Greetings from J-List January 26, 2002

Weekend greetings from your friends at J-List!

I had a nice trip to Nagoya on business on Friday, and I got to ride the Nozomi 700 series, the sleekest and fastest shinkansen (bullet train) in Japan. All boys growing up in Japan go through a phase when they think that trains are the neatest things since odor-free natto, and when my son entered his train phase, I picked up a lot of information about trains in Japan from him. Japan's bullet trains were developed in the 1960's to streamline transportation in Japan, and as with all major construction projects, to impress foreigners who visit here. Some of the most popular bullet trains include the Hikari (which travels between Tokyo and Osaka), the Tsubasa (a bullet train that can travel on normal train tracks, too), and our all-time favorite, the two-story MAX (which stands for "multi amenity express" in case you were wondering). The Nozomi 700 series came on-line a few years ago, and can get you from Tokyo to Nagoya in 90 minutes. To see pictures of the famous trains in Japan, as well as get information on Japan's excellent Japan Rail Pass system, see this page: http://www.japanrail.com/5_gallery/index.html . For whatever reason, there are a fair number of "train otaku" in Japan, people who love trains and travel all around Japan to ride on and photograph their favorite trains. I've noticed a correlation between students who studied hard to get into good high school and universities and this slightly odd "train fetishism."

One of the first words learners of Japanese com across is the word "genki," which means anything from healthy to energetic to "fine." The first greeting you learn in Japanese is often "Ogenki desu ka?" which means "How are you?" (although it literally means "Are you fine?"). The reply is "Hai, genki desu" (Yes, I am fine). In another context, a man becoming "genki" in bed refers to the state of his sexual member. Whenever you learn a language, you're confronted with words that don't quite "match up" with words you use in your native language, such as the two words for "cold" in Japanese (samui and tsumetai), which refer to coldness in the air and something that's cold to the touch, respectively.

We've got a lot of nice items for you for the weekend, including the Anna Ohura soft porn DVD that was accidentally not posted last time -- sorry about that. We've got fresh stock of DVDs (many Soft on Demand and other DVDs in stock), many volumes restocked of hentai manga, fresh stock of photobooks, and more. We've also got more wacky things from Japan, a restock of several backordered anime toy items (including the popular Love Hina figures), and other items for you. Also: a great new item, just in time for Valentine's Day, the long-rumored and very hard to find Hello Kitty Vibrators, er, we mean shoulder massagers, an item we've been searching for months. Check out all the newly posted items on the J-List site today!

The top 5 has been updated for the past week, so you can see what products have been selling well at J-List. (Actually the top five shows the top 10 items for each category, go figure...)

The Japanese phenomenon of the "kogal," the bizarre combination of fashion and life style that grew out of the "Amuler" movement of the mid-1990's (girls who wanted to look and dress like singer Namie Amuro), is a very interesting and unique one. We found an interesting article on kogalism, and wanted to pass it on to you: http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_07/uk/doss21.htm

Greetings from J-List October 25, 2002

Hello again from your friends in Japan!

There are certain changes that happen to Americans who live in Japan for a long time. For one, you get quite comfortable with the metric system, and start annoying your friends and family back home by referring to everything in centimeters and kilometers. My shoe size is 26.5 cm, but I've long forgotten what it is in inches, just as I've forgotten how much I weigh in pounds. But the Japanese don't use the metric system for everything. When talking about the sizes of rooms in Japan, you never use square meters, but instead refer to the number of tatami mats the room contains (or would contain, if it were a tatami room). Tatami mats are standard-sized rectangular mats made of straw, that are supposed to be the correct space for one adult to sleep. A 6-jo room ("jo" is the Chinese pronunciation for the "tatami" character) is an average sized; poor college students have to live in a 4-jo-han (or a small apartment that's just 4 1/2 tatami mats in size). When you buy land, you measure it in "tsubo," an area of measurement that's conveniently equal to two tatami mats. Thus if you have 20 "tsubo" of land you can picture it as 40 tatami mats in size. When you've been in Japan as long as I have, it becomes quite easy to do.

