Hello again on this fine Saturday morning in Japan!
Japanese marrying foreigners is at an all-time high, up nearly double from 10 years ago. In 2000, 31,900 international marriages took place, with about 22,000 Japanese men marrying foreign women (mostly from China, South Korea and the Phillippines), and the rest were Japanese women who married men from other countries, mostly America and South Korea. International marriage is very beneficial to Japan, and it helps society move forward in many imporant areas while providing diversity for Japan, which would otherwise be a very closed place.
On the other hand, many of Japan’s institutions are very inflexible when it comes to dealing with non-Japanese, which causes frustration. One such system is the Family Register (koseki tohon), basically an official list of which people live in which households, that is maintained by every City Office around the country. If your daughter gets married and goes off to live with her husband’s family (called “yome ni iku” or “going off to be a bride”), she is removed from your family’s register and added to her husband’s. Foreigners, however, don’t “fit” into this system, and are never added to the family register (unless they take Japanese citizenship). As a result, it looks to the city we live in that my wife is a single mother with two kids, since I don’t “exist” in the eyes of family registry system. (They’ve sent social workers around to our house a few times to see how this poor “single mother” was getting along.) Recently, the Japanese government has allowed foreigners to be listed in the “comments” section of the register to avoid this confusion.
When Japanese think of foreigners, they think of overly tall, blonde Americans with huge feet, trying to find their way to the right subway line. In actuality, the vast majority of foreigners living in Japan are not Westerners, but are from South Korea, North Korea, Brazil, Peru and China. Officially, 1% of Japan’s population are foreigners living here, although that number doesn’t take into account people who are here illegally, so the number is probably higher. The largest group, the Koreans, are very interesting because many of them were born and raised right here in Japan, and often don’t even speak Korean unless they attended one of the Korean-only private schools that pepper thee country. To an American like me, this is quite confusing, as all children born in the U.S. get to be Americans without any problems, and this works for pretty much everyone. But the relationship of Korea and Japan is a very complex one, and more or less by mutual agreement of both sides, Koreans live for generations inside Japan, living and working but never allowing themselves to become culturally assimilated. Or is it the Japanese who keep the Korean population from becomming part of itself? I couldn’t possibly say for sure. On the one hand, it’s not difficult for anyone (even old gaijin me) to get Japanese citizenship as long as he meets the requirements, and Japan is always very sensitive to possible accusations of racism, so there are no groups that aren’t “allowed” to take Japanese citizenship. One thing I must do is take a Japanese name. For many reasons, including the name requirement and the memories of Japanese attrocities during World War II, many Koreans living in Japan don’t allow themselves to become Japanese.
Calendar season continues to pass us by, and we see that several of the calendars we got in stock during the week are selling well. It wil be quite hard for us to fill calendar preorders after the end of October, so if there are any interesting anime, JPOP, Japanese beauty or other calendars you’re interested in, let us know. We’ll get another shipment of calendars in within a week or so, so more preordered calendars can go out. One note: the images we’ve got posted to the J-List site leave a little something to be desired, since we have to scan the pictures of the calendars from tiny thumbnails. The real calendars are much nicer to look at.
The J-List site was broken for about 8 hours, two days ago, as our programmer was doing some work on the site. We’re very sorry for the problem, but it’s all fixed now. At some point in the next couple of days, we’ll be making some more improvements to the J-List server, moving images to an image server. If you experience any problems with the page for any reason, please let us know right away. Remember that you can always order with the secure email form if our shopping cart gives you trouble. Thanks!
For fans of Japanese adult video, slashed many prices and put many items on the Discount Videos page — get these great videos for cheap, and get free SAL shipping, too. Included in the discounted items are the popular Zenra (all nude sports) videos, Penis Study, and more!
