J-List ‘s huge holiday sale is continuing, and our customers are ordering tons of cool items every day, including Sailor Moon tortilla chips, soft Totoro blankets and our world-famous ecchi products. In addition to our popular EMS Cash Back sale, which gives you up to $50 back when ordering from the site using EMS, we’re offering free shipping on all J-List anime and kanji T-shirts and shrinkwrapped visual novels shipping from San Diego, all month long!
One thing I like about anime, and about animation in general, is its timelessness. There seems to be something about the medium of animation that makes it easy to connect with even though many years may have passed since it was created. With a few exceptions, I don’t often find myself watching TV dramas or sit-coms from the 70s and 80s because they can seem dated and hard to relate to, yet for some reason I often enjoy re-watching a classic anime series or Disney film from decades ago, savoring the differences between that era and today. One of the best things to happen to a cynical old-school otaku like myself has been the revival of the Space Battleship Yamato franchise, which got a high-budget remake with involvement by top names in the industry, including Eva creator Hideki Anno. In addition to a compilation movie, the studio just released an all-new Yamato film in theaters which extends the story with new adventures, which made me fall in love with the series all over again. What classic anime do you enjoy watching?
I often write about Japan’s love of assigning special meanings to certain days, like February 22 being Cat Day because 2/22 can be read nyan nyan nyan (meow meow meow in Japanese), or November 11 being Pocky Day, because 11/11 looks like delicious Pocky sticks waiting to be eaten. Today is Kanji Day, the day when the Kanji Standardized Test Association announces the Kanji of the Year, the single Chinese character that sums up the past year best. Candidates this year included 嘘 uso (lie, falsehood), over the revelation that a famous deaf composer called “Japan’s Beethoven” didn’t write his own music and isn’t actually deaf, and 災 sai (disaster), from the spectacular eruption of Mount Ontake 10 weeks ago, claiming 47 lives. The kanji that won out, though, was 税 zei, meaning “tax,” over the government’s raising of the Japanese Consumption Tax from 5% to 8%, which resulted in a drop in spending by consumers and pushed the country back into recession. Previous kanji of the year have included 輪 wa (circle), signifying Japan’s joy at winning the 2020 Olympics for 2013; 命 inochi (life, specifically the preciousness of life) for 2006, a year when there were many suicides; and 絆 kizuna (bond, as in the bonds that tie us to one another) after the terrible trials of the earthquakes and tsunamis of 2011.
J-List’s EMS cash back sale is going strong, and we’re pushing out hundreds of orders for 2015 calendars, Japanese Kit Kat, Totoro and Ghibli and Sailor Moon every day. There’s plenty of time for EMS orders to reach you in time for Christmas, and if you order $200 or more and choose EMS shipping, you get a whopping $50 cash back as a use-anytime store coupon. We’re also having a free shipping sale on all T-shirts and H-games that ship out of San Diego. Make an order now!
