Need some tissues? You’ve come to the right place!

We hope you’re enjoying the all-new J-List website. Just a reminder: certain products like magazine and snack subscriptions, iTunes cards and game downloads are still not up, but will be soon. For English visual novels and eroge via download, please visit JAST USA.

If you’ve made an order from J-List, you’ve probably received a package of our world-famous Japanese pocket tissue, which we send out with all orders, subject to availability and sometimes depending on the shape of the order going out to you. Advertising businesses with printed pocket tissue has been popular in Japan ever since 1969, when a paper manufacturing company in Kochi Prefecture hit on the idea of using inexpensive packets of tissue to advertise products, since who would throw away free tissue? The advertising tissue industry is huge in Japan, and if you walk around Japanese cities you’ll see people standing on street-corners, handing out tissues promoting this week’s bank CD rates or the latest flavor of tsundere imouto catgirl maid cafe in Akihabara. J-List has been printing pocket tissues and shipping them with orders for years, and we love to hand them out at anime conventions too. We’re rolling out a new design for Christmas 2015, so why not put in an order today?

Is Japanese a difficult language to learn? I honestly believe that it isn’t, and there are many aspects that make it easy to learn — a simpler grammar without “helping verbs” messing up sentences, a straightforward phonetic system similar to Spanish that has no tonal elements, as found in Mandarin or Thai — to make up for the extra challenge of having to study basic kanji. The Japanese are fond of using words rich in nuance to describe various situations, which I found were fun to study. The phrase そろそろ soro soro adds the idea that the time for something has come to a sentence, for example そろそろ行きましょう soro soro ikimasho “Let’s go [because it’s time we should be going].” A similar phrase is わざわざ waza waza, meaning “to go to all the trouble,” as in わざわざありがとう waza waza arigato, “Thanks for going out of your way to do that for me.” If you have a sparkling new car, it’s ぴかぴか pika pika (gleaming with newness), but if you don’t take care of it, it’ll become ぼろぼろ boro boro (old and rusty). (The pika sound does double duty as the sound of lightning, which is where Pikachu’s name comes from.) Some other random examples of these fun phrases include たまたま tama tama (by chance), ばらばら bara bara (something that’s been scattered around, like a dismembered toy), and ぺらぺら pera pera (the “sound” of someone speaking a foreign language fluently).

J-List has been making fun anime and kanji T-shirts for years, and we’ve got some fun new designs for you, including a YuruYuri “I am Aho” (I am stupid, in Osaka-ben) shirt and the classic Science! parody design. Browse all our awesome anime shirts now!