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.
The other day I saw an article by the BBC that asked why Japan, a country most consider to be quite high-tech, continues to use outdated technology like fax machines. It’s an interesting puzzle, and one that I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I started J-List back in 1996, the Internet was just finding its legs, and we’ve been able to use many interesting technologies to help make our business more efficient over the years. Still, because we’re based here, we obviously need to work with various Japanese companies, and that means looking through a sheaf of faxes for new products every morning, or downgrading our Illustrator documents to versions from ten years ago because that’s what the print shop can work with. Japan is just getting around to creating a national tax ID system like Social Security numbers in the U.S. or the National Insurance Number in the U.K. (it’s called “My Number”), after decades of ire from taxpayers whose records were not tracked accurately, and billions of lost tax revenue to the government due to a terribly inefficient bureaucracy.
While you or I might view anime as a fun thing to watch, or a doorway to a shared global sub-culture that’s nice to plug into, to others it’s a way to get a message out to young people in a unique way. One example was the idol series Wake Up Girls!, a show about idols from the tsunami-hit Touhoku region of Japan, which was created with government money to bring attention to the still-recovering region, as well as promote otaku tourism, which is an actual thing in Japan. Recently I decided to check out an anime called Onsen Fairy Hakone-chan, which is a pretty blatant attempt to promote the hot springs around Hakone, near Mt. Fuji, showing off various hot springs in the hopes that fans will make pilgrimages to the region. Before I even started the series I could guess that it would be the new “super short” format (each episode is only three minutes long), which might be nice for the producers, but it kind of limits the emotional attachment you can form with the characters.
Every year J-List assembles awesome fuku-bukuro grab bags, a Japanese tradition we bring to you. The ecchi grab bags are up now, with a great Japan ero box filled with goodies for naughty boys and girls, plus two different grab bag sets to choose from shipping from San Diego. Browse them now! (Our “PG” grab bags are coming soon.)
