First of all, we had a problem with checkout on the J-List and JBOX.com websites that caused orders to not function for a few hours on Saturday. The error has been fixed, and anything saved in your shopping cart should still be there — apologies on the problem. A related speed issue with the site (caused by some websites in China hotlinking to our images) has been fixed as well. It’s amazing how easy it is to redirect those hotlinks to show some of the Internet’s grossest images instead. ^_^
Japan is probably the only country where eating too quietly will get comments from people around you. The correct way of eating Japanese and Chinese noodles like ramen, udon and soba is to slurp them while holding your face near the bowl, sucking in the soup along with the noodles to make both taste delicious. There’s no upper ceiling to how loud you’re allowed to slurp, and making these noises is one way of letting whoever prepared the noodles for you know that you think they’re good. When foreigners come to Japan, they usually eat their noodles without making these noises, prompting Japanese to say “Shizuka desu ne” (you eat very quietly). There are some other areas where table manners differ between the Japan and the West. Here, it’s perfectly okay to pick up your ramen bowl and drink the soup from it directly, although drinking out of a bowl might get a child smacked back home. It’s okay to slurp noodles, but spaghetti is another matter, and the image of an old Japanese man loudly vacuuming his pasta off the plate is very unsophisticated. Some table manner no-no’s are related to Buddhism, including the tabboo against sticking chopsticks straight up in rice or handing food to someone else chopsticks-to- chopsticks (both of which are part of funeral ceremonies here).
“trading torso” figures) and more. J-List goes the extra mile for our customers by offering both full set and random individual items so you can get exactly what you want.
