Hello and greetings from J-List on this lovely Saturday afternoon.
Today was the summer Sports Day at my kids’ kindergarten, and all the kids and parents spent the morning running relays and three-legged races, doing tug-of-war, and watching the kids show off their athletic skills. At the end of the day, the kids thanked their parents for working hard and gave their fathers framed pictures the kids had drawn. Rina, my daughter, must have been influenced by the pictures the other kids in her class were drawing, because I came out looking pretty Japanese, complete with black hair…
When you live in Japan, you learn to “adjust” your language so that the people you interact with will understand you. A “fan” in Japanese could be an electric fan, but the kind you hold in your hand is, to the Japanese mind, a completely different concept. A tissue is always a tissue, never a “Kleenex,” although Kleenex is a popular brand here — “milk” is the powdered stuff you put in your coffee, not what comes out of a cow. In a similar vein, there are several words that just “work” differently from word s in English, and it causes some confusion to the English-speaking mind. For example, there are two words for “cold” in Japanese: samui (for the air around you) and tsumetai (for anything that is cold to the touch, like ice cream). Gaijin invariably use th e wrong word when speaking Japanese. Also, the concepts of cold water (mizu) and hot water (yu or o-yu) are completely separate words, something that takes more than a bit of getting used to.
Yasu and Tomo are enjoying an Evangelion renaissance. Having missed the classical anime series when it was on the air in 1995, they’re watching the series now, renting the episodes at the local Family Book. Every day at work we discuss the new psychologica l elements that come up in the show. If you like Eva and bishoujo games, I recommend you take a look at Season of the Sakura, which is basically a game based on the last 5 minutes of the Eva series (right down to several of the characters)
We’re happy to announce that Borderline 3 ~Frozen Beach~ is shipping (and early, too!). This is an excellent work of hentai CG by illustrator Sakaki Naomoto, which we think is just wonderful. He’s taken, ah, extra care with the detail of the 100% uncensore d graphics, too, and the result is a very erotic collection of “doujin” anime computer images — something unavailable even to Japanese fans of this artist’s work. The “click to zoom” feature on the images is great, too.
We’ve got a special announcement for the weekend: announcing the J-List 10% off sale. During the changeover from our current site, we’re going to give 10% all magazine, photobook, anime art book and manga items on our site. This is our way of thanking you for your understanding while we work on the changeover. The temporary order form we’ve got up and running is working well, by the way, but if you find entering the items you want to buy into the form is cumbersome, we can accept orders either through our s ecure email form at https://rook.axnet.net/pages/virtual/jlist/orderjlist_secure.html or else directly via email. This is an excellent chance to pick up on some fantastic magazine, photobook and manga items from Japan!
Also, we’ve permanently lowered the price of one of our most popular video series, the Stark Nakedness Sports Series. This is a great and wacky video series from Soft on Demand that puts “zenra” (all-nude) Japanese girls in various athletic settings, from snow sports to nude underwater sports, “stealing into the room at night” and more. The #1 “Zenra” series video, though, is the classic “64 Zenra Girls in Rock-Paper-Scissors.” 64 girls play jan-ken-pon with each other; the loser has to take off an article of clothing. Repeat. (The Zenra videos can be found on the SOD Main videos page.) In the last update, we talked about Morishita Kurumi’s newest video release in which she actually performs with director TOHJIRO. Unfortunately, the item wasn’t posted to the SOD video pages. We’ve corrected this now, sorry for the confusion ^_^
One of our most popular games over the past couple of years has been Nocturnal Illusion. One of the first bishoujo games ported to Windows 95, it features many nice characters and is popular with bishoujo gamers. Unfortunately, we had just sold out of the game — or so we thought. The Gods of Pretty Girl Games smiled, and we found another 20 or so copies of this game in San Diego. If you’re interested in this nice game, we suggest you get it before it sells out again.
We’re glad to hear feedback from CM-Watch (http://www.cm-watch.com). This is a nice site (IMHO) where you can download a slice of Japan, in the form of Japanese TV commercials. There are many commercials we’ll be showing you, from Brad Pitt’s “Roots” coffee commercials to the infamous Simpsons CC Lemon ads. You can subscribe yourself to the CM-Watch updates mailing list to receive emails when the page is updated — or if you like, just reply to this email and ask us to add you to the CM-Watch list. You need Quicktime 4 or 5 installed to view the movies on the site.