Today is my father-in-law's birthday, and birthdays mean one thing in our house: an excuse to get a big plate of sushi. As you can expect, sushi is pretty popular here in Japan, although in land-locked Gunma Prefecture, right in the middle of the main Japanese island of Honshu, we're as far from fresh fish as one can be in. Still, there are many sushi restaurants, including expensive restaurants where a sushi master chef cuts the fish for you (you have to have a license to prepare sushi in Japan), and the always-popular "mawari-zushi" restaurants ("revolving sushi," i.e. conveyor belt sushi). Some of the conveyor belt sushi places are quite good, but with the deflationary spiral Japan is in now, restaurants are competing on price, not taste. Personally, I'd rather pay a little more for good sushi than settle for "cheap" sushi. But the best sushi in all of Japan (at least in my experience) is a place called Edokko, in Narita City (near the airport), a fabulous place with "neta" (the fish part of the sushi) so big and fresh it falls off the rice. If you ever have a layover in Narita and want to have some good sushi, find any taxi driver and say "Edokko sushi?" and he'll take you there.

We solved a bug with the site which made some customers trying to view adult products via the "three day link" submit button get put into "PG" mode. The problem happened with IE 6 for Windows. The fix should take care of things, but if you have problems viewing J-List products (adult or otherwise), email us right away.

When we first started J-List six years ago, there was one product we knew we wanted to sell, but we've never been able to find a supplier. They're a special kind of shoes for kids (age 1-4) that are really good because they're equipped with "squeakers" in the bottoms, so that the kids make cute little squeaking noises when they walk. The noise is fun for the kids, so they love to wear the shoes. They're great for parents because you can always know where your kids are, without even looking up, which makes your children safer. When our kids were small and wore their "kiki shoes" (as they're called here) in the U.S., we constantly got comments about what a good idea the shoes were. We've got some of these cool shoes for kids for you to try. If there's sufficient interest we'll try to carry more of these shoes in the future.

We've got tons, and we means tons, of calendars in stock for you, with eight new boxes delivered in the past two days. We've posted these to the site so you can see what we've got in stock for you. Also, because it can be hard to tell what the pictures inside the calendars are like, we've opened a few dozen and have added some pictures of inside the calendars for you. Already, several calendars are starting to sell out, and since these are an extremely seasonal item, we won't be able to get more. So please look at our calendar stock -- thanks!

For the pre-weekend update we've got an extra special selection of items for you, including:

• We've got more pretty idol photobooks for you, including the beautiful hardcover photobook of Eiko Koike, one of our favorite swimsuit idols, a cute photobook of Riho Makise (the spokeswoman for the Japanese post office) and more
  
• For Domo-kun fans, we've got a super item, a plush Domo-kun that has a blanket folded up inside (stock is limited though)
  
• Also, a darn cool item: a Totoro "kigurumi" suit, which allows your child to completely become Totoro!
  
• We temporarily ran out of stock of the Sampo DVE612, one of our most popular region free DVD players. We got some more stock in, so if you're looking for a reliable DVD player that will play all DVD regions (for just $109), we recommend it
  
• Fans of the lovely swimsuit idol Yuka will enjoy fresh stock of the Yuka Special DVD, great for fans of this lovely girl
  
• For fans of Race Queen Fumika Suzuki, we've restocked several of her photobooks
  
• For Hello Kitty fans, some cool items, including unique Hello Kitty lip gloss (the cases are so cute), Hello Kitty gift items, more Hello Kitty chopsticks, a great toothbrush for little ones, and other Sanrio items that aren't available outside of Japan
  
• We've got a new and very stylish plush Totoro to go with our other Totoro items that we have in stock
  
• We love the high-quality anime statues available in Japan, and we've got a super cute "sexy statue" of Ayaka Urusugawa from To Heart
  
• We have some nice items for you and your kids, including Japanese origami paper, and some beautiful Japanese "washi" paper for crafts
  
• For Japanese snack fans, look for a major restocking of items, including Green Tea Pretzels, the tasty Banana Choco, wacky Japanese gum, and more
  
• Finally, see a funny wood sign in Japanese ("I'm taking a bath now"), a cute character strap featuring Panda Kopanda, a nice item for Ojamajo Doremi fans, a way to seal your milk so it won't spill, more wacky maps of Japan and more!
  

