Greetings from J-List March 28, 2002

Greetings to all of you from J-List!

Japan has changed in many ways in the almost ten years that I've lived here. One has been the elimination of Saturday as a day of half-attendance at work and school. In the "old days" (1992), many companies as well as all government offices and public schools had required half-day attendance on Saturdays, which seemed very alien to my American sensibilities. During the 1980's, Japan realized it was not an up-and-coming nation that had to work extra-hard to rebuild itself in the world economy, but instead had "arrived" and could take it easy. Half-days for government offices and public schools were phased out, and the "era of leisure" was declared. (Most private schools still elect to keep required Saturday classes, to avoid having their academic standards eroding.) Compared with what Japan was like at the beginning of the 1990's, when salarymen worked through holidays and rarely saw their families, I'd say it's certainly a change for the better. On the other hand, the economy here has gone through three plodding recessions in the past decade. One way to look at the present lack of growth in Japan's GDP might be that it has been caused partially by extra emphasis on working less and "taking it easy."

Japan has a national network of freeways, but they're quite different from what you might be used to in the U.S. or Europe. First of all, they're not free at all -- you pay a toll to use them, about $5 for us to drive 20 km to the next city over, or around $25 to go the 100 km into Tokyo. Paying to get to where you're going faster isn't much fun, but if they didn't charge the tolls then everyone would be using the roads, which would defeat the purpose. Unfortunately Japan's freeways are not linked up with each other very often, so it's quite common to have to drive a ways on one road, get off and drive on normal roads for two hours, then take the next freeway. Japan's freeways are very well designed and easy to drive on, but if you're visiting from overseas and want to drive around Japan, there's one potential challenge awaiting you: virtually all major roads are named with long, difficult kanji names (when they are named at all), rather with, say, easy to read numbers, as the interstate freeway system in the U.S. The freeway nearest our house is called the "Kita Kanto Odan Doro" which means the North Cross-Kanto Road. To get to Tokyo we head south on the "Kan-Etsu Kosoku Doro" which means the Kanto-Niigata Freeway. It's just part of being in Japan.

For today's update, we've got an extra special selection of cool items, including:

• First, several great magazines for you, including the new Bejean (which is fantastic), new Kogal magazines, and more
  
• We've got the very nice DVD Japan in stock, which features a full color magazine and 138 minute sampler DVD for a great price (region 2)
  
• For photobook fans, we've got several very nice items, including the hardcover nude photobook of the lovely Manami Shimizu, fresh stock of the famous Rie Miyazawa nude photobook, and more
  
• We have some very nice hentai manga for your enjoyment, including works by EC Comics, AV Comics, and more
  
• For yaoi fans, we've got two excellent new items for you, with very bold and hardcore shonenai for your enjoyment
  
• For our DVD customers, we've got several top-quality items for you today, including a superb lesbian kissing DVD from Deep's featuring some of Japan's most lovely AV idols (region free)
  
• The waif-like Nanami Nanase shines in her latest erotic performance, The Santa Claus is Coming to My House, in which she plays a very lovely "Santa girl" giving a special present to her boyfriend (region free)
  
• One of my personal favorites is the lovely Kyoka Usami, and now her great indies production CC Idol, one of the most interesting peeing fetish productions I've ever seen, is available on DVD! (region free)
  
• Then: we get a lot of requests for unique items at J-List, and one of the most unlikely are requests for videos of Russian adult video idols, which are extremely popular inside Japan for some reason, and very hard to get. See Yulia Nova's fabulous large breast videos in stock now! (VHS)
  
• For fans of incredible bukkake performances, enjoy the latest Fuuka Sakurai offering from Waap, with the odd name of "Disgrace Novel Story of the Spermatozoon Palace" (region 2)
  
• For anime lovers, we've got a very special item for you: the DVD release of Porco Rosso, aka The Crimson Pig, aka Kurenai no Buta, a popular Hayao Miyazaki feature release film which features English and French subtitles and dubbed tracks on 2 DVDs! (region 2)
  
• For fans of our anime toys, we've got a great update for you, with a deluxe Cosmo Zero (aka Astro Fighter) from Yamato/Star Blazers, a very rare blue Battroid from Macross, and a deluxe Devilman "completed figure" for fans and collectors
  
• Also: fresh stock of Ah My Goddess competed figures, the Kiki's Delivery Service figures, and the Japan-only Hot Wheels from Bandai
  
• If you love My Neighbor Totoro, we've got a beautiful Neko Bus (cat bus) plush from Studio Ghibli and Sun Arrow, with incredible detail and a soft plush feel
  
• Other hopelessly cute items include a lucky Totoro strap that's very cute, a rare item for fans of Bambi, and some new and back-in-stock Hello Kitty items (including fresh stock of our oh-so-popular Hello Kitty vibrators)
  
• We have some cool "traditional" Japanese items for you, including a complete Japanese calligraphy set, a beautiful savings bank patterned after the collection boxes in temples, and moer
  
• For anyone who loves trains, we've got two great bullet train toys for you, with great all-die cast construction and detail
  
• We've got some great new snack items, including candies flavored after popular Japanese drinks (CC Lemon, etc.), and a fragrant and good-tasting gum from Lotte that smells like azaleas (really, we're not kidding)
  
• Also, we've had a major restocking of our candy and snack items, including fresh stock of Black Black Candy, Sushi Gummi, sake candy and traditional kuro ame, the super-tart shige-kix "hard gummi," and the popular Pocky with Morning Musume limited edition stickers inside
  
• We've got fresh stock of several varieties of the popular "The Dog" stuffed plush toys from Japan, with cute, oversized heads
  
• Finally, look for other cool items, including Hello Kitty toilet paper, new funny bento boxes with funny English on them, delicious and healthy miso soup mix, real chopsticks from Japan, and ways to help you learn Japanese!
  

