Greetings from Japan, where wet umbrellas need condoms…
It’s interesting, the things you learn about the human brain when you learn a second language. For example, when I was learning Japanese, I found that my brain was not able to “parse” Japanese that I didn’t understand when it was spoken at me. In fact, my brain didn’t even register that I’d been spoken to at times — effectively, the Japanese words that were spoken to me registered as so much static to my brain. Interestingly, embarrassing myself by not knowing a certain word in a certain situation often serve as a “memory hook” that will help you remember the word in the future. I remember hitchhiking to Aomori Prefe(famous for apples and Japanese “enka” singers). I was trying to buy a flashlight, but I didn’t know cture, at the top of the main island of Honshu the word, to my great frustration. I know it now — kaichuu dentou — and that frustration probably helped me greatly.
When the brain encounters a language it can’t understand, sometimes it tries to “fit” the words into existing “holes” and understand it that way. I remember watching Macross 1984 for the first time, back in the heady mid-1980’s, when there was no English anime to be had for love or money. I heard “Minmei-san” during the course of the movie, but my brain interpreted it as “Minmei song” because that’s what it was ready to accept as comprehensible. When my nephew Chris came to Japan and rode around in our Mazda Bongo Friendee, he kept calling it “Bongo Frenzy,” because there were no synapses for the odd word “friendee” in his brain.
Big changes are coming for the small liquor shop which my wife’s parents run. The shop has been in business for nearly 50 years, but sadly, it’s become quite dirty and run-down in past years. In the past, “mom and pop” liquor stores were protected by Japanese liquor licensing laws, which prevented large chains from selling alcohol. But in the “new Japan” with its economic turmoils and new challenges, the government is allowing convenience stores and supermarkets to sell liquor too, which makes things even harder for our little liquor shop. To improve things, we’re going to reform the interior of the store, replacing all glass, shelves, and fixtures and adding a specialty coffee bar. It’s going to be hard work, and very expensive, but on the plus side: borrowing the money is practically free, about 1.6%.
We’re pleased with how well the Himeya titles have been selling . To help you decide which games you want, we’ve updated the descriptions to some of the Himeya titles with links to compressed demo movies that you can download. To see the links, choose the Himeya Soft link under Hentai/Bishoujo games, and the games will links will all appear at the top of the page.
For this weekend’s update, we’ve got some excellent items for you, including:
- First, a great update of Japanese adult magazines, including the brand new Dela Beppin (featuring both Mai Hagiwara and Anna Ohura), the new Cho! Very good!! (great for kogal fans), and the very erotic new Do-Up!
- For photobook fans, we’ve got the lovely hardcover photobook of Mako Tanaka, a former Mini-Suka Police member, as well as fresh stock of Bauko Eichi’s dynamite “B” photobook and Juri Kayama’s waitress fetish photobook
- We have some excellent doujinshi for you, both new “one shots” obtained at the summer’s Comic Market as well as ten copies of the red-hot “God’s Hermit Play”
- For erotic manga fans, we’ve got many new titles posted, including new works by Tsukasa Comics, Wani Comics and more, as well as “Thief of Love,” a dynamite comic by Mujin Comics
- We have some new issues of b-Boy Zips, the high-quality yaoi comic compilation for fans of Japan’s unique homosexual comic themes
- For DVD fans, we’ve got two new titles for you: first, a super erotic performance from Koharu Tohno, the pure and lovely “puchi AV idol,” and for fans of the Soft on Demand “Deep’s” label, a super compilation DVD featuring all their productions from the first half of 2001
- Also for DVD lovers, we’ve got fresh stock of many cool titles that had been sold out
- For adult video collectors, we’ve got a super performance by Kaori Shimizu, the erotic and stylish AV idol
- We’ve got another cool item for card collectors — a cool trading card series based on the popular manga Futari H
- For fans of our unique Japanese snacks, we’ve got fresh stock of the delicious Hi-Chew candies, including cola, green apple, and a new flavor, grape. Also, a restock of the delicious Japanese Tomato Pretzles (you have to taste them to believe them)
- On our Wacky Things (cute) page we’ve got fresh stock of Hello Kitty picture holders and pretty printed chopsticks
- For fans of Japanese notebooks and other study items, we’ve got some cool new notebooks in stock, with funny and bizarre English printed on them, as well as fresh stock of the Pokemon kanji practice notebooks and Japanese traditional report-writing paper
- On the Wacky Stickers and Signs page, we’ve got limited stock of some cool items: the “it is forbidden to urinate here” wooden signs, and the “I am H” (watashi wa H) wacky Japanese headbands
- Finally, on the main “Wacky Things from Japan” page, we’ve got a bunch of new items for you, including a super new Japanese banto box, delicious individual packets of soy sauce to go with your bento boxed lunch, limited stock of cute sushi erasers (maguro, tamago and uni), a great way to clean your ears in Japanese style, and more!
The link that we’d been using in our past few mails to show the latest items at J-List was broken, thanks to the mailing list “converting” part of the URL for us. This probably caused most of the newly posted products to not display. To view all the new and updated items at J-List, please access http://www.jlist.com/ directly and find the “find new products updated in the last 3 days” submit button. Sorry for any confusion.
