Hello again from Japan, where the hours when the most viewers are watching television is known as “Golden Time.”
The Japanese love their 4 seasons, and when Dave Barry says that a Japanese is likely to stop you on the street and tell you how wonderful Japan’s four seasons are, he is not making it up. But Japan has many seasons, all unique and different from the rest. First comes winter, then “windy winter,” which is much worse. Then comes “sakura viewing season,” which is supposed to be part of spring, but it’s usually bitter cold, so it feels like part of winter. After Spring come the month long rainy season, followed by summer. Right now, summer has ended, and we’re in “typhoon season,” when Japan is pummeled by one storm after another. Finally comes autumn with its beautiful red leaves, then winter again. Right now we’re enjoying rain every other day, and as I write this, a big typhoon is on its way to the Tokyo region. Hope it doesn’t hit too hard.
The Japanese use a lot of English in their daily lives, but it’s often impossible to identify it sometimes after the Japanese get through with it. If you ask your boss for a raise, but he says no, it’s “NG” (which stands for “no good”) — a TV “blooper” is also called an NG. The letter “W” stands for “double” to the Japanese, thus a washing machine might be advertised as “W [double] Power.” If you want to check your weight, you’d better ask for a health meter — the English term “scale” is used in Japanese, but only meaning something’s size in relation to something else. Sometimes Americans are confused by alien terms that are British English — I didn’t know that the hood of a car was a “bonnet” in British English until I came to Japan. If you want to tell someone to not worry about something, you can say “Donmai!” which comes from “Don’t mind!” Similarly, when someone is backing their car up, you can tell them it’s okay to come back further by saying “Orai!” which comes from “Alright!” Many English words have been imported into Japanese, but with different pronunciations — “energy” is pronounced with a hard “G,” and “vitamin” comes out like “bitamin” (bee-TA-min). Finally, many of the foreign words used in Japan, like “anket” (a questionnaire), “arubaito” (a part-time job) and “ruksak” (a backpack) don’t come from English at all, but that doesn’t stop the Japanese from trying to use them during English conversation class.
For this evening’s update, we’ve got the following new stuff for you:
- First, we’ve got some great new magazines for you, including the new Urecco, which features some beautiful Japanese gals as Rio Sannomiya, Manatsu Hirose and Ami Ayukawa
- For hentai fans, we’ve got the new issue of Push!!, featuring not one but two CD-ROMs filled with goodies, with nothing but the newest titles from Japan
- For fans of high-end bondage and S&M from Japan, we’ve got a new volume of The Most of Beautiful Slave, featuring 14 lovely ladies inside…
- For hentai manga fans, we’ve got a nice update, including excellent erotic titles from Angel Comics, I.C. Comics, and a nice erotic “boy meets girl” manga by Yutaka Tanaka
- For doujinshi lovers, we’ve got an excellent update for you, with both new single-issues as well as good stock of several excellent erotic doujinshi — check out the new offerings!
- For fans of DVD, we’ve got a super erotic production featuring Rin Tomosaki, the popular AV idol who appears frequently in Japan’s adult magazines
- Also, for fans of Soft on Demand’s very erotic works, we’ve got an all-new *4 hour* DVD celebrating their “5 1/5 year anniversary,” featuring their “worst” productions ever — although in reality this disc has some of their greatest stuff, including some of their most bizarre ideas ever. No materials duplicated with the SOD 5 years anniversary special, too…
- Also for DVD fans, fresh stock of some of our most popular DVD titles, including wonderful DVDs by Mai Hagiwara and Anna Ohura
- We’re having a sale on many of our region 2 DVDs, as we close out many of these titles we’ve kept in stock. Check out the DVD region 2 page for the new bargains. This is a great time for those with region-free DVD players! (and remember, see the top of the region 2 DVD page for info on how you can view these discs).
- We’ve got some nice new snack items, including a delicious “super soda” flavor of Shige-Kicks, the super-sour “hard gummi” candy, and a great boil-in-bag curry rice for kids
- For fans of lovely Japanese swimsuit idols, we have fresh stock of the Last Alive cards in stock
- We’ve got a new wacky Japanese sign for smokers on the Wacky Stickers & Signs page
- We’ve got some very nice traditional Japanese items in stock for you, including a very nice “simulated” lacquerware bowl and tray (ours is plastic, not polished wood), as well as some excellent chopsticks with ukiyoe pictures on them
- If you love our wacky things from Japan, we’ve also got some nice items in for you, including our popular map of Japan, a quality stainless steel cup from Japan, and more!
We’ve added an easy “one click” link in our outgoing auto reply mails, which makes it easy for Paypal users to pay for their orders. Paypal is a system that lets you pay for things over the Internet directly, from either a credit card or your (U.S.) checking account. It’s quite easy to use.
