I’m super happy today, because the second season of the New Game anime has begun, officially designated New Game!! since the more exclamation points a series has in its title, the more “sparkling” it will be. It continues the yuri-tastic story of Suzukaze Aoba, a cute twin-tailed girl who gets her dream job working at the game company that made Fairies Story, an RPG she loved as a girl. There she works with a large group of other females, learning how to develop software and having adventures with her co-workers. As usual, the best part of the New Game anime is the will-they-or-won’t-they yuri tension between the female characters. Will Rin and the pantsu-loving Kou officially hook up, or will Aoba steal her beloved senpai away at the last moment? Will tanned Okinawan survival game-otaku Umiko stop beating around the bush and start dating Nene? Will shy Hifumi ever break out of her shell and confess to Aoba? Watch the New Game anime season 2 and find out!
I often write about how Japanese people are the most polite in the world, which can be understood by analyzing three Japanese words, which are kind of fun to know. First is the “golden rule” that you should never cause 迷惑 meiwaku (inconvenience, annoyance) to others, which is the guiding principal when you’re out in public in Japan, or should be. Second is the word 我慢 gaman, meaning to stoically endure an unpleasant situation rather than confront it openly, which the Japanese consider to be a positive personality trait. (If my wife and I are in a restaurant and the air conditioning is too cold, I’ll generally endure it quietly while my wife loudly chases down an employee to get them to turn down the AC.) Finally there’s 遠慮 enryo, a word that means “to refrain from doing” (like, to refrain from smoking in a non-smoking area), but on a deeper level, a kind of “social hesitation” for reasons of politeness, refusing brashly state an opinion that others might not like. The classic enryo situation is when eating pizza, when there’s one piece remaining yet all the people in the room insist they’re full, someone else please take it…until the pizza gets cold and goes to waste.
(While good manners important and all, foreigners living in Japan will eventually come to understand that it’s possible to die of loneliness behind barriers of politeness, and it’s important to force informality at times, if you want to ever make friends, even if it violates some social rules.)
We love to carry interesting oppai mousepads from Japan, but not just any oppai mousepad: these are the high quality full sized mousepads that are handmade in Hamamatsu, Japan, using amazing M.J.Softgarage 2.0 materials, which are unbelievingly realistic. We’ve got two Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 mousepads up for preorder, but the window is very short, so preorder them now. You get 10% off when you do!