J-List brings you many interesting items, including English-translated bishoujo games, which we're happy to have been involved with for so many years. By far one of the best games to come along in years has been Tokimeki Check in!, the two CD-ROM game about an unwilling proprietor of a traditional Japanese hot springs hotel, and many interesting girls who come through the in. We're always happy to receive warm feedback from customers on this game and our other titles, and we certainly hope you'll give this fun genre a try. Tokimeki Check in! features beautiful graphics, full voice and a CD-quality soundtrack, too.

Greetings from J-List March 25, 2002

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Greetings from J-List March 20, 2002

Hello again from Japan, where having kids means never getting to take a bath by yourself.

Tomorrow is a big day for many of the Japanese gaijin community, the annual Macworld Expo in Tokyo, a day to head out to Tokyo Big Sight and see the new Luxo Jr. iMacs and whatever Apple will have for us. For many of my friends, it's an excuse to spend a night on the town in Tokyo, bouncing from bar to bar in Shibuya and Roppingi, and this year will be no different. For whatever reason, frozen margueritas are impossible to find in Japan, however the T.G.I. Friday's in Shibuya has some frosty ones.

Japan has had a decade of bad economic news, with no less than three separate recessions during the ten years I've lived here. As bad times continue, a more or less "official theme song" for the Japanese recession has emerged -- "Ashita ga aru sa" (There's always a tomorrow) by Kyu Sakamoto, the talented singer who also sang the famous Sukiyaki Song. A happy, uplifting song about keeping your chin up so you can enjoy the happier days ahead, it's found its way into numerous TV commercials and is played on the radio quite a lot here. You can hear the song and see a picture of Sakamoto at this site: http://www.manasepro.co.jp/kyu/tomorrow.html . See the lyrics, in romaji (roman character) and Japanese, at http://www.japankiku.com/lyrics/Ashita_ga_aru_sa.html . Sakamoto was killed in the most famous plane crash of Gunma Prefecture, where J-List is based -- it was one of the only ones, too, as there are no airports anywhere in our prefecture.

The uncommonly warm days have done their work on Japan, and the millions of cherry trees around the country have officially started their blooming for which they're famous -- the season of the sakura has once again come to Japan. Sakura season is very short, usually about a week, and during that time Japanese make any excuse possible to go to a park with cherry trees and engage in "hanami" or "flower viewing" to enjoy the beauty of the sakura before their fleeting existence is over. We'll be holding our annual J-List flower viewing, as we always do.

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

• First, we've got new magazines, including the great new Urecco (filled with tons of positively beautiful women), as well as some popular amateur magazines for your enjoyment
  
• If you like value, enjoy the new DVD Perfect Guide, which brings you a whopping 3 video CDs of MPEG "quickies" spanning a great range of amateur and professional adult video from Japan
  
• We've got some great photobooks for you, including the hardcover and light bondage photobook of Minami Kurihara, and more
  
• We've got a great update of erotic hentai manga for you, including some dynamite works by Action Comics, Toen Comics, Hot Milk Comics and more -- check out the very nice items we've added for you
  
• We've also restocked several volumes of the popular Paradise Lost, the excellent "doujinshi anthology manga' which compile the best Evangelion adult parody doujinshi in a keep-forever manga volume
  
• Also: Trans 3, a "hard boy's love adult comic anthology" for yaoi fans
  
• For fans of Japan's very special erotic DVDs, we've got some nice items for you, starting off with a fantastic new Maiko Kazano erotic soft porn presentation from Bauhaus
  
• There's a great new "No Cut!!" series DVD, featuring a massive 180 minutes (3 hours) and three complete video productions for a great low price
  
• For fans of the high fetish Milky Stop M's Video Group, we have a very rare bukkake video offering
  
• We've got a great 2-in-1 Tekoki Series Special featuring dynamite Japanese hand-job fetish material
  
• Tomo has restocked several popular DVD titles, including our popular Anna Ohura DVDs and erotic Adult Video Wrestling DVD that has been such a hit
  
• Also, look for reduced prices on many DVDs and videos, and with included free shipping, too!
  
• We have many great Japanese candy and snack items in stock, including Good Stone Choco (a chocolate snack that looks like stones), Jersey Milk milk-flavored hard candy, and the limited edition Kit Kat Orange flavor from Nestle
  
• Also, fresh stock of the Green Tea hard candy and chocolate covered sunflower seeds (which are really good!)
  
• We've seen a lot of interest in our Tomica Japanese mini-car toys, so we've posted some more: the Toyota Celsior (sold as Lexus 400 in the US), the Prius, and the Hilux Surf, all very cool
  
• Japan is very big on cute hamsters, and we've got some cool items for you, including hamster message stamps that say "Konnnichi wa" in hiragana, a Hamutaro "free note" (meaning a notebook that you can do anything you like with), and a deluxe stuffed Hamutaro stuffed toy complete with sunflower seed in his little hands
  
• One of the most popular items in our history has been the Hamster Club bento boxes, but we keep selling out of them whenever we get some in -- well, we've got 20 in stock now, so they should last a little while
  
• We've got fresh stock of some "kawaii" (cute) items, including Hello Kitty mayonnaise cups (which you can use as contact lens cases if you're so inclined), more Hello Kitty toilet paper, and more!
  
• If you want to add a touch of Japanese to your room or house, we've got some nice Japanese signs and message boards for you, some of which are very wacky
  
• Finally, look for other fun items, including a marijuana wristband ("good fit!"), fresh stock of some great tools to help you study Japanese, new health and fun items, and much more!
  

Remember that J-List carries many fun items from Japan. One of the most fastest sellers in recent memory has been the Hello Kitty Vibrators, long rumored and thought to be an urband legend, but made by Sanrio for limited distribution in Japan. We've got about 100 in stock right now, so check this cool item out -- makes a unique and thoughtful gift, too.

