Happy Friday from J-List, now with 20% more Pocky!
The Japanese bishojo game Tokimeki Memorial is one of the most popular games ever to come out of Japan, and has sold over 1.1 million copies in its various forms, making Konami one of the major game companies in the country. Now Japanese investors can own a piece of the Tokimemo legacy, with a new Tokimemo Fund that was recently created. Basically, investors buy shares of the fund, which is tied to the future performance of the Tokimeki Memorial licensing franchise. The more popular the games and characters become, the higher the shares will rise.
The Sogo department store chain is the latest casualty of the beleaguered Japanese economy. The massive debt run up by the unprofitable chain finally caught up with it, causing closure of dozens of the company’s stores all around Japan. As part of a government-assisted bailout, the chain’s creditors will receive payment for the massive debts, but the total bill comes out to $15 for every Japanese citizen. One factor in the chain’s failure is probably slowness in adapting to changes in the world around it. Typing www.sogo.co.jp into a web browser brings up nothing — the company had not even created a homepage. Close competitor Takashimaya, however, has a highly developed web (www.takashimaya.co.jp) that you can even buy products from.
For this weekend’s update, we’ve got some extra special items, including:
- First, even more of our extremely popular $5 magazine items — help us clear out our overfilled stock room
- Also for lovers of Japanese adult magazines, the new Gal’s Dee, the bust fetish magazine for fans of lovely, busty Japanese women
- For photobook fans, we’ve got not one, but two lovely new photobooks capturing the #1 AV idol in Japan today, Kawashima Azumi
- For fans of our high-end bondage photobooks, we’ve got the excellent new Slave Mania, as well as the new Anal-ko Club, for fans of “Hip and Anal”
- We’ve got fresh stock of the Crystal Card nude AV idol collectible cards, on the Photobooks page 1
Fans of the excellent erotic illustrations of Hawazaki Takuma, creator of Golden Stage and Innocent Age, will love his super new manga, Doctorine of the Sailor Suit (on Manga -> New releases)
- Also of interest to manga fans, limited stock of three special volumes of the popular “How to draw manga girls” art books, on Manga -> New releases (and cross posted to the art book pages)
- Love erotic dojinshi? We’ve got fresh stock of several red-hot books from Okachimentaiko, as well as stock of their newest release, Gorippa 2 (take note, busty female fans)
- On the newly christened Hentai Magazines page, we’ve got new in-stock hentai magazines, including extra copies of the newest E-Login
- Very cool for Yaoi fans, copies of the extremely popular Be-Boy Gold
- For fans of Japanese snacks, we’ve got a major update to our snacks, including fresh stock of original as well as the best-selling Men’s Pocky, Strawberry Pocky (with real strawberry bits), Milky Candy, the excellent Chelsea Butterscotch candy, and of course, our popular sake candy (with real sake!)
- Fans of the old classic Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot (a childhood love of Peter’s) should check out the Giant Robo Miracle Action Figure toys, on the Anime Toys page
- We have some copies of the current Newtype in-stock on the Anime & JPOP Magazines page (it’s a great issue!)
- Last, but not least, we’ve got — real origami paper, for making classic Japanese origami creations. Each pack contains 49 sheets of wonderfully colored paper for creating origami, and comes with instructions on how to make a Japanese crane. See it on the Wacky Things from Japan page!
We’ve received word from our calendar distributors that we will have to close orders on Oct 31st — in past years, we’ve kept them open into November, with a disclaimer that calendars ordered later in “calendar season” might not be available. Since we’ll have to close calendar orders early this year, we again hope — at the risk of repeating ourselves — that anyone who is interested in getting a beautiful, large-format, glossy Japanese calendar for 2001 get their orders in ASAP. Thanks!
We hope you have a fun weekend wherever you are. Until next time, we’ll see you on the web!