For our adult customers, we've got many new 18+ products. The new items include:

• For fans of our adult magazines from Japan, we've got some nice stock of amateur and leg fetish magazine items for you
  
• For fans of harder core themes, check out Ana Ana, a very nice hardcore amateur item
  
• DVD Soft Catalog is a nice item that gives you a full color magazine and two Video CDs (playable in a computer or most DVD players) of JAV sample items that's always good
  
• We love Japan's erotic photobooks, and we've got some great ones for you, including nude hardcover books by Ai Mita and Natsuki Abe, and for fans of bondage themes, there's a great photobook starring Shinobu Kasagi
  
• For leg fetish fans, we've gotten in fresh stock of Panst Best, an excellent panty stock and mini-skirt fetish photobook
  
• We've added fresh stock of the "Girl's High School Uniform 2000," a massive photobook presenting beautiful photographs of Japan's most famous school uniforms
  
• For hentai manga fans, we've got several new items for you, including new hitozoma anal, dick girl and other items, from some of Japan's top manga studios
  
• For our adult DVD fans, we've got another great selection of items for you, starting with Ai Kurosawa's "Re-Mix" DVD, with 180 minutes of her best performances (region free)
  
• Another great 180 minute DVD, enjoy three hours of Momo Hoshino's best erotic works from Kuki (region free)
  
• We're big fans of the Japanese genre of "deep kissing," and now there's a new Super Bishoujo Kiss, featuring six beautiful AV idols who experience tender lesbian kissing for the first time (region free)
  
• For fans of Akira Watase, a "virtual rape play" offering from Soft on Demand (region free)
  
• The lovely Kaori Shimizu is an erotic Bunny Girl who will fulfill all your sexual wishes, in a new offering from Dogma (region free)
  
• We love the sassy, bold style of Wanz Factory, and now there's a new "Hip and Vagina" DVD with the lovely Nao Oikawa -- and it looks great (region 2)
  
• We've added a new DVD category for bukkake fans -- now you can browse bukkake titles directly if you like. We've restocked many popular bukkake items including some of our best-selling items. Please see the great items we've got for you.
  

Remember that J-List carries virtually every English translated love-sim game available out of our San Diego office. We carry all titles by Peach Princess, G-Collections, Hobibox Europe, and JAST USA. See the Henai and Bishoujo Games category for all of these products. If you ever need help or recommendations, please email us and we'll be happy to help.

Greetings from J-List October 23, 2002

Hello again from Japan!

There are many Japanese products with names that sound funny in English. Calpis is a canned drink that's sweet and milky white in color, that's been popular in Japan since before World War II. The name sounds slightly disgusting in a bovine sort of way to the English ear, so it's marketed as Calpico in California. Pocari Sweat is another funny-sounding product, a thirst-quenching sports drink that gets its name from a Japanese word ("pokkari" means to float like a cloud) -- and it does not contains any sweat. (We sell Pocari Sweat powder on the J-List site.) Creap is a popular "creaming powder" for your coffee, and Nutrasweet is sold in Japan as Pal Sweet Diet here. There's a popular line of boil-in-bag meals for people in a hurry called Cook Do, too. Just as some of the names used for Japanese restaurants in the U.S. sound very strange to Japanese people (you'll never find a restaurant called "Ichiban" or "Kamikaze" in Japan), some of the names of products here can sound funny to English speakers.