Greetings from J-List March 18, 2002

Hello again from your friends at J-List!

One thing you learn when you learn a language like Japanese, is that a meaning in one language will not necessarily match up with meanings in other languages perfectly. In English, there is one concept for cold, but in Japanese, there are two, one for coldness in the air (samui) and one for something that's cold to the touch (tsumetai). When you learn very basic word like "life" in another language, you realize how difficult it can be to match meanings of some concepts up with their counterparts in other languages -- some of the words used in Japanese which correspond with the English word life include "seikatsu" (which means a person's life, as in, a new life in a new city), "jinsei" (which is a person's life, from their birth to their death), and "seimei" (used, say, to refer to life on other planets, and also life insurance). Implementing the Chinese character for "life" was evidently difficult for the Japanese, too, and as a result, this character has many possible pronunciations, compared with most characters, which have two pronounciations (one Japanese and one Chinese). To see this character for yourself, click here: http://www.jlist.com/c2/life.jpg

The Japanese have an interesting sense of things sometimes, which never fails to impress me. A balding man with a comb-over and lines of hair on the top of his said is said to have "bar code hair," which is certainly an interesting way to look at things. (On one Japanese TV show I caught, they touched a bar code reader to men's hair to see what amount came up on the register, then they gave that amount of money to each man.) Opening a bag of potato chips at the middle, so that it opens out to be a single sheet for the chips to sit on, is known as "manko-ake" (MAHN-ko AH-keh), or "opening as a woman's sexual region" ("manko" means the woman's sexual organ, and is the only truly "bad" word that exists in Japanese). And I never thought that Tic Tacs came in "toothpaste flavor" until I Japanese pointed it out to me -- now I can't eat Tic Tacs anymore.

I learn something new every day I live in Japan. Last weekend, my son and I were headed off to Nikko to see the temples and the resting place of Ieyasu Tokugawa (the third of the three unifiers of Japan), and the day before, we were worried if the weather would be good for us. So my son took off his shoe and threw it on the ground. It landed upright, so he knew it would be a nice day the next day. If the shoe had landed upside down, it would have meant rain. It didn't rain while we were in Nikko, so who knows, maybe there's something to Japanese children's weather prognostication.

Peach Princess's upcoming sci-fi bishoujo game, Critical Point, is being printed right now, and should be back from the duplicators very soon. This is a great game, with many different unique game endings and excellent graphics. The story for Critical Point was written by Kenichi Matsuzaki, who was heavily involved with Macross (Robotech), the original Gundam series, Orgus and Bubblegum Crisis, and it has the "look and feel" of classic 80's anime series. You can preorder the game still, and get free shipping as soon as the game ships. Each copy of the game comes with a spiffy numbered Moon Base ID badge, too!

For our first update of the new week, we've got some great items prepared for you, including:

• First, we have new magazines including some really nice new amateur magazines that feature contemporary Japanese girls aged 18-22 in love hotels with their boyfriends and more
  
• For fans of various Japanese sexy uniforms, we've got Seifuku Invitation, featuring many lovely AV idols like Yuna Akimoto, Nao Oikawa and more
  
• Also, we've added many new discount magazines for you, posted to magazine page 3
  
• We've got some nice newly posted photobooks for you, including the lovely nude photobooks of Minako Fujimoto, Honami Seki and more, as well as restocked photobooks
  
• We have a great stock of new hentai manga volumes for fans of Japanese adult comics, including "Sakura Sakura," an erotic celebration of Spring, as well as fresh stock of several new manga items
  
• Also: for Yaoi fans, enjoy the newly posted items for your enjoyment
  
• For DVD collectors, enjoy several newly posted items, including two great "No Cut!!" DVDs featuring 180 minutes and three complete video productions each (one region free, one region 2)
  
• For fans of Deep's unique Holed Panty series, which gets around mosaic laws by cutting a small hole in the actress's panties during her performance, we've got a new "2-in-1" DVD for you (region free)
  
• If you are a fan of Japan's bondage fetish DVDs, enjoy the new Bondage Battle ~ Beautiful Soldier (region free)
  
• For fans of extremely beautiful lesbian performances, we've got an excellent new DVD by Cinemagic, featuring 12 different actresses, including the very rare and popular Miki Sawaguchi (region free)
  
• A special bukkake DVD from Wanz Factory, Semen Love, featuring the lovely Milk Asaoka
  
• Finally, we've got another special 2-in-1 Angel DVD release from Attackers/Idea Pocket, featuring the lovely Sally Yoshino and Yuki Tazaki
  
• For anime fans, we've got some great items for you, starting with limited edition figures of Capcom game girls shyly giving chocolate to you
  
• We get many requests to carry Japanese high school uniforms, and we've got one for you -- a joke item which consists of everything you need to be a wacky high school girl, with skirt, vest, wig, hair flower, and loose socks (both men and women can wear this)
  
• For lovers of the terribly cute "The Dog" character goods from Japan, we've got stock of some cute new items, an excellent set of "The Dog" chopsticks with holder, and a very high-quality all-purpose pouch for keeping anything
  
• For fans of Mobile Suit Gundam, see the most excellent and most complete transforming Gundam RX-78 we've seen to date, from Bandai
  
• We've got new Hello Kitty items, including a great Hello Kitty "congratulations envelope" which you use to bring money to people at weddings (but you can find many uses for it), a really cool My Melody tissue set, and more
  
• Japan is far ahead of the West in many areas, one of them being really cute pencil cases -- we've got a cute "Study Bear!!" pencil case in stock for you now
  
• The three-tiered bento box, which separate compartments for rice, your main meal and an included water bottle, sold out in record time, amazing all of us -- fortunately, we've got more of this great item for you, in a new color
  
• We've got fresh stock of the best ear-cleaning item you will ever find, a cotton swab made of ringed cotton that feels great (I bring them to family members as gifts from Japan)
  
• Finally, look for other cool items, such as the ultimate way to grind sesame seeds (or just about anything else), a cute cash book for recording incoming and outgoing money payments in a cash account, fresh stock of our really cute metal Hamster Club pin, and more!
  

