Hello again from your good friends at J-List!
When encountering another culture, it’s often easy to get a self-centered vision that everything from your own culture is “right” and things in the new culture are “wrong.” For example, the Japanese have adapted many English words to their own language, and use them in ways that are quite different from how they are used in English. Certainly English words carry a slightly different connotation from the same word in Japanese — for example, the word for milk in Japanese is “gyunyu,” but the powdered milk you put in your coffee is called “milk” (actually “miruku”), written in katakana since it’s a foreign-loan word. For some reason, the Japanese word for “ground” (as in, an electrical ground) is “earth” (which makes some cognitive sense, I guess). It’s quite easy to brand these words as “wrong” instead of just “different,” and in my nine years of living in Japan, I have done my share of it, too. That’s part of why I recommend living abroad for at least a year to young people whenever I get the chance — you’ll learn so much about how you view the world.
I got an interesting lesson on how subtle Japanese can be when I wrote up little papers describing the differences in the coffee beans that we’re selling at our liquor store/coffee shop. As a rule, Japanese has three writing systems, hiragana (the “basic” syllable-based writing system), katakana (used for foreign words) and kanji (which is used to express adjectives and nouns). When writing something that you want to look attractive, the interplay between the three systems is quite important. English words like “aroma” and “dark roast” embedded in the Japanese make the text look very slick, but too much katakana can be ugly. Adding a flowery adjective written in kanji, like “maroyaka” (warm and pleasing) or “shinsen” (fresh) break up the monotony of the text. Finally, the “fourth” writing system used in Japan is English, and it’s quite common to see English words written in English (not katakana) in Japanese text, especially song lyrics. We used a little bit of English to further smooth things out. If you want to see what our finished Japanese text came out to be, it’s here: http://www.jlist.com/c1/example.jpg
We got even more 2002 calendars in, and I must say our stockroom is quite full of calendars! Unfortunately, our calendar distributor tells us that the time for pre-ordering calendars is just about up. If you’re just dying to order a 2002 Crayon Shinchan calendar, get your order into us in the next day or so or forever hold you peace. We’ve been very pleased with how well the calendars have sold this year, as many customers decided to buy one or more of our large poster-size glossy calendars to put on their wall or give as Christmas gifts. The winners so far this year are the anime calendars (Ah My Goddess, You’re Under Arrest, Ruro ni Kenshin), Race Queen Fumika Suzuki, the beautiful Modern Nihon-ga art calendar, Jun Kusanagi’s busty nude calendar, and the always popular Onsen (Hot Springs) nudes. We do have about 200 calendars in stock right now, so please browse our selection. We can get your calendars to you by Christmas!
We made some changes to the J-List site after our last update, which caused some users’ browsers to fail to display products correctly. The error should be fixed, but if you have any problems with the site, please email us immediately and we’ll check out the problem.
Also, we posted Gibo, the new game from Peach Princess, on Monday, but we posted it at $49.95. The actual price is $39.95 (with free shipping for preorder if you order it now). Sorry about that.
For this evening’s update, we have a bunch of excellent new products for you, including:
- First, we have new adult Japanese magazines, including the very nice Mini Teen, which features very interesting hard core sex with “kogals” (the bad girls of Japan), and a new copy of EX CD-ROM, a magazine with a cool sampler CD-ROM
- We’ve also added many discount magazines, too, including fresh stock of several copies of our popular magazines
- For fans of Waffle, we’ve got a new deluxe Buru Mani photobook-style magazine, featuring some lovely models
- For lovers of Maiko Kazano, a treat: her super-erotic hardcover photobook, filled with some of the most beautiful nude photos we’ve seen in five years of running J-List
- We’ve got fresh stock of some nice leg fetish photobooks, including the long-selling “Legend of Stairs” which features pictures of women in miniskirts and panty stockings photographed going up stairs
- If you love Japan’s erotic manga, we’ve got a nice selection of all-new books for you, including a new work by the popular Fuuga and all three volumes of Teacher Takatsuki’s Sexual Days in a handy set
- Also for manga fans, fresh stock of a dozen or more out of stock books, including Blue Eyes, and more
- For doujinshi fans, we’ve got some very nice books for you, all single issues (so check them out fast, before they go)
- For DVD fans, we’ve got many nice new offerings, including a deluxe 180 minute video with Bunko Kanazawa
- From SOD, we’ve got a super Kyonyu (Giant Breast) Best Selection, with the best large-bust fetishism in the history of Soft on Demand, followed by the long-awaited DVD release of the Kurumi Morishita Fan Thanks Day, in which she performs fellatio and tekoki (hand job) on 40 of her fans
- For lovers of Emily Yoshikawa, the F cup “Latino” AV idol, we’ve got her 2nd video release
- For fans of Japan’s sexy idols, see the very nice DVD of Haruka Igawa, the #1 sexy swimsuit idol in Japan today
- For fans of “traditional” Japanese things, we’ve got fresh stock of the very nice ukiyoe postcards with famous Japanese images on them
- On the anime and toys, a very cool Nightmare Before Christmas phone strap/keychain from Jun Planning
- For customers with kids, we’ve got a nifty Hello Kitty paint set in stock, which my own kids like
- We have a new Japanese wooden sign for places where people should not use portable phones
- Finally, we’ve added many nice new “wacky” items, including a super-handy shoulder protector to keep straps from bags you’re carrying from digging into your flesh, a convenient “finger separator” for women to use when painting their fingernails (with matching toe-separator), more wacky Japanese health items, and more. Check out our excellent items!
Japan is home to many fine manga artists, who create all manner of interesting comics. One popular subset of the manga world is “yaoi,” Japan’s homosexual comics which detail the deep and complex relationships between males. Very deep and interesting, you can always find a selection of yaoi manga and doujinshi here at J-List.
