Friday, August 17, 2001
Greetings from J-List August 17, 2001
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Wednesday, August 15, 2001
Greetings from J-List August 15, 2001
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Tuesday, August 14, 2001
Greetings from J-List August 14, 2001
Greetings again from a very humid Japan!
The Japanese recession continues, but some parts of the Japanese economy are still doing well. House construction is up, for example, as people take advantage of the "0% interest" strategy the government has pushed for the past two years, making the real rate about 1.9% (before you ask, no, we can't arrange a Japanese loan for anyone ^_^). Cars are also selling well. This year's selling cars are Toyota Corolla, Honda's new "Fit" (a very small, cute car for women to drive), Honda's Step WGN (pronounced "step wagon"), and Toyota Estima (Toyota's "ingenious egg" according to their commercials). Sales of foreign cars are also up, with Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW being the major beneficiaries. Volkswagen leads the foreign car market here, with 14% of the foreign market.
Well, the existence of God has been proven once and for all: we have an actual Starbucks in Gunma Prefecture. It opened at the single most metropolitan spot in our fair prefecture of 2 million, inside the train station of Takasaki, the largest city in Gunma. We'd love to go enjoy a frosty Frapachino some time, but unfortunately, everyone else in Gunma has the same idea, and you can't get into the place without waiting 45 minutes or more.
We continue to limp along without our air conditioner, hoping it will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, summer is always an interesting time to be in Japan, mainly to enjoy the "usugi" or thin, revealing clothes that girls wear. This year's fashions includes bras that use clear plastic for the shoulder straps, making them appear "invisible." The effect is rather nice.
For this evening's update, we've got some excellent items for you, including:
The Japanese recession continues, but some parts of the Japanese economy are still doing well. House construction is up, for example, as people take advantage of the "0% interest" strategy the government has pushed for the past two years, making the real rate about 1.9% (before you ask, no, we can't arrange a Japanese loan for anyone ^_^). Cars are also selling well. This year's selling cars are Toyota Corolla, Honda's new "Fit" (a very small, cute car for women to drive), Honda's Step WGN (pronounced "step wagon"), and Toyota Estima (Toyota's "ingenious egg" according to their commercials). Sales of foreign cars are also up, with Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW being the major beneficiaries. Volkswagen leads the foreign car market here, with 14% of the foreign market.
Well, the existence of God has been proven once and for all: we have an actual Starbucks in Gunma Prefecture. It opened at the single most metropolitan spot in our fair prefecture of 2 million, inside the train station of Takasaki, the largest city in Gunma. We'd love to go enjoy a frosty Frapachino some time, but unfortunately, everyone else in Gunma has the same idea, and you can't get into the place without waiting 45 minutes or more.
We continue to limp along without our air conditioner, hoping it will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, summer is always an interesting time to be in Japan, mainly to enjoy the "usugi" or thin, revealing clothes that girls wear. This year's fashions includes bras that use clear plastic for the shoulder straps, making them appear "invisible." The effect is rather nice.
For this evening's update, we've got some excellent items for you, including:
- First of all, we've got several great new magazines for you, including the lovely new issue of Dela Beppin, a new issue of Haay Gachinko Musume, and more!
- For photobook fans, see the wonderful hardcover photobook of Hitomi Hayasaki, and more
- For hentai magazine fans who like the popular magazines we carry, we've got several in-stock issues of Bug Bug and E-Login for you, and all issues come with a demo CD-ROM inside
- If you love Japan's erotic manga, we've got some great new products for you, with super new manga by Mujin Comics, Hit Comics, Angel Comics, and more -- also, fresh stock of many sold out books, including the runaway bestseller Puri Puri Mermaid
- Also: we've got doujinshi! We've posted over two dozen nice doujinshi for doujinshi fans, so check out the new items, as these single issues will go fast
- For Japanese adult video and leg fans, check out the new Mini-Skirt Street, a fun video featuring three lovely, leggy Japanese women and high heels
- For DVD fans, some nice new items, including the lovely erotic performance of Kaori Shimamura, as well as a super Zamen Gokkun Best Selection DVD from Soft on Demand, for bukkake lovers; for those with region-free DVD players, a dynamite erotic DVD featuring Aoi Minori
- We've also gotten fresh stock of many of our popular adult DVD titles, including Mai Hagiwara's "The Secret of Mirukuru," Emily Yoshikawa's "Poison," and the very cool Kuki 20th Anniversary sampler DVD titles
- If you love Japan's colorful anime magazines, we've got some issues of Animage from a couple of months ago, complete with all posters inside
- For fans of the Ultraman TV characters, we've got one more box of the very cool Ultraman Hero cards
- We've got a new flavor of delicious Xylitol gum, a sugarless gum that tastes great (Kaori especially recommends it)
- If you love the delicious snacks from Japan, see our snacks page: we've got fresh stock of Pocky, the original chocolate covered pretzel, and Toppo, a delicious baked chocolate snack
- If you love bizarre messages in Japanese, we've got several nice items for you, including fresh stock of a popular Japanese headband, new "Looking for a beautiful woman" stickers, and the totally insane Buddha Man (so stupid, he's cool!) -- see these on the headbands and stickers page
- Finally, for fans of things with funny English on them, we've got a handy little spiral notebook with insane English printed on the front, as well as a nifty train map of Japan showing all train routes, and more!
