Last Friday several members of the J-List staff and I drove down to Tokyo Big Sight, the sprawling convention center where the Comic Market doujinshi event is held, to attend the Tokyo Gift Show. This is a huge event in which thousands of companies show off new products they’ll be selling in the coming year, and we were there looking for interesting stuff to carry on the site, like rice bowls in the shape of Mt. Fuji or Ninja cosplay gear. On the way back we stopped at one of Japan’s freeway “service areas,” which are little rest stops located every 10-15 km inside the Japanese freeway system. Far surpassing the tiny highway rest-stops I’ve visited California (which will have a single Coke machine on the premises, if you’re lucky), Japan’s service areas are wonderful oases of convenience where you can buy canned coffee, omiyage souvenirs for the folks back home, and inexpensive Japanese noodle dishes to eat. Japan’s rural areas are always looking for innovative ways to bring in commerce and tourism, and the town of Hanyu (where we stopped for dinner) had a good idea: convert their freeway service area into an old Edo Period town, complete with wooden buildings and employees dressed in samurai clothing selling traditional sweets. It was great fun to visit.
J-List has been involved with licensing and selling English-translated visual novels and eroge for more than 18 years, and one thing I love about a really well-written game is the extra level of story and character detail that players can experience. A lot of this is due to the fact that VNs usually feature stories that are longer and more involved than the average anime series, and most VNs players have groaned in frustration at seeing their favorite game story compressed to fit it into anime arc. Another thing I like about visual novels is the way you can learn about Japanese culture with more depth than most other forms of popular media. In the soon-to-be-released total remake of Kana Little Sister, about a boy named Taka whose little sister is dying and unable to live a normal life like other girls, there are a lot of these interesting cultural tidbits to discover. Like the scene in which Yumi, a girl who’s loved Taka ever since elementary school, tearfully asks him for the second button from his school uniform on their high school graduation day, to keep as a memento. You can also learn about how Japanese society deal with disease, which is quite surprising when coming from the West: usually the details are hidden from patients, with doctors talking only to the parents or (in the case of elderly parents who have become ill) the oldest son to decide what course to take.
Remember that Kana Okaeri (“Welcome Home, Kana”), the total remake of the classic visual novel Kana ~ Little Sister, has gone “golden master” and will be shipping very soon. This is without a doubt one of the best examples of how powerful the visual novel genre can be, written by the creator of for you to watch!
