Good evening from your friends at J-List!
The Japanese are awfully good at memorizing facts and dates by making handy phrases. To memorize the months of the year that have less than 31 days in them, they use “nishi muku samurai” (“the west-facing samurai”) — ni = 2, shi = 4, mu = 6, ku = 9, and samurai is written with the Chinese numbers for 10 and 1, hence the 11th month. Want to remember the start of the Kamakura Era? Just memorize “ii kuni o tukuro” (“let’s make a great nation”), which contains the year — 1192. There’s even a way way to memorize the periodic table of elements using a method like this, although it defeated me pretty quickly.
Japanese singer Kahala Tomomi is still trying to make a go of her “American debut, trying to find a band she can join as a singer. I hope she does well, but it’s hard to see her getting a record contract without some backing. Meanwhile, another Japanese singer is trying to make it in the US. Kobayashi Yukie, a talented singer picked out of 4000 competitors to become the star-child of star producer Tetstuya Komuro, has released her first single in the U.S., using the stage name Nikki Monroe. Her career is followed each week on the hit TV show Asayan, the show that made Morning Musume what they are today. See her homepage at http://www.nikkimonroe.com (Flash-enabled).
For this evening’s update, we’ve got some excellent new items for you, including:
- First, some excellent new magazines, including the new Urecco (Kusanagi Jun alert!), a new issue of Amateur Girl’s Data, and more
- For photobook fans, Pure, a snapshot of the wonderful youthful idol Yagi Mika
- For let fetish fans, we’ve got more stock of several sold-out books, including Bizarre Legs, Slit Skirt, and The Nama-ashi (pictures of sexy women with bare legs)
- The new DVD & Video CD Soft Catalog is in. This is a magazine with two Video CDs, filled with quickie” sampler AV (including underwater fetish)
- If you love lovely Japan AV videos, we’ve got a bunch of new titles in stock, including Asato Yuka, Suginami Ami, and Tomosaki Rin in “My younger sister’s panties” — see Japan AV Videos -> New releases
- Also for video fans, a super 90-minute tekoki & lewdness video from Kanazawa Bunko and SOD — see the SOD in-stock video page, or the special order page if our stock runs out
- For our adult manga customers, we have several back-in-stock classics, including I can’t keep quiet ~ Koe ga dechau, stock of manga by the very popular Ranchiki, and more — see the Manga new releases and best-sellers pages
- For our T-shirt fans, fresh stock of previously sold-out sizes of shirt F (“Beware perverts in the area”) and shirt K (the popular black & white version of “Looking for a Japanese girlfriend”)
- For idol video fans, a really special new items: the wonderful 50 minute idol video of the captivating Sakai Wakana — see the Idols page
- If you’ve ever loved the excellent show Kamen Rider (Masked Rider), we’ve got several complete sets of the “Dash Rider” bike & figure toys
- We have several copies of Goods Press in stock, for those who love to follow what’s popular in Japan — see then on Anime -> Anime & JPOP magazines
- Finally, just when you thought J-List had run out of handy things to sell on our Wacky Things from Japan page, we’ve got — cooking chopsticks. These extra-long bamboo chopsticks are extremely useful for a variety of cooking tasks, not just when preparing Asian food. Check them out now!
Friday is “Thai day” at J-List, as we celebrate our fourth anniversary with various Thai curries (not very Japanese of us, we know…).
