Greetings and salutations from your friends at J-List!
Our warmest Thanksgiving wishes to everyone on this American holiday weekend. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American event, and when you’re an expat living outside of your home country, it’s honestly difficult to remember it as I do when I’m at home. Tonight I will get Kentucky Fried Chicken — there is no turkey to be had in Japan for love or money — and we’ll do our best to mark the occasion.
There is no American-style Thanksgiving in Japan, but today is a holiday. My chance of the calendar, Friday is Kinro Kansha no Hi, or Labor Thanksgiving Day. This is a pretty run-of-the-mill Japanese holiday in which we’re supposed to give thanks to those who work hard to keep Japan running. As with all holidays added since the 1980’s, it’s a thinly disguised attempt by the Japanese government to stimulate the economy, since the assumption is that people spend more money on holidays. As far as I can tell, there are no special customs or events associated with the Kinro Kansha no Hi, except that manual laborers, such as those who do road construction, work extra hard on this day (they get higher pay for working on holidays).
A second cow has been found with BSE (mad cow disease), this time in Hokkaido. As if the Japanese economy needed any more problems, now they have to worry about consumers fleeing all domestic beef. The government is doing its best to reassure people, with many a Japanese politician eating platefuls of beef on TV to show that it’s safe to eat, but Japanese consumers are very worried, and domestic beef consumption has dropped 30% after seeing images of cows in the U.K. falling over pathetically while trying to walk. Meanwhile, imported beef from the U.S. and Australia is soaring, and McDonald’s is broadcasting a cute commercial showing a family taking their daughter to McDonald’s, where all the meat served is “Aussie beef that you can trust.”
Several customers had trouble accessing the J-List site around Thursday. We’ve tweaked the site, and think the problem has gone away, but if you experience any errors, please email us right away. Also, in an unrelated problem, several of the items we posted on Wednesday didn’t show up on the site, including the new issue of Cream and Emily Yoshikawa’s very lovely photobook. They’re on the site now — sorry about that.
A huge volley of calendars have come in, including the long-awaited Ah My Goddess, Love Hina and You’re Under Arrest calendars. If you had preordered these items, we’ve already contacted you to let you know they’re on their way. The extras we ordered are posted to the J-List site, although we already wish we had ordered more — if you want these great 2002 Japanese calendars for your room, please don’t wait to order them, as Japan is a very seasonal place, and once calendars are gone they will be gone til next year. Since most of the calendars we’ve ordered are in stock, Yasu and I undertook the arduous task of opening the calendars and taking pictures of the inside pages, so you could get a better idea of how nice they are than the small thumbnail scan we had posted before. Check out all the updated calendar images, on the site now.
For this special weekend update, we’ve got an extra-special lineup of products for you, including:
- First, the new issue of Gokuh is a very special one, featuring Anna Ohura and Nao Oikawa and all the most lovely Japanese AV idols and models
- For fans of Beppin School, we’ve got another excellent issue for you. As with the last issue, the back cover has been damaged and cut away, so we’re selling the issues we have at a discount
- If you want to keep up-to-date on the Japanese bisujoujo (“pretty girl”) gaming world, we’ve got an excellent hentai magazine, Push!!, which includes a CD-ROM filled with demos, sample images, computer wallpaper and more
- For those who love “hitozuma” (married women) and women over 30, we’ve got an interesting gouka-bon (high-end fetish photobook) featuring married women age 30-42
- For fans of magazines that come with sampler video CDs inside, we’ve got the new Club Indies EX vol. 3, which features 3+ hours of AV in MPEG format for your enjoyment
- We have a fistfull of excellent new photobooks, including the incredibly sexy Ran Enoki photographed by Garo Aida, and a rare photobook by Haruki Mizuno, shot on location on the elegant island of Bali
- For fans of Japanese “rape play,” we’ve got the new K.O. in stock
- We have some great new manga volumes in stock by some of Japan’s most popular manga studios, as well as a restock of some very popular “dick girl” books that
- For yaoi lovers, a very exotic “hard boys love” anthology of material from several yaoi artists — highly recommended
- We’ve posted lower prices for most of the excellent Pure Beauties soft porn DVDs, which feature some of Japan’s most lovely idols in super DVD format
- If you dig doujinshi, we’ve got a great volley of truly excellent new books for you, from the past summer’s doujinshi, and all of excellent quality — unfortunately we only have one of each book, so they will go fast
- For fans of the lovely new “indies” idol Nanami Nanase, we’ve got an extremly special item — the First Nanami Nanase Fan Thanks Day, in which the slender, pretty Nanami-chan says “thank you” to her fans by sucking off 54 of them in one day. One lucky fan is even selected to receive much more…
- Also from Soft on Demand, a great new tekoki & lewd woman DVD by Kurumi Morishita, followed by a dynamite “2 in 1” tekoki DVD for fans of hand-job fetishism
- If you like DVDs that explore lesbian themes, we recommend a new DVD by Kitty High (this is a region 2 DVD)
- For fans of leg, nylon stocking, mini skirt and high heel fetish themes, we’ve got a very special DVD for you by SOD’s Hamlet label
- We have restocked the delicious “limited release” dark chocolate Mousse Pocky. which is only available in the winter — this is a delicious and fluffy treat from Japan
- For those who have some Japanese down already, we’ve got a handy kanji dictionary, for looking up Chinese characters by stoke order or radical
- We have a new Kubrick toy item for Evangelion fans, the mass-production Eva 05 unit with Kaoru figure
- Finally, we’ve got more zany items from Japan for you, including a great way to make drip coffee Japanese style, an all-purpose “cusion case” that you can use to protect many things (I use it to safeguard my Powerbook G4), and more!
The CM-Watch page has been updated with some new Japanese TV commercials. CM-Watch is just our way of saying thanks to our customers for allowing us to bring Japanese pop culture to you in all its many forms. You can access CM-Watch at http://www.cm-watch.com (Quicktime required). Remember you can support CM-Watch by buying a cool limited edition CM-Watch T-shirt at J-List, too!
