Hello again from Japan! This is just a quick update to let you know that the rest of the 2002 calendars have been posted to the J-List site. Since we love these large size glossy calendars that are only available from Japan, we’ve worked extra hard today to get the calendars ready for ordering. Writing the descriptions for 200+ calendars is no easy thing, I can tell you! In case you’re not familiar with the large size high-quality calendars that are published in Japan around this time, please browse the newly posted items on our site.
As always, we love to see which calendars will be included each year. This year, popular singer and fashion icon Ayumi Hamasaki snagged the coveted CL-1 position again, the same as last year, a reflection on the active year Ayumi has had in music and TV commercials. “Mo-musu” (teeny bop idol group Morning Musume) bagged the #2 slot. In general, each calendar season is a snapshot of the past year, and shows how Japan has grown or changed in the past 12 months — or how some things have stayed the same.
As usual, our selection of calendars is massive, since we want to give as much choice to everyone. We’ve got calendars with sexy Japanese swimsuit idols like Haruka Igawa, dozens of anime calendars, JPOP calendars, with everything from idols to Japan’s “visual rock” represented. Stars of Japanese baseball? Beautiful contemporary Japanese artists? Cute Japanese characters like Afro Ken (Afro Dog)? A My Neighbor Totoro calendar, with a “Bondage Nude” on the side? Our selection of very nice Japanese calendars mirrors We’ve got them all available for preorder right now.
For information on the sizes of calendars, please see the top of each calendar category page. For protection, all calendars will be shipped in protective tubes that we have sent especially from the U.S. Tubes are $3, and two calendars can fit inside one tube. Preorder four or more calendars, and your mailing tubes are free. The mailing window for calendars is always frustratingly small — we ask that you get your preorders in as soon as possible, so we can guarantee that your calendar will be available. Orders made past mid-October will start to get hard to fill. A note about the scans that we’ve posted: in some cases, they’re not very good. The reason for this is, we’re scanning very small thumbnail images that we’re provided with. The actual printing on the calendars themselves is beautiful and top-notch.
In addition to the newly posted calendars, we’ve got a few other newly posted items tonight. First, we’ve got a huge restocking of some of our most popular manga, with about two dozen items, some of them very popular manga items. We’ve got fresh stock of several of our wacky Japanese T-shirts, including “Proud of my Big Root” and “Dirty American Devil” (we’d sold out of size M and XXL, but we have them back in stock now). We’ve got fresh stock of some backordered photobooks, too, with many nice items in. Please check out the new items!
In other news, the Japanese Pentagon has been destroyed, but not by terrorists. The Japan Self-Defense Forces General Headquarters, which corresponds to the Pentagon in the U.S., has been located in the heart of Roppongi for the past fifty years. The land around the buildings had become some of the most valuable in the world, so the Japanese government decided to move the operations of the military to a cheaper location and sell the land. It fetched a cool $6 billion. The land is being cleared now, and will be developed with apartment buildings and more of the drinking establishments for which Roppongi is so famous for.
For those interested in learning more about the bishoujo gaming world, there’s an interview with Dave Endresek of Peach Princess at Gamers’ Press. See it at http://www.gamerspress.com/article.php?sid=659&mode=nested&order=0 . It’s quite interesting…