Sunday, August 12, 2001
Greetings from J-List August 12, 2001
Hi again, from the land where soft-serve ice cream is known as the much more delicious-sounding term, "soft cream."
Lightning strikes! Last summer, the J-List office was struck by lightning, which caused our big air conditioner (which we informally refer to the Giver of All Life and Happiness) to die for a week during the hottest part of the summer. After a freak lightning storm on Friday night that made national news, the J-List office has been hit again -- and we have lost our air conditioner again! Hopefully it will be a minor repair, as it was last time, but the timing is really terrible, as it happened on Friday night before the week-long Obon holiday. Doh! The lightning also managed to kill our phones, and knock out our internet connection (the one we use from Japan, not the one the J-List site is served from). This has been a hell of a day. Now if we can just get that air-con fixed before it heats up again.
Speaking of heat, by the time you read this, I'll be basking in it. Comic Market 60 is going on in Tokyo, at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center (you can see the famous inverted pyramid as it gets destroyed in Godzilla vs. Destroyer), and Yasu and I will be making the pilgrimage on Sunday to talk with doujinshi circles about letting us sell their works on J-List. A massive doujinshi convention in which about 50,000 fans line up to spend hundreds of dollars on these extremely popular amateur-printed comics, Comic Market (or "Comiket" as its called) is held twice a year, in the summer (sweaty, dripping hell) and in the winter (blessedly cold and refreshing). Inside Big Sight, there are four large halls jam-packed with doujinshi circles selling doujinshi (comics) as well as CG collections on CD-ROM, cute hand-made tributes to their favorite anime character, and more. We try, but I never have time to get through more than two of them before the event is over. Because there is no air conditioning in any of the halls, our bodie will be completely drenched in sweat by the time we're done, despite the towels I bring with me to stuff in my clothes. Yasu and I will do our best.
I'm a big fan of video games, and have loved them ever since the days of Berserk and Star Castle. Whenever my son and I go to our favorite public bath ("Furo 21"), we stop off and play a few games at the Sega ge-sen (Japanese for "game center"). We can only afford to play a few, since video games cost 100 yen here in Japan, which is roughly $1 per game, compared to a quarter or 50 cents in the States. Actually, many of the really exotic games are $2 to play. But the extra income from the higher video game prices comes back to consumers in the form of some really cool games. Of course there are the ones that show up all over the world, the Virtua Fighter 4's, the shooting games, and so on. One of my current favorites is a Japanese taiko drum game, in which you have to hit the Japanese drum (either the face of the drum or the rim around the drum, which produce different kinds of sounds) in tune with the song you're playing. There's also a funky "photographer game" out, in which you're a photographer with a camera on a wire, trying to catch great shots at sporting events. Every game center in Japan has a large amount of floor space devoted to "UFO catcher" (crane games) as well as "puri-kura" (print clubs, i.e. those cute machines that take your picture and print it onto stickers), which are solid money-makers here in Japan. Another major trend in video game entertainment is the rebirth of "retro" games that were popular in the 80s and early 90's, like Crazy Climber, Donkey Kong, and the original Street Fighter II. Some of them are cool, but at $1 per pop, I'll stick to Mame.
Everywhere I look, I see more and more signs that Japan really is in a deflationary spiral. We're all used to prices going up a little bit as time goes by, but in Japan, the rule is "Japan's prices are high to begin with, but the rate of inflation is low." This seems odd, but somehow it accurately describes the movement of prices here in Japan -- actually, during the nine years I've lived in Japan, I can't think of a single thing that went up in price, except for train fare to Tokyo (which was raised fro, $16 to $18 a few years ago). Now, signs that prices are actually coming down are everywhere. Beef bowl (that all-important economic indicator) now costs just $2.80, $2 less than it did a few months ago. Many food items that were $1.20 are now under $1. You can even find the 500 ml PET bottles of tea, which usually go for $1.50, for $1 if you look. More than just certain prices dropping, I feel there's a new attitude of "cheapness" present in Japanese consumers, who were known in the past for spending money on all sorts of silly things (like toilets that clean and dry your butt, complete with remote control). Now, consumers want value and low prices, even if it means shopping at Fresay instead of Shimizu Supermarket because their instant coffee is 68 yen instead of 88 yen. This is a good thing in some ways, but if Japanese housewives are being extra-stingy with their pennies, it will make it that much harder for Japan's economy to grow in the future. At the Comic Market on Friday, I watched a huge line of people wait for 30 minutes in the hot sun to ride the free bus to Tokyo Statin, rather than pay the 400 yen to ride the Yurikamome train (a very pleasant train line that takes you up and over Tokyo bay).