The J-Mate website has been updated yet again, with new photobook reviews, and a great interview with the lovely Hirose Manatsu. The URL is http://www.jmate.com/

J-List customers tell us that the #1 way they heard about our unique little site was through word of mouth. If there's someone you think would be interested in our fun products from Japan, or just in our slice-of-life email updates from Japan, please let them know about us! Thanks very much.

Greetings from J-List March 13, 2002

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Greetings from J-List March 11, 2002

Hello again from Japan, where drivers turn off their headlights at intersections to be polite to other drivers.

Japan is not, all things considered, the country you should come to if you're disabled in some way. Standards about wheelchair access are haphazard all around the country, with some cities trying to modernize their facilities, especially publicly sponsored places like parks, so that people with disabilities can use them. Some platforms on some train stations have some kind of wheelchair access, but if the station you're going to doesn't have the same access, it's quite difficult to use the train. One of the primary motivating factors for the progress of Japanese society is how their country looks in the eyes of the foreigners who visit or live here, and Japanese are aware that North American and European foreigners tend to look down on Japan's record when it comes to dealing with its disabled citizens. As a general rule, though, many Japanese will tell you that Japan is a small country without much land (Japan has a population density of 335 persons per square km, vs. just 29 in the U.S.), and just can't have the same amount of access that people in wheelchairs enjoy in the U.S. Most foreigners living here, especially Americans, don't buy this and tend to look on Japan's lack of handicapped access as a big minus, despite the invention of words here like "barrier free" (which means, life free of barriers for all citizens, be the disabled or aged and so on).

Then again, it's extremely easy to find one's self looking at Japan from the standpoint that everything in your home country is the "way it should be," and that's of course not right. If you're from the USA, then the way things are done at home naturally seem to be best; ditto if you're from France or South Korea. It's quite difficult to avoid this tendency to be judgmental of other countries and cultures, and lord knows I have failed at this many a time myself. This is one reason I recommend to young people that they should live for a year outside of their own country, preferably while in college -- you will never look at other countries or your own home country quite the same way.

Everyone who is disabled in Japan has certain benefits that the Japanese government sets up for them. There are special health and rehabilitation facilities all around Japan for them to use -- I used to volunteer my time teaching English conversation at a facility for handicapped persons that is just up the road from my house. Companies above a certain size are required to hire handicapped people to work. If they don't want to do this, companies can instead pay a penalty, and this money is used to benefit support programs. The government assists handicapped people purchase special equipment like cars that don't require legs to operate, too.

For the update this evening, we've got a bunch of excellent items for you, including:

• First, we've got some new magazines for you, including the excellent Gal's Shower (bukkake magazine), and the new Urecco Gal, which captures the lovely "bad girls" of Japan
  
• We've got some excellent photobooks, including the lovely swimsuit grace of Emi Ito
  
• Also: fresh stock of several of the very erotic "Strawberry Diary" photobooks which feature extremely high quality glossy photographs of beautiful Japanese angels
  
• For bondage lovers, we've got the elegant magazine with dual Video CD combo SM Desire, with tons of images and video for bondage and S&M lovers to enjoy
  
• We have many nice new items on our erotic manga comics page, including new "wide manga" from Japan's top studios, as well as many restocked manga titles (about a dozen overall)
  
• For yaoi fans, we've got the new b-Boy Zips, as well as fresh stock of several others in the series
  
• If you are into doujinshi fans, we've got fresh stock of new items for you, as well as several restocked and popular books
  
• For DVD fans, we've got wonderful new items for you, including the new No Cut!! release of Ichigo Milk, featuring 180 minutes of great AV by this lovely bad girl (region free)
  
• For lovers of adult video history, enjoy the excellent Alice Japan 2002 Special, with 30 AV idols and a whopping 4 hours (240 minutes) of AV for you! (region free)
  
• If you love Cosplay, with such erotic costumes as race queen, nurse, bus guide and so on, enjoy Cosplay Royale from Kuki (region free)
  
• Soft on Demand has a new turn on cosplay, with the lovely Itsuki Kinoshita in a fun anime bukkake DVD, as she takes 100 mens' ejaculation on her while wearing various anime costumes (region free)
  
• Fans of the G-Taste erotic anime DVDs will enjoy the new Director's Cut, featuring the lovely nurse training of Nana Morimura and Mai Kannazuki (region 2)
  
• Finally, we've got two more titles by the oh-so-hard-to-get Milky Cat
  
• We continue to get great feedback from customers who have purchased The Dog plushes, and we thank you for you warm comments. We've got a bunch of new "The Dog" items for you, including fresh stock on the sold-out set 1 of the normal size plushes, a giant-size extra huggable size of the Labrador Retriever and Golden Retriever
  
• For fans of the bishoujo game "Air," we've got some very cool collectible cards that are really stickers, so you can use them as either
  
• Also: a metal "The Dog" dog dish for your dock with the cute dogs printed on it and very cute "The Dog" coffee cups with fish-eye dog images printed on them
  
• For fans of our Japanese snacks, we've got a new taste of baked pretzels from Glico, the delicious Grilled Cheese Pretz
  
• Also, fresh stock of one of the most popular snack items we've ever sold, Sake Hard Candy from Japan
  
• Fans of anime should check out the very cute Totoro white board and magnet set, as well as a rare item, Sailor Moon gum with little "kisekae" dress stickers
  
• Finally, look for many other neat items, including new bento boxes, Kero Kero Keropii watercolor paint sets, cute hamster items, a great toothbrush for your tongue, and more!
  

