Hello again from Japan, where the municipal employment office is called Hello Work.
As in most countries in the world, modern Japanese culture has been changed by the arrival of the “keitai denwa” or portable phone, which virtually all Japanese seem to own. The Japanese market for cellular phones is red-hot, with companies like NTT Docomo and J-Phone (bought by Vodaphone and recently rebranded with the Vodaphone name) and Au competing to bring the best products to consumers. Being the Microsoft of Japan, NTT’s Docomo is a gorilla that beats up the competition pretty badly, and their pioneering iMode, the first system to let you surf web pages on your phone, is a category-killer. Their 3-G FOMA system is going head-to-head with Au’s CDMA-1, which has a good edge both in Japan and worldwide. (We like CDMA because it was designed in San Diego.) Some Au phones can also be used outside of Japan, although the extra charges are still quite high. Phones that take pictures have been popular in Japan for a long time, and newer phones offer the ability to record MPEG-4 movies, play Java games, find yourself on a GPS map, and so on. Phones that have an LCD screen on the outside of the phone, so you can see the face of the person calling you, are popular now, too. Japanese are quite adept at sending email with portable phones, and it’s funny to see high school girls typing at a very high speed using just their thumbs on the tiny keypad.
What color are your eyes? All Japanese people have brown eyes, although if you ever ask them what color their eyes are, they’ll tell you “black” (because the center of the eyes are black, as opposed to the iris). Japanese are often interested in the eyes of foreigners, since they come in different colors, something totally unknown in Japan (although they do sell color contact lenses here). Yet when I tell them that my eyes change color depending on what I’m wearing, changing from green to hazel to blue (they do), they usually don’t believe it’s possible. Once, we were asked by our Spanish teacher, a Japanese who grew up in Peru, if I saw the world through a blue or green tint because of the color of my eyes. It was kind of a weird experience…
One of the social elements at work in Japanese daily life is the “myth of Japanese uniformity.” Just as Westerners who haven’t had much experience with Japanese people might say “they all look alike” to them (don’t worry, it’s a natural reaction, especially when you come here for the first time), Japanese have a tendency to act as if the Japanese race was completely pure and unified, with everyone looking pretty much the same as everyone else. Japanese all have the same color eyes, it’s true, but their other features can be extremely varied — hair color and texture, skin shade, shape of the nose and face, height, facial and body hair, and so on. Inside the “unified” Japanese gene pool there are genes from the Ainu, the original inhabitants of Northern Japan, as well as Korea, China, Mongolian, South America, and increasingly, America and Europe (like my kids). All of the genes create more and more variation in what Japanese people look like, yet Japanese tend not to “see” these differences, and go on believing that Japanese are all pretty much exactly the same as each other. This can be quite a useful thing, since it removes internal strife inside Japan based on perceived differences, although it’s an odd concept to get used to, but for the most part, Japan is one big happy in-group. Tokyo mayor Shintaro “The Japan That Can Say No” Ishihara, whose politics are sometimes a bit to the right of Atilla the Hun, recently admitted that Japanese do indeed have blood from a variety of regions in their veins.
At J-List, as love all forms of Japanese pop culture, including the wacky adult and hentai, which is not in short supply in Japan. Today we’re happy to announce Casual Romance Club, a bold new kind of total dating simulator released by Libido. Suddenly without reason, love takes you by surprise. Do you want to have a serious romance? Keep it simple at first by joining the Casual Romance Club. Not only is the game released in Japan with a full English translation (including a first for bishoujo games, voice actors who speak English as well as Japanese), it comes with a deluxe 48 page hardcover data book on the characters and gaming system. Since Casual Romance Club is a Japan release, it’s stocked and shipped out of J-List’s Japan office. Requires Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and a DVD-ROM drive.
For the new update, we’ve got some excellent products from Japan for you. They include:
- First, for fans of Japanese pretty idols — check out the “Monthly Yuko Itoh” dedicated magazine/photobook, just lovely
- Also, a nice hardcover mini-photobook featuring Minako Komukai, a beautiful girl who wears a kimono, yukata, and bikini of the camera
- Then enjoy a great short movie and “gravure image” (Japanese parlance for sexy photos and video of in bikini) featuring the lovely Fumina Hara, a truly beautiful Japanese lady (region 2)
- For fans of unique Japanese toys from Japan, we’ve got a really cool Dragonball Z series of figures, Gokuh, Piccolo and Vegeta, rendered in beautiful soft vinyl
- Also, fresh stock of the very cool Amazing Weapons series, miniature recreations of the bizarre weapons invented during World War II as only the Japanese could create them
- If you love Naruto, we’ve got some really cool “detail stickers” for you
- For fans of Japanese Hot Wheels, which are sold exclusively in Japan, we have some cool new items, vehicles from bizarre TV shows of the 1970’s
- For fans of our Japanese food items, we’ve got several unique delicacies from Japan, delicious “butter caramel,” tasty bread sticks from japan, and more
- We have more chopsticks from Japan, too, which are extra-easy for adults to use
- For those interested in Buddhism, we’ve got some beautiful Buddhist beads for use as decoration or as an accessory, very nice
- If you want to keep your car looking nice, get a cute canvas trash bag for the back — it’s got wacky English on it too!
