Greetings from Japan, the country with feminine products with names like “Charmy body fit.”
Japanese as a language has many elements not found in English, which can be challenging to students of the language. One of these areas is the Japanese system of polite language (keigo), which is used occasionally in extremely formal situations and in business speech. There are two basic functions of keigo: to raise the level of the person you’re talking to (called “exhaulting” speech); and to lower your own level (called “humble” speech). There are actually different verbs to use depending on the subject in a polite sentence, so if you said, What will you eat, Sensei? I’m going to eat sushi, you’d use different verbs for the two occurrences of “eat” depending on the subject of the sentence. There’s a complex version of this used in business speech. If someone from an outside company calls, asking to speak to your boss, you’d use exhaulting speech to refer to the caller, but humble speech to refer to your boss, as he’s a part of your “uchi” or in-group, compared with the person calling from outside.
Related to Japanese polite speech is the honorific “o” that goes in front of some words, to give them a higher status. Words like money (okane), relationships like mother or grandmother (okaasan, obaasan), and so on — it could be translated as “honorable” in Engish, but of course it’s never translated blatantly like that (thank God). It’s interesting to notice the patterns of words that take this “o” — words having to do with death or Buddhism tend to take it (otera = temple, okou = Buddhist incense), yet words related to Shinto (the original Japanese religion) usually don’t. Adding the honorific “o” to words sort of “softens” the word, so words related to children or babies tend to take the prefix (omaru = child’s toilet, omutsu = diapers). Perhaps for this reason
We usual, we’ve got a bunch of excellent items for you, including:
- First of all, even more magazines for our red-hot $5 magazine sale, to replenish items that have sold over the past few days
- In addition to another addition of books to our magazine sale page (Magazine page 3), we’ve got several all-new items, including the new issue of Aishite Ageru (“I’ll Love You”), a popular “wet” fetish magazine from Japan
- We have several classic photobooks on the photobooks pages, including copies of the premium Santa Fe by Miyazawa Rie, and more
- For our leg fetish customers, we’ve got a wonderful and elegant leg, stocking and high-heel fetish book, Leg Karisma — see the leg fetish photobook page for this item
- Like Japanese S&M books? We’ve got a very special on on the gouka-bon page — with 50 models and 340 all color pages!
- J-List sells tons of unique Japanese adult manga, because they’re of such incredibly high quality. For our manga customers, we’ve got a bunch of new, as well as “back from the dead” (previously sold out ) manga titles, with limited stock of several out-of-print items. See Manga -> New items and Manga -> Best-sellers for these items
- For dojinshi fans, we have fresh stock of the popular Kaiten erotic dojinshi (Sailor Moon and popular game gals), on the dojinshi page
- We have some excellent new videos by Soft on Demand (a company we really respect), with a new “tekoki” (hand job and penis study) offering, and two great new videos from the lovely Sakura Nana!
- Also for video fans, two great cosplay videos, with great erotic footage with characters from Eva, Gundam Wing and Japan’s most popular fighting games
- For fans of esoteric toys from Japan, we’ve got new “Ultra Detail Figures” from the Planet of the Apes movies — Dr. Zaius, General Urko, and a new soldier ape. Very detailed!
- Finally, for those interested in unique things from Japan, we’ve got some “Magic Magnets, small magnets you stick on your body, which increase bloodflow and overall health, according to the Japanese. See them on the Wacky things from Japan” page.
Remember that J-List is one of the few places where you can find the popular adult “dojinshi anthology” manga Lunatic Party (Sailor Moon parody) and Paradise Lost/Angelic Impact (Evangelion). Although these books are out of print, J-List has a special relationship with the publisher, and still have a good supply of most volumes. Anthologies of some of the best dojinishi ever released in Japan, the artwork is fantastic in these books, and each volume has 160+ pages. You can see these extremely cool items on the Manga -> Parody Manga.
