Greetings from J-List. We’re rushing to finish this post early because today is the day of the J-List New Year party, where we’ll all gather to drink beer and sake and eat delicious food as we re-dedicate ourselves to covering the world with Japan Kit Kat and shimapan in 2015.
During my time in Japan I’ve been able to see quite a bit of the country, exploring Hokkaido and the Tohoku areas north of Tokyo, hitch-hiking to Osaka and taking the “Youth 18” ticket (which lets you travel as far as you want in a 24 hour period for $24, as long as you don’t mind taking the slow local trains) all the way to Hiroshima. One thing I realized early on was that my favorite cities were the port cities, like Yokohama, Hakodate (at the southern tip of Hokkaido), and Nagasaki. Port cities are interesting because they’re doorways between Japan and the West, and I always enjoy visiting 外人墓地 gaijin bochi, western graveyards for foreigners, and trying to imagine what the residents saw while they were alive. Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of a very sad event that happened in another famous port city, Kobe. 20 years ago at 5:46 am a 7.3 magnitude quake struck the Hanshin (Kobe and Osaka) region, doing a huge amount of damage in part because up til that point, that region of Japan had not had strong quakes, so the building codes were not as strict as in Tokyo. 6400 people were killed, mostly while sleeping in their beds as their homes collapsed around them.
There are many possible approaches to discovering Japan, for example through the country’s history or architecture, through martial arts or language, through anime and manga, or even through its highly developed culture of desserts. While most Japanese sweets will usually be familiar to us – cakes, parfaits and crepes are all amazing here – every once in a while you find some unexpected treats, such as “coffee jelly,” a slightly sweetened coffee flavored gelatin that’s really good with whipped cream on top. (Starbucks sells Coffee Jelly Frappuccino throughout Asia.) The Japanese are big fans of かき氷 kaki-gori (shaved ice) in the summer, and they also love プリン purin, an egg custard/flan pudding with caramel sauce on top which was unknown to me before I got here, though now both me and Makise Kurisu love it. Japanese love Nata de Coco, a dessert from the Philippines with firm, chewy squares made from fermented coconut water, and my family will sometimes mix a bag of fresh aloe (yes, aloe) with yogurt for a treat. Another desert that the Japanese can’t get enough of us baumkuchen, a round cake popular in Germany and Poland that’s made by “painting” layers of cake batter onto a spit that rotates next to a fire, creating layers of cake like tree rings. The dessert crops up in anime quite often – Shiina from Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo eats it constantly, and it’s the only word Shinji can produce when Asuka orders him to think to her Eva in German – and now you can buy baumkuchen through J-List.
We had a hectic Holiday season, with hundreds of orders being processed by the hardworking J-List staff per day. In all the confusion, we didn’t notice that our popular Facebook page had crossed 200,000 ‘likes.’ To commemorate this milestone, and to thank everyone for participating on our Facebook page (and Twitter, and Tumblr), we’re having one of our 10% off anything coupons now through next Tuesday. Just enter 200KTHANKS at the shopping cart page as you check out. No minimum, but you can only use it once, so make it count!
