We hope everyone is enjoying the big J-List Holiday Sale, which we started early in order to give customers more time to receive their packages. Make an order now, and get 18% off orders over $150, or 10% off orders over $60. Because the site was inaccessible for a short time Monday and Tuesday due to a server upgrade, we’ve decided to extend the sale through the end of December 2nd! (See Details here.)
Strange things can happen when you live in Japan too long. Before you know it you can find yourself bowing while speaking on the phone, asking what blood type your friends are so you can categorize them properly, and eating Cream Collon cookies without any irony at all. Then there’s the problem of having your language subtly influenced by your environment. It’s not that foreigners living in Japan will pick up a “Japanese” accent per se, though I once spent an 18 month period speaking slow and careful English to Japanese children, with no native speakers around to talk to, which started to affect my English in strange ways. No, it’s a little more subtle than that. Like everyone else in Japan, I’m a big fan of Indian cuisine, but since my repertoire of curries and other dishes was learned through Japanese, I probably pronounce the words as a Japanese would. The same goes for French: when I ask Mrs. J-List if she’d like to have some カマンベールチーズ (Camembert cheese) to go with this year’s just-released
ボジョレーヌーボー(Beaujolais nouveau, which the Japanese go crazy for), I know I’m probably saying the words with a slight katakana accent.
I like J-List’s Facebook page and Twitter feed because fans can shoot me questions about Japan they’d like to see me talk about here, like the customer who recently asked me to talk about weddings in Japan. Weddings are an area of Japanese life that have become quite Westernized, and it’s more common for couples to opt for a white wedding dress and tuxedo than a traditional Shinto ceremony. Weddings are big business, and in J-List’s home prefecture of Gunma there are a dozen or so fabulously grand wedding halls, including Georgia House, which recreates an Antebellum plantation house from the American South; Lockhart Castle, an authentic castle that was imported
from Scotland; and Royal Chester Ota, a re-creation of a palace from Czarist Russia. While you might bring a toaster as a wedding gift in your country, in Japan everyone is expected to bring cold, hard cash, wrapped in a special wedding gift envelope. While it might seem like a hardship to have to bring $2-300 to each wedding you’re invited to, the system is actually quite logical, since friends whose weddings you attend will be honor-bound to attend your wedding, returning the money to you in the end.
We love finding rare and fun products from Japan for the Holiday season as much as our customers love buying them, but this year there’s a slight problem: the usual “Black Friday/Cyber Monday” weekend is one week later than in normal years, which shortens the time for J-List customers to receive their orders. Our solution? Start our big sale one week early! This year we’re really going big, with 10% off everything on the site if you buy $60 or more, or a whopping 18% off if your order total is $160 or more! (Doesn’t apply to certain items like iTunes cards or gift cards, grab bags or subscription items.) No coupon codes to enter, just enjoy the savings. And we have even more good news: our customers loved the sale
so much, we’re extending it for a week, through the end of December 2. So get shopping now, oniichan!