Greetings from J-List March 8, 2002

Hello again from your friends in Japan!

The Japanese love of saving money is world famous, and as a nation, Japan has a mind-boggling US$9 trillion in savings, most in cash-based accounts that earn almost no interest. Getting a 1% return on savings is considered great in Japan right now, what with the government's "zero interest policy" of keeping money practically free to borrow to try to get the economy moving again. We don't mind this policy at all -- when we built the J-List office and remodeled my wife's parents' rural liquor shop, we were able to borrow money for around 1.9%. (No, we can't arrange any loans for anyone outside of Japan, sorry.) Incredibly, the per-household average amount of cash savings for Japanese families is a whopping US$100,000. They have enough money to save this much and still have some left over for toilet seats that wash your butt for you when you're done going to the bathroom. As the economy has grown worse, Japanese households are saving more and more, which is of course a big corse reason for the problems with the economy in the first place.

Japanese banks became famous as the expanded out of Japan in the late 1980's, but the granddaddy of them all isn't a bank at all: it's the Japanese Postal Savings System, established back in 1875 when Japan was going through a period of rapid modernization. About 20% of Japanese savings is done through the Post Office here, making for a staggering amount of money -- supposedly, if it were considered a bank, it'd be the largest bank in the world. Since the Post Office doesn't loan money out to individuals or businesses, this money is put to use in various ways, funding Japan's public works and building various projects all over Japan.

One of these projects is a beautiful onsen (hot springs) hotel situated in the mountains above Nikko called Melmonte. It features many baths and saunas, a sprawling heated pool with many water slides and fountains, and the coup d'grace, an observatory where you can go view the planets and stars after your bath. Built with public funds, the hotel is partially a PR campaign for the Japanese postal system, and historical items of interest relating to the postal service are on display. Postal workers get a discount when they stay there -- which really gives our local mailman in San Diego a laugh. Since my son and I love Japanese baths so much, I'm taking him there on Saturday as a special treat for him. So you know we'll be very clean this weekend!

For the pre-weekend update, we've got a bunch of nice items for you, including:

• First, we have some great new magazines for you, including the new Urecco, laden with beautiful models for you, including the new "too big poster" (very large nude poster of Hitomi Hasegawa and Hitomi Hayasaka)
  
• We've got a new bust fetish magazine for fans, Oh! Pai
  
• For photobook lovers, we've got several nice items, including an all-new photobook by the lovely Risa Tani, as well as fresh stock of several of our popular leg, stocking and mini-skirt fetish photobooks
  
• Also: a very rare and interesting photobook of the lovely Mariko Mise, which comes in a limited edition box with a poster and T-shirt (available by special order, only 5000 of these have been made)
  
• For hentai anime fans, we've got a rare "complete work book" (art book) on the anime OAV "A Kite" by La Femme Nikita
  
• Look for another large update of adult comics from Japan on our manga page, with several really cool works that really stand out, including an incredibly hentai parody of Love Hina, Rayearth, and Utena
  
• Also: Yasu has worked hard to restock our manga pages, with fresh stoc of many popular items so you can get them with no waiting
  
• For DVD collectors, we've got two new 180 minute "No Cut" DVD releases, which feature three full video releases of two very lovely professional AV idols
  
• From Soft on Demand, a great new "Penis study with innocent girls" release, in which girls without much sexual experience see and touch a man's penis for the first time
  
• A great item from SOD's Deep's label, we've got a 120 minute DVD which collections the best cum shots from 61 actresses in a great item for you
  
• There's a great new "chijo" (lewd woman or slut) performance by Hitomi Ikeno, Yuuki Tsukamoto and Riran Mizuho for fans of bold, erotic women who pursue their sex with a vengeance
  
• Finally, Tomo has updated the video and DVD pages, with fresh stock of many items, including videos by Akira Fubuki and Anna Ohura, and the popular new items by M's Video Group
  
• Because we love The Dog, we've got more The Dog stuff for you, including some very cool (and in Japan, hard to buy) The Dog bento boxes, and cute colorful tape with images of dogs on it
  
• Our only-available-from-Japan Hello Kitty items continue to be popular, and we've added many all-new items for Kittyphiles
  
• Also for Kitty fans, an entirely new category of item -- Hello Kitty stick-type chewing candy, which looks like sticks of normal gum but is really delicious soft, fruit-flavored candy you can chew and swallow
  
• Other newly added snack items including delicious rice crackers, tasty "pudding flavored Pocky," a reduced-salt version of our popular miso soup, and delicious ume flavored hard candy
  
• When we saw the very cool Sesame Street character pens from Sony Creative Products, we were bowled over and got some stock for J-List, even though it's not our usual area of business
  
• For anime & toy fans, see the cool "miracle action figures" of Devilman we've posted, along with a very, very cool Cyber Trooper robot figure from DNA
  
• For fans of the bilingual comics series from Kodansha, which let you read Cardcaptor Sakura, Ah My Goddess and Love Hina in English, we've got a general restocking of several volumes that had sold out
  
• We've restocked one of my favorite anime movies, Kiki's Delivery Service, a 2 DVD set released only in Japan, which comes loaded with the English and Japanese versions (both dubbed and subbed), interviews and extras from the creators, the storyboard version of the film, and more! It's region 2 and highly recommended for collectors!
  
• Finally, an item I've wanted to sell through J-List for years, the extra-large cat bus tissue box holder, which accepts any standard box of tissue and lets you take the tissue out through a hole in his back.
  

Remember that J-List now carries some interesting U.S.-published adult comics from White Lightning, including the first three volumes of the English version of Tohru Nishimaki's Blue Eyes. These are all stocked in our ever-growing San Diego office for your ordering convenience. See the English hentai manga page for these items.

