Suddenly, a Hawaiian Beach Episode.

If you’ve watched any anime at all, you know there’s a well-used trope called the “beach episode” in which all the characters will somehow end up wearing swimsuits and playing at the beach for no particular reason. Well this has happened to me: I’m currently in beautiful Hawaii, where I’ve come to attend the wedding of an American employee who married his long-time Japanese girlfriend. The wedding was excellent (though wet), with lots of happy friends and family members present to celebrate the happy occasion. One of the challenges of running a company in Japan is the expectation that the boss of the groom will stand and give a formal speech, which is of course not easy if you’re doing it in a foreign language, but I do my best to live up to challenges like that. I brought my son with me, since children have a way of growing up and not wanting to do stuff with parents anymore, and we’ve been having a blast so far.

Hawaii is, of course, very important to the Japanese, serving as a bridge between Japan and the rest of the U.S., which can at times seem threatening to Japanese who aren’t good at English. My wife is a level 20 Hawaii tourist, having been here dozens of times, and she gave us lots of advice about to have a successful trip. “The jet lag is really bad when coming from Japan, so after you check into the hotel, head over to the Ala Moana shopping mall and power-shop to keep yourself from falling asleep and wasting your time.” She pretends to be Korean rather than Japanese, since she knows she’ll get a better discount that way. If they figure out she’s from Japan after all, she talks about how Japan’s economy is undergoing deflation right now, so the same items will cost even less if she buys them back home, so she needs a little more incentive to get out her wallet. But while my wife might be happy shopping or sitting by the pool here, I want to do more: in a couple days we’ll head over to the big island where we’ll take in some of the wonderful sights there, including heading up to the top of Mauna Kea — at 4200 meters, it’s taller than Mt. Fuji — as well as explore the Volcanoes National Park with a drone we brought.

Summer is ending, and to bid it a proper farewell J-List has decided to have an End of Summer sale! Through the end of September 7 (extended through September 13!), we’re having a sitewide sale. Order $125 or more, and get $25 back…or order $60 or more and get $10 back, if you can’t find enough cool stuff for the bigger discount. The money will be issued to you as a store credit which can be used at any time on either jlist.com or jbox.com sites, and it will carry over to the new site when we launch later this month. Let’s shopping at J-List!