- For Hello Kitty fans, we have a cute toy vacuum cleaner — wind it up and watch it go — as well as fresh stock of various other from-Japan Kitty items
- We’ve gotten in a major restocking of miniature toys w/ ramune candy, including the Chinatown and miniature sushi sets — with full sets restocked and ready for you to order
- Also, look for various new Domo-kun items, including several popular items which had sold out (including the “really big Domo-kun plush”)
- Finally, look for Japanese train pass holders, a great way to scoop rice, more mosquito incense to kill the pesky bugs, sushi molds for making sushi, more minty eyedrops from Japan, and more!
- For our adult customers, we’ve got many new 18+ products. They include:
- For fans of high-quality Japanese adult magazines, we’ve got the new issue of Urecco, and it’s a great one, with dozens of ripe, beautiful girls for you to check out
- Also, we’ve got the great new issue of Photo Shot, featuring a host of superb erotic cosplay photos and top stars, like Alice Ogura, Sora Aoi, Ryoko Mitake, Hitomi Hayasaka, and Yuko Ogura
- Then enjoy the first issue of Ryu-gu (“Dragon Shrine”), featuring superb hardcore sex by Japanese bad girls, a real treat
- Also, for fans of magazines with a focus on kogals, we’ve got a great new issue of Yes!! featuring dozens of loose Japanese girls in love hotels
- For photobook fans, don’t miss the super sexy nurse fetish photobook of Yoko Kumada, fast becoming one of the top sexy idols in all Japan, as well as fresh stock of Manami Suzuki’s superb erotic photobook
- Also, a great issue of DVD Sand, featuring a full color hardcore magazine and a DVD with great cosplay “quickies” (region 2), along with fresh stock of the superb Ran Asakawa “More and More” magazine + DVD set
- For our hentai manga customers, we’ve got some great new books for you, including The Campus Legend Love Affair by Mujin Comics, sweet sex in everyday situations with Lovely Girl by female hentai artist Moe Kirara, and exploration of sex-on-train themes in Piko no Season as well as other works
- In addition to the excellent Casual Romance Club, we’re happy to announce that X-Change 2 is back in stock after selling out for a week (more copies were being pressed) — so be sure and check out this fabulous dating-sim game if you don’t own it yet
- For our DVD customers, we’ve got some great titles for you, starting with a new bargain-priced “Masterpiece Concentration” release featuring the lovely sex of Ai Nagase (region free)
- Then enjoy some real sex of authentic soap girls in Tokyo, in a special look at this interesting world of Japanese soaplands, image clubs and lingerie pubs (region free)
- A bargain release on our SOD Outlet, we’ve got stock of the very cool Lovers Pop, a “sex magazine” on DVD featuring erotic content that’s of interest to both men and women (region free)
- Explore the world of slutty women and lesbian sex in a new release from Dash, “A molester’s woman is a lesbian” — love those funny English titles (region free)
- Finally, Tomo has added fresh stock of several popular DVD titles, including Wet & See Through with Mirai Hoshizaki, Female Masturbation Study (Lesbian Version), the erotic Chikan Report, Deep’s 2003 Masterpiece, erotic Gymnastics girls, and more — see all the great new items!
J-List carries AG, the excellent manga magazine of “art, sex and CG culture,” bringing superb English-translated hentai manga and more to adult readers. We love the format of the excellent magazine, which comes out every 2-3 months, and we offer reserve subscriptions for fans who want to make sure they don’t miss an issue. We hope you’ll support this great magazine by picking up all the issues. For your ordering convenience, it’s stocked in our San Diego warehouse.
Like Star Trek or the Lord of the Rings? Then logic dictates that you see the video of Mr. Spock singing the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins if you haven’t yet. I found a link here: http://www.game-revolution.com/download/trickyl/goodies/Video/baggins.mov (not sure if it will stay up when everyone on the list accesses it, but search Google if it stops working). Quicktime required.