The "top 5" list has been updated, so you can see what other J-List customers have been buying over the last week.

Well, that's all for now -- thanks as always for being a valued part of J-List and making it all fun for us. We'll see you next week!

Greetings from J-List March 6, 2002

Greetings, programs, from all of us at J-List!

English grammar is sometimes too difficult for Japanese to accept, so they "reduce" it to be easier for all Japanese to understand. If you buy shampoo in Japan, you'll have many brands of "rinse in shampoo" to choose from. (We've also got some "Vitamin C In Candy" in stock today.) Movie titles are sometimes "trimmed" in this manner -- You've Got Mail was released as You Got Mail, since it's easier for Japanese to digest in that way. Many Japanese words get similarly "adjusted" when they enter use in English, with the original meanings changed. "Hara-kiri" is ritual Japanese disembowelment that was done in the Edo Period, but it somehow managed to enter English usage pronounced "hairy carry," meaning to commit suicide. In Japan, a hibachi (hee-ba-chee) is a kind of heart that was built into houses 100 or more years ago, for cooking or warmth, but in English it's a cute little barbecue for apartment-dwellers. Language is fun.

I am a big fan of sushi, and eat it whenever I get the chance. 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. There are many sushi restaurants, including expensive restaurants where a licensed professional chef cuts the fish for you (you have to have a license to prepare sushi in Japan) and "mawari-zushi" (where you wait for your sushi to come along on a conveyor belt). 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're ever laid over in Narita, stop by for some good sushi. (To get there, go to the train station and say "Edokko sushi?" to any taxi driver, and they'll point you in the right direction).

For today's update, we've got another volley of incredibly fun and rare things from Japan, including:

• First, we've got new magazines for you, including the lovely new Gal's Dee, filled with beautiful Japanese gals size "D" and up (all the way up to I cup)
  
• Also, fun amateur sex and kogal magazines for fans of Japanese girls
  
• We've got some fantastic new photobooks today, including new hardcover and softcover books with some of Japan's top beautiful models
  
• If you are into fetish for panties, bikini or "that funny patch of cloth that sits between a girl's legs" we recommend Sachiyo Isobe's dynamite photobook
  
• This month's Mini Suka Deluxe sold out in record time, sorry for all who wanted to buy a copy -- but we've got a great replacement item for you, the wonderful Mini-skirt and Panty Stockings Collection, featuring tons of famous Japanese idols
  
• For fans of hentai manga, we've got a very special update for you, including the incredibly erotic manga "The Den" by Yukio Shijima
  
• Like doujinshi? We've got stock of the very nice Angel Pain 5, an *all color* doujinshi, as well as fresh stock of the best-selling Blue Eyes by Tohru Nishimaki
  
• We've got tons of great adult DVDs for you, including the bold new slut-in-hospital performance with a funny English title ("We're crazy about the act of molesting") (region free)
  
• The popular "Bukkake Circle in the Blue Sky" series continues, with Yukari Sawamura performing boldly with many actors (region free)
  
• For fans of Japanese indies hardcore, enjoy the great sexual performance by Yuna Akimoto with tons of very hard themes and bukkake (region 2)
  
• We have more very special and impossible to find videos from Milky Cat, some of their finest bukkake material ever!
  
• Finally, we've got a good restock of several very popular DVDs, including Kanabun's tekoki special, Aika Loves You, Semen White Paper and fresh stock of the G-Taste hentai DVDs from Kodansha
  
• For fans of Japan's bold and fun pro wrestling world, see an idol DVD by Soft on Demand capturing the life and times of two professional wrestling idols, Miho Wakizawa and Kayo Noumi
  
• We've two beautiful new "cold cast" (polyresin) anime statues in, Sayuri and Jun from Hiroki Yagami's "Futari ni Omakase" -- and they are just too cool
  
• Also for Japanese toy fans, we've got the first-ever stock of the brand-new Kubrick Tron figures, with very cool figures and vehicles from the classic movie
  
• For fans of lovely Japanese idols, we've got a very nice idol card series, the HIP Virtual Photocard Collection (features Yuka and others)
  
• For Japanese food and snack fans, we've got several items, including tasty Ramune candy, "Vitamin C in Candy," Lotte "Crunky" chocolate and almonds, crab pilaf, Japanese "Matcha Milk" mix (green tea milk), and orange soda flavored Hi-Chew Kids
  
• Also: a major restocking of our unique Japanese chewing gum, including Black Black, No Time (toothbrush gum), Plum Gum (Ume), Blue Berry and Sweetie (Grapefruit)
  
• For Hello Kitty lovers, we've got several fun new items, including a very cool "Kogal Kitty" set of bad-girl Hello Kitty plush dolls, as well as fresh stock of toilet paper, chopsticks, straws and other items
  
• If you like cool Japanese monster movies, we've got a dynamite "Perfect Analysis" of Gamera, one of my own favorite movie monsters
  
• Finally, fresh stock of onigiri makers, sushi molds, bento boxes, Japanese vocabulary study cards, funny signs in Japanese, Licca-chan memorabilia, and much more. Check out all the new items!
  

J-List has many unique products for fans of Japan, and one of the most wacky are our own Wacky Japanese T-shirts, which contain funny messages in Japanese like "Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend" or "Hen na Gaijin" ('m a Strange Foreigner). Wearing these funky shirts are great ways to shock Japanese people you run into, who will wonder why you got a shirt like that (they may want to take a picture of you). Please note that we're always closing out our current stock of shirts to make room for new designs, so most of the shirts we have in stock now won't be available in the future -- so you should get yours now while we have the design and sizes you want. The shirts are all printed in the USA and all sizes are American sizes, and we have size M through XXL in most of the shirts.

Greetings from J-List March 4, 2002

Greetings from your friends in Japan!