Customs differ all over the world, and some of Japan's customs would seem a little odd in the States. When calling on someone in their home, it's acceptable to open the door and step into the "genkan" (the low area where you take off your shoes in a Japanese house), which is considered part of the outside of the house. It's quite common to have salesmen or delivery men to open the front door and poke their head in, saying "Sumimasen!" (Excuse me!), then letting themselves into the genkan area to wait for you to come talk to them. If no one can be found inside, it's common to walk around to the back of the house to see if anyone's there, perhaps hanging up laundry. This kind of thing isn't done in the U.S., but is a nice folksy custom, for the most part. It proved deadly in at least one case, though: in 1992, a boy Japanese boy named Hattori-kun did this in America while looking for a Halloween party. The owner of the house was alarmed and went for his gun, and because the boy did not understand the word "Freeze" he was shot and killed.

Now that J-List has turned six years old, it's always interesting to reflect on how we've grown and changed over that time, thanks to you, our valued customers. We can gauge our growth as a company each year by seeing how many more calendars we get in than we had in stock last year. This year we've really outdone ourselves, and we've got so many 2003 Japanese anime, JPOP, contemporary art, pretty idol, AV and other calendars, we finally have no room to move all (we've taken over the J-List kitchen as our Calendar Shipping Department). We're very happy with the quality and variety of calendars this year, and think you will be too. Please check out what we've got for you!

For the new update we've got some great new items for you, including:

• For fans of one of Japan's most popular swimsuit idols ever, we've got a sexy new photobook featuring Yuka
  
• Also, a white-hot sexy photobook featuring top Race Queens like Miho Yoshioka, Toko Ushikawa, Chisato Morishita and more!
  
• For fans of Japanese swimsuit lovelies, we've got the Operation of Aya Hirahama, a full color magazine and idol DVD (region 2)
  
• For fans of our Japanese snacks, we've got the delicious Coffee Beat, candy-covered chocolate coffee beans, as well as a super Milky Candy and toy set, new varieties of miso soup, and some Korean dishes that you can try yourself
  
• Also, a new parody item that looks like a package of chocolate, but it's really a set of really cool colored pencils
  
• We've got even more Studio Ghibli music boxes from Sekiguchi and Sun Arrow, this time from Hayao Miyazaki's famous film Kiki's Delivery Service (one of our favorites)
  
• For Lupin III fans, we've got some great "super deformed" character keychains in stock
  
• For fans of Hamtaro and Japanese bento boxes, we've gotten in fresh stock of the deluxe Hamster Club bento box set
  
• For anyone interested in buying one of the Studio Ghibli region 2 DVD players, we've been able to find some more stock -- these items can be special ordered, so if you want one please find the item on the site and we can get it for you
  
• Finally, we've gotten in fresh stock of the popular Hello Kitty toilet paper, both colors -- these wacky items are great for anyone who loves (or hates) Japan's most famous cute character.
  

For our adult customers, we've got many new 18+ products. They include:

• For fans of Japanese adult magazines, we've got some nice new items, including new amateur and love hotel magazines with real Japanese amateur girls
  
• Also, we've got more rare back issues of popular magazines like Urecco and Gal's Dee, in stock in our San Diego office
  
• For fans of Japan's hardcover erotic photobooks, we have several new items, including a great photobook shot by Seiichi Nomura and other great items
  
• Also: fresh stock of popular items by Yuko Ogura, one of our favorite swimsuit idols
  
• We've got a nice hardcore photobook that features erotic cosplay and sex, it's great
  
• For hentai game fans who want to follow the Japanese hentai world, we've got the new issue of Push, with two CD-ROMs of demos, pictures and more to check out
  
• Also, a rare hardcover photobook filled with bondage photographs that are uniquely Japanese
  
• For hentai manga lovers, we've got six new items for you, including a great new "deep and hard" comic anthology and a new hentai work from Hariken Hanna
  
• Also, fresh stock of many nice items, including several volumes of Pururun Seminar
  
