page — seven new soft vinyl figurines from the Sentimental Graffiti game series. These are extremely realistic-looking anime dolls that you can collect and display. New magazine on the magazine pages include Jo Mag, Gal’s Dee, and more. And don’t forget that we’ve got lots of close-out magazines, some going for as low as $3
We’ve also made a long-overdue change to our video pages. In the past, we’ve had four pages of “available-by-order” videos, and two pages of “in-stock” videos. The problem is that we’ve got far more in stock than are on the by-order pages. We’ve not swapped the two, so that there are four “Video Warehouse” pages and two “Video Catalog” pages. This allows us to put less videos on each page, reducing load time for everyone. As always, the newer additions to the in-stock videos will be on the first page, and close-out bargain videos will be on page 4.