Poor Kaori. Some evil person broke into her husband's car and stole an expensive CD player and "car navi" (those nifty navigational computers -- I've lived in Japan so long I'm not sure what they're called in English). He also broke the glass in Kaori's Nissan Cube before fleeing the scene. During the past five years, as the Japanese recession has continued, we've seen more and more instances of crime, and the liquor store my wife's parents operate has been broken into and/or had money stolen three times. What is happening to Japan?

As the recession continues here, many industries are brought down as some others flourish. When companies vacate buildings in Isesaki, they are often replaced by "sara-kin," high-interest loan companies like Acom and Takefuji Yen Shop and Lake (which is owned by General Electric venture capital arm, by the way) that lend money to individuals -- perhaps Scott Adams would call them "induhviduals" -- at up to 30% per year. These companies spend millions on advertising on late-night TV to get consumers to use their money-loan machines, which let anyone borrow up to $3000 with just a drivers' license. In the New Japanese Economy, the growth of these high-interest loan companies has been incredible, and many of the founders top the roles of Japan's wealthiest businessmen.

One area that I'm glad to see booming are Japanese onsens and bath-related entertainment, a uniquely Japanese way to enjoy yourself. With the opening of Yura no Sato ("Land of Hot Water and Comfort"), I now have two great hot springs within 10 minutes of my house. Yura no Sato sports at least twenty different indoor and outdoor baths, several saunas, a traditional Japanese "pot bath" (tsubo-buro), and more. My son and I have already been several times, since we are just baka for springs.

Do you have a cat's tongue? If you can't eat hot food, then Japanese would say that you do. Cat's don't like to eat hot food, and a person who likes to cool his food before eating is said to have a "neko-jita." It's totally different from the English phrase "Cat got your tongue?" but an interesting area of confusion between English and Japanese.

For the start of the week update, we've got a great selection of items for you, including:

• First, we've got new magazines, including the new issues of Penthouse Japan and Penthouse Special, filled with lovely Japanese models shot by Japanese photographers
  
• Since our bargain magazine pages are quite popular, we've posted fresh stock of our low-priced magazines
  
• For MPEG (video CD) fans, check out the new EX CD-ROM, featuring a magazine and 70 minute sampler CD-ROM for your enjoyment
  
• We've got great photobooks for you, including the hair nude photobook of Airi Hoshizaki, fresh stock of several other very nice photobooks and more
  
• For manga fans, we've got several excellent new volumes for you, by some of Japan's most famous studios, as well as a major restocking of popular past issues that had been taken off the manga page -- look for about twenty new and back-in-stock items
  
• If you're a fan of yaoi comics, we've restocked several of the popular b-Boy Zipz anthology mangas (270+ pages per volume)
  
• For DVD fans, we've got some great new items for you, starting with two of the popular "No Cut!!" DVDs from Kuki, featuring 180 minutes of AV (3 complete video releases) per disc (region free)
  
• From Soft on Demand, more erotic fun with "Shiritori Samurai" in which girls agree to be raped if they lose a famous Japanese word game (region free)
  
• For indies lovers, rare offerings from Dream Quest, featuring Ai Nagase in some of her best fetish performances (region 2)
  
• Finally, an incredibly cool item from MVG, Kazuhiko Matsumoto's M's Video Group, a super new Semen Champion Carnival in which four beautiful AV idols complete in a bukkake championship (VHS)
  
• For region 2 DVD fans, we've got limited stock of the very nice Ah My Goddess motion picture, which was shown in Japanese theatres in 2001
  
• For fans of "The Dog," the very cute plush line of little furry dogs, we've got two new items -- the Shuh Tzu and the Poodle, both of which should be very popular (so get yours before we sell out)
  
• For fans of our Japanese snacks and food, look for several nice items, including a delicious (?) corn-flavored caramel treat, fresh stock of our best-selling miso soup with wakame and tofu, and fresh stock of Black Black candy (which sold out in record time) and Strawberry Pocky
  
• Also, we've got fresh stock of various Japanese gum, including the fun and bizarre blueberry flavored "Fruit of the Bubble" bubblegum
  
• For collectors of anime statues made using the "cold cast" production method (for beautiful detail), we've got a great new one -- Vampire Hunter D, rendered in beautiful 1/7 scale polyresin
  
• Also for anime lovers, many cool new additions to our recently redesigned anime ' toy pages, including Lupin III keychains, a cool soft vinyl figure of Cobra, and the brand-new Kubrick Planet of the Apes toys
  
• Also: a super-soft, super nice "stuffed plush mascot" of Jiji, the black cat from Kiki's Delivery Service
  
• For JPOP and idols fans, a very special item -- the dynamite hardcover photobook of the lovely Maki Gotoh, of Morning Musume
  
• We've got fresh stock of the Kubrick-like Tinibiz figures of famous characters from the Doraemon universe, one of the most popular long-running anime shows ever
  
• We've also got some new cute items on our "Wacky things form Japan -- cute items" page, including new Hello Kitty items for collectors of "kawaii" (cute in Japanese)
  
• Finally, look for cool double-ended pens with beautiful colors, unique Japanese cotton swabs with hooks on the ends, super cool sushi erasers, and other fun items!
  

One of my own favorite hentai/bishoujo games, which I still find myself playing late at night despite my own busy schedule, is Hentai Anime Poker. Featuring five different games of strip poker, including Texas Hold 'Em, the game allows you to "plug in" other anime opponents, so you can play for hours. As a special thanks to our bishoujo game customers, we're offering our "POKERPACK" (the Hentai Anime Poker CD-ROM with all four downloadable packs of opponents) for an even better price, just $24.95, half the price of buying the game with the download packs separately. The offer ends this month.

Greetings from J-List March 2, 2002

Hello again from your friends at J-List!