For the pre-weekend update, we’ve got some extra-nice items for you, including:
- First, weve got a nice mix of new magazines for you, including the new Gal’s Dee, just brimming with wonderful bust-fetish girls like Makoto, the lovely covergirl (93 cm bust, F cup), and many other newly posted items
- For fans of Japanese idols, we’ve got two items for you. In Hakkutsu Magazine, see old and embarassing pictures of Japan’s famous idols like Yuka and Mami gotoh. Then in Video World CD-ROM, see startling (?) footage of Japan’s idols performing AV before they were famous
- For lovers of Japan’s unique kogals, check out Yes!! featuring a slew of kogals and Japanese female college girls
- We’ve got some excellent photobooks posted for you, including the new installment of the excellent Tennyo series, featuring the erotic nude of Ayumi Tahara
- Also for photobook fans, we’ve restockd the Yellows Angels and Yellows Americans photobooks, which catalog the nudes of beautiful women for posterity
- For Race Queen fans, limited stock of a nice item indeed, the Top GT Race Queen photobook
- For fans of Japan’s high-end bondage pornography, we’ve got the popular DVD Video Cinema, featuring a magazine as well as a full 2 hour DVD with two complete bondage AV productions
- Our customers often ask us to get even more manga in stock, so we cheerful oblige — we’ve got a major update to our hentai manga pages, with several new items as well as fresh stock of some doujinshi anthology books including the Electric Fighting Daughter’s series
- For yaoi lovers, we’ve got the excellent Sony Magazine Comics “Rutile” (yes, Sony makes a homosexual comic, go figure), along with fresh stock of several of the popular Be Boy Zips
- If you love the erotic doujinshi themes known as “kemono” (beast), humans with animal characteristics like cat ears and furry tails, check out the upate to our doujinshi page, with several adult doujinshi posted
- We’ve got some great DVDs for you. For lesbian fans, we have a super *4 hour* all-lesbian megapack from Media Supply. Then, Nanami Nanase, star of the best-selling One Week with Only Semen, is back in a massive 200 minute product in which she answers “the flagrant requests of semen maniacs with a smiling face”
- In addition to the reduced-price videos, we’ve got a new video release from Soft on Demand’s famous director “Dogma,” the lovely Erika Nagai is a karate-wielding tornado who beats up guys then performs “tekoki” on them
- For anime fans, we’ve got a cool Card Captor Sakura Figure Clock that’s just great, as well as lovely “angel and devil” figures for fans of the Japanese fashion doll Licca-chan
- For fans of Japanese bishoujo games, see the collectible cards for “Air,” the popular game from Visual Art’s
- We’ve got some new funny “Japanese buttons” with funny and bizarre pictures and images on them, and some excellent new Japanese “hachimaki” headbands
- We’ve got several new items on our Japanese snacks and food page, including a delicious new flavor of Shigekix, the popular super-sour “hard gummi,” Japanese shreaded ika, and some chocolate gum that’s really good
- We have fresh stock of several of the sold-out “ukiyoe” chopsticks on the “traditional things” page
- Our Wacky Things from Japan main page includes many new items, including rolls of beautiful Japanese “washi” paper, fresh stock of the always-popular “fude pen” (a pen that you can use to write Japanese calligraphy), a new item in the cheerful “Kitchen Hanako” line of cute things for your kitchen, a cute “door message” for your door with ridiculous English on it, and more
- Finally, if you’ve ordered from J-List before, you may have been surprised to find a packet of Japanese pocket tissue included in with your order. In Japan, a major way that companies get their message out to people is through printed advertising tissue, handy packets of tissue that are fun to receive and handy to use. J-List’s pocket tissue is always popular when we bring it to anime conventions, but now, by customer request, we’re making 12-packs of our handy tissue available at our cost, to J-List customers who want to carry a little piece of J-List with them wherever they go. You’ll get 12 packs of our famous pocket tissue in a plastic protective case. Share them with your friends, we don’t mind! (Of course, a free packet of tissue will still be included with every order).
For fans of Japan’s bishoujo games, we’re reducing the prices on our three Peach Princess hentai T-shirts, which feature images from Tokimeki Check in! and the upcoming Little my Maid. These shirts are beautiful, featuring excellent 4-color images and high quality, and now they’re on sale!