• For DVD fans, we've got some great items for you, starting with Wet and Fetish Mix, from Kuki, with 210 minutes of soap girl and lotion fetish featuring top AV stars (region free)
  
• With her 105 cm bust (J cup), Marina Matsushima is truly an amazing busty AV idol -- see 3 hours of her best work in a new DVD! (region free)
  
• From Soft on Demand, 35 all-nude AV girls get revenge on men, subjecting them to all kinds of wacky punishment (region free)
  
• SOD also gives us a great new "from below" DVD featuring the erotic Ran Asakawa, shot entirely from "low angle" below her erotic body (region free)
  
• For lesbian DVD fans, we've got another excellent offering from Deep's, featuring "The Best Lesbian" of nine beautiful actresses (region free)
  
• For fans of Indies AV, we've got the DVD release of Mirai Hoshizaki's best-selling Dream Shower (region 2)
  
• Finally, we've added stock of several DVD items, including Aoi Sora's "Blue," fresh stock of Rubbing Breasts for the First Time, and a major restock of the "Do Lesbian" series by SOD.
  

At J-List we carry many nice art books for fans of Japan's hentai culture, such as the art books for X-Change 2, Tokimeki Check in! and Brave Soul, as well as other popular bishoujo games. Check out our excellent selection of items.

Remember our "free shipping sale" on Hentai Anime Poker ends at the end of the month -- this is a great game that's really fun to play, and now that it comes with all twelve expansion pack characters for free, it's a super bargain. We highly recommend it!

Greetings from J-List January 23, 2002

Hello again from Japan, where it's okay to make loud slurping noises when eating soba (Japanese noodles) but very rude if you're eating spaghetti.

First of all, we apologize if anyone experienced any problems with the mailing list on Monday. The computer we send the J-List updates list choked again, and it looks like a few people got multiple copies of the mailing (although most got no copies). If you want to see my update, it's on the front page of the J-List site.

I talked about "kokumin-sei" last time, the national personality that is a grouping of various aspects of all of us. One of the fun things about living outside of your home country is, you get to view it from the outside, as people in other countries see it. Everything from American politics to national events looks different, and I sometimes feel I'm outside a fishbowl looking in. Americans, as a general rule, value individuality and uniqueness, and everyone seems to want to find their own little niche (or their "my boom" as the Japanese would say, meaning their own personal unique little hobby). Looking back to the mid-1980's, becoming in anime fan back when anime was really fringe and unknown, was probably some desire to "be original" on my part.

Japanese like to be original too, and the Japanese staff of J-List (Tomo, Yasu, Mayumi, Kaori, Hiromi and Chiharu) encompasses an incredibly wide range of talents and interests from the Beatles to rap and bongo drums to my wife, who for some reason has a license to operate fork lifts. But during my time in Japan, I've met some people who thought that the best thing in the world was to be "average" -- that is to say, normal, unexceptional and above all, not different from others. When I was in college, I strove to be as different from everyone else as I could be, but my Japanese friends were actually offended if I said they were a little "kawatteru," a word which means "different" or "odd" -- they wanted others to see them as average and normal. At one of the Japanese bishoujo game companies we work with, there's a slightly odd programmer who has legally changes his name to Reije Abe, or in Japanese name order, Abe Reiji (ah-BEH REI-ji), because he wanted his name to have the same pronunciation as the English word "average" in Japanese. As an "individual" American, sometimes I am hard pressed to understand Japan, even though I've lived here nearly 10 years.

One aspect of working with Japanese is that there are sometimes multiple ways to write (or transliterate, to use the correct term) a Japanese word or name in English. In Japanese, there are long and short vowels -- the sounds "ko" and "koh" are two completely different phonetic concepts in Japanese, just as L and R are in English. It can be confusing when learning Japanese: ojisan means "uncle" but ojiisan (note the extra "i") means "grandfather." It's challenging when writing names because there is no "official" way to write Japanese names in English. Is it best to write Maiko Yuuki (long vowel) as Yuuki, Yuhki, or just cut out the long vowel since it serve no purpose English? For the word bishoujo ("pretty girl"), should we faithfully translate the long vowel, or use the more coincide spelling of "bishojo"? It's confusing, and particularly because of this, we had to custom-code the J-List search engine to look for alternate spellings of many words to make sure items that people search for come up.