Well, we hope you are having a great weekend -- hopefully cooler than Japan is right now!
Lightning strikes! Last summer, the J-List office was struck by lightning, which caused our big air conditioner (which we informally refer to the Giver of All Life and Happiness) to die for a week during the hottest part of the summer. After a freak lightning storm on Friday night that made national news, the J-List office has been hit again -- and we have lost our air conditioner again! Hopefully it will be a minor repair, as it was last time, but the timing is really terrible, as it happened on Friday night before the week-long Obon holiday. Doh! The lightning also managed to kill our phones, and knock out our internet connection (the one we use from Japan, not the one the J-List site is served from). This has been a hell of a day. Now if we can just get that air-con fixed before it heats up again.
Speaking of heat, by the time you read this, I'll be basking in it. Comic Market 60 is going on in Tokyo, at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center (you can see the famous inverted pyramid as it gets destroyed in Godzilla vs. Destroyer), and Yasu and I will be making the pilgrimage on Sunday to talk with doujinshi circles about letting us sell their works on J-List. A massive doujinshi convention in which about 50,000 fans line up to spend hundreds of dollars on these extremely popular amateur-printed comics, Comic Market (or "Comiket" as its called) is held twice a year, in the summer (sweaty, dripping hell) and in the winter (blessedly cold and refreshing). Inside Big Sight, there are four large halls jam-packed with doujinshi circles selling doujinshi (comics) as well as CG collections on CD-ROM, cute hand-made tributes to their favorite anime character, and more. We try, but I never have time to get through more than two of them before the event is over. Because there is no air conditioning in any of the halls, our bodie will be completely drenched in sweat by the time we're done, despite the towels I bring with me to stuff in my clothes. Yasu and I will do our best.
I'm a big fan of video games, and have loved them ever since the days of Berserk and Star Castle. Whenever my son and I go to our favorite public bath ("Furo 21"), we stop off and play a few games at the Sega ge-sen (Japanese for "game center"). We can only afford to play a few, since video games cost 100 yen here in Japan, which is roughly $1 per game, compared to a quarter or 50 cents in the States. Actually, many of the really exotic games are $2 to play. But the extra income from the higher video game prices comes back to consumers in the form of some really cool games. Of course there are the ones that show up all over the world, the Virtua Fighter 4's, the shooting games, and so on. One of my current favorites is a Japanese taiko drum game, in which you have to hit the Japanese drum (either the face of the drum or the rim around the drum, which produce different kinds of sounds) in tune with the song you're playing. There's also a funky "photographer game" out, in which you're a photographer with a camera on a wire, trying to catch great shots at sporting events. Every game center in Japan has a large amount of floor space devoted to "UFO catcher" (crane games) as well as "puri-kura" (print clubs, i.e. those cute machines that take your picture and print it onto stickers), which are solid money-makers here in Japan. Another major trend in video game entertainment is the rebirth of "retro" games that were popular in the 80s and early 90's, like Crazy Climber, Donkey Kong, and the original Street Fighter II. Some of them are cool, but at $1 per pop, I'll stick to Mame.
Everywhere I look, I see more and more signs that Japan really is in a deflationary spiral. We're all used to prices going up a little bit as time goes by, but in Japan, the rule is "Japan's prices are high to begin with, but the rate of inflation is low." This seems odd, but somehow it accurately describes the movement of prices here in Japan -- actually, during the nine years I've lived in Japan, I can't think of a single thing that went up in price, except for train fare to Tokyo (which was raised fro, $16 to $18 a few years ago). Now, signs that prices are actually coming down are everywhere. Beef bowl (that all-important economic indicator) now costs just $2.80, $2 less than it did a few months ago. Many food items that were $1.20 are now under $1. You can even find the 500 ml PET bottles of tea, which usually go for $1.50, for $1 if you look. More than just certain prices dropping, I feel there's a new attitude of "cheapness" present in Japanese consumers, who were known in the past for spending money on all sorts of silly things (like toilets that clean and dry your butt, complete with remote control). Now, consumers want value and low prices, even if it means shopping at Fresay instead of Shimizu Supermarket because their instant coffee is 68 yen instead of 88 yen. This is a good thing in some ways, but if Japanese housewives are being extra-stingy with their pennies, it will make it that much harder for Japan's economy to grow in the future. At the Comic Market on Friday, I watched a huge line of people wait for 30 minutes in the hot sun to ride the free bus to Tokyo Statin, rather than pay the 400 yen to ride the Yurikamome train (a very pleasant train line that takes you up and over Tokyo bay).
Well, we hope you are having a great weekend -- hopefully cooler than Japan is right now!
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