For the mid-week update, we've got the following new products for you, including:

• First, we've got more great adult magazines for you, including a very nice ass-fetish item, more fun amateur girl in love hotel magazines, and more
  
• For fans of lovely girls in sailor uniforms, we've got a bunch of issues posted for you, just $5 each! See magazine page three for these bargain items
  
• If you're a fan of our quality photobooks from Japan, check out the newly posted books by Fumika Suzuki and more
  
• Also: a big restock and price reduction on many of our photobooks, with great new prices across the board
  
• We've got another new volley of hentai manga for you, with new works by some of the top comic studios in Japan today
  
• For doujinshi fans, we've got stock of a very nice new erotic doujinshi dedicated to Sailor Mercury from the venerable Rose Water doujinshi circle (lots of romantic action between Ami and Minako)
  
• Also: newly obtained from the past winter Comic Market, we've got some excellent CD-ROMs of "doujin-soft," which refers to fan-created hentai computer CG images parodying Japan's game girls and more
  
• We've got a great new selection of erotic DVDs for you, starting off with the incredible Stark Nakedness Sports Series 5-in-1, which crams 270 minutes (4.5 hours) of all-nude aerobics, swimming, weight training and more onto a single DVD
  
• From SOD's Natural High label, a killer new "Bukkake Circle in Blue Sky" offering
  
• From Momotaro Eizo, a killer new category of AV: country western hard core, featuring lovely Japanese girls with cowboy hats and boots on (this features Mirai Hoshizaki, one of my favorites)
  
• For fans of zamen themes, we've got a new 2-DVD Dream Shower series release, VIP Shower (featuring three famous AV idols)
  
• Tomo and I have long loved Minami Yoshikawa for her charming good-girl style and pretty looks, and now she's officially made her debut in the sordid world of Indies adult video -- see her new DVD and video from Moodyz
  
• If you love Anna Ohura, be sure to get her new soft porn DVD, which features some of the most erotic imagery we've ever seen from her (region 2)
  
• Finally, we've got stock of the (region 2) DVDs for several popular Indies productions, including Reversible Soap, Costume Princess and the best-selling Big Bust Lesbian Orgy DVDs (which comes with a free packet of sex lotion in each DVD)
  
• For fans of Skin Conscious, the incredibly lovely collection of erotic airbrush art on two CD-ROMs, we've got a special treat: the price has been lowered to just $9.95 for each volume, and there are over 1100 large images in the collection
  
• If you are studying Japanese or any other language, why not tell the world with our cute wooden signs that says "Now studying" in Japanese
  
• We have some great sugarless gum for Felix the Cat and Hello Kitty fans, and it's got Xylitol in it (very cool), as well as fresh stock of the chocolate covered sunflower seeds we sold out of so quickly last time
  
• For those who love cute things, see our cute doorstop that's a parent and child dragon, fresh stock of our ever-popular Hello Kitty chopsticks, and more
  
• For fans of Bento (boxed lunch) from Japan, we've gotten fresh stock of our best-selling Hamster Club lunchboxes
  
• Finally, for those who want to add a touch of Japan to their rooms, we've got several Japanese maps, including the stylish Japanese train map, a general map of the entire country of Japan. Also, cool health items, some really nice Japanese traditional bowls, and more!
  

Remember that J-List is the only place where you can buy the excellent Himeya Soft games from C's Ware and get them sent from inside the U.S. We stock all the very nice bishoujo game titles from Himeya, and recommend them very highly to fans and collectors of this unique genre of game from Japan.

Greetings from J-List October 21, 2002

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Greetings from J-List January 21, 2002

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