My wife and daughter are in San Diego now, taking a little mini-vacation before we get busier in the summer. Anyone who's married probably knows how much fun it can be to have the whole house to yourself to rattle around in, and I'll be doing some fun things with my son while my wife and daughter are in the U.S., including some serious onsen (hot springs) trips.

There's no doubt about it -- the Japanese really love their tea. While in a 7-11 the other day, I counted no less than a dozen brands of bottled or canned tea for sale, mostly variations on Japanese green tea and Chinese oolong tea. In addition to the normal Western canned tea like Kirin's Afternoon Tea, which are the only teas with sugar added, many brands competed for shelf space, including Kirin's new Nama-cha, Sapporo's Kyo-ryoku-cha, Asahi's Marocha, the popular Soukenbi-cha by Coca-cola, various blends of jasmine tea, and my own personal favorite, Asahi's "Chugoku no Ryokucha". As the market for bottled tea products heats up, manufacturers come up with ways to get you to buy their products, offering larger or smaller packages, keychains that you get free with the bottle of tea, and so on. Unlike the U.S., where adding sweetener to products is an unfortunate requirement in most cases (bottled green and oolong tea we've bought in the U.S. even contained honey to sweeten it), all Asian teas are completely unsweetened, and the unaltered, slightly bitter taste is really delicious. Sapporo tried to bring its unsweetened oolong tea to market in California some years ago, but their efforts weren't successful.

In case you wondered why beer companies like Asahi, Kirin and Sapporo are so busy making bottled tea products, the short answer is that Japanese companies pretty much do everything, rather than focusing on one category of products or services, as U.S. companies often to. All beer makers also have beverage bottling businesses, to better compete in all markets -- JT, aka Japan Tobacco, also sells beverages, although drinking a refreshing drink that was bottled by a tobacco company can give one pause. Do you want to reform your home? Panahome, the construction company operated by Panasonic/National, will be happy to help you. Panasonic bicycles are also very well-known in the marketplace. Hitachi is famous for consumer products, but they also make Japan's speedy bullet trains. Sony has a popular line of high-end make-up products, and a life insurance business, too. When we built the J-List office, one of the companies we considered was Toyota Home, a division of Toyota that will build you a home in chunks in their factory, and truck it out to your land for later assembly. Whereas American companies like Apple or Compaq pretty much stick to one main business, it's quite common for Japanese companies to branch out into many areas.

As part of our ongoing quest to bring you just about every form of fun Japanese pop culture possible, J-List offers a unique service, a selection of anime, yaoi and other manga, JPOP, fashion, swimsuit idol, hobby and adult magazines by "reserve subscription." This basically means that we'll send you the newest issue of the magazines you want each month, automatically, until you ask us to stop. Since J-List gets these magazines in at the same time as the Japanese newsstands and sends them to you automatically, you can always be assured of having the latest issues. We've frankly got an incredible lineup of magazines, which Tomo works very hard to maintain, and to help you figure out which excellent Japanese magazines you'd like to get each month, we've updated all our scans with fresh ones so you can see how good the items are.

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

• First, we've got new magazines for you, including the new Bejean (a very nice issue this month!), as well as new kogal and amateur hardcore magazines for your enjoyment
  
• If you like our photobooks, we've got some nice new hard- and softcover books for you, including a very nice "on the set collection of shots of Japan's top AV idols, from Audaz
  
• One of more most popular categories are our leg, stocking and mini-skirt fetish photobooks, and we've got the new Mini-Suka Deluxe in for you, although stock is limited this time around, so get it fast if you want it
  
• If you like hentai manga, you've come to the right place -- we've got an extra nice selections of a half-dozen all-new works for you, including the very cool "Leave it to the Bunny Maids"
  
• For DVD fans, we've got some nice items, starting with the Private Onanie (which comes from the word onanism, and means masturbation) of ten girls aged 19-23, from Deep's (region free)
  
• The lovely Sakura Kawai dresses up in a variety of sexy anime costumes and performs for your pleasure, in a new DVD from Big Morkal (region free)
  
• In a DVD market where more and more lesbian sex is done with "penis band" (strap on dildos) and the like, Moodyz director Kei Morikawa has filmed the "real lesbian" with soft, gentle lovemaking and more (region 2)
  
• Finally, the long-awaited and very-often-requested Milky Cat bukkake videos are finally available through J-List -- we've got the first titles, The Gansha series, posted now (VHS only)
  
• For fans of the Leiji Matsumoto masterpiece Space Cruiser Yamato, e.g. Star Blazers, we've refreshed our stock of the very nice Yamato trading cards from Cardass
  
• Our only-available-in-Japan Hot Wheels are proving to be more and more popular, so much so that we sold out of all the ones we've posted. We now post more stock of the Thunderbird and Back to the Future cars, as well as a rare collector's edition of the Mach 5 from Speed Racer (oh, this is so cool)
  
• The Dog, the series of ultra-cute plush little dogs from Japan, has sold beyond our wildest expectations, and to say thanks, we've gotten another major restock of these cute little guys for you
  
• A classic item, the PVC figure of Asuka Hoshino from Sentimental Graffiti, is in stock, and it's very lovely indeed
  
• For Licca-chan fans, we've got a little figure that's a recreation of the Licca doll issued in 1967, a really cool classic item
  
• If you'd like to follow the adventures of Anpan Man (that is, Bean Paste Man), and his two friends, White Bread Man and Curry Bread Man, check out the little plush toys we've posted to the stuffed animals page
  
• For lovers of traditional wacky stuff from Japan, we've posted a nifty new sake bottle with cups (great for drinking hot sake), as well as a traditional bamboo sign for your bath
  
• If you dig Japanese gum, we've got a tasty item for you, Lotte's "Fruit of the Bubble" gum that features little blueberry gum with larger pieces of yogurt flavored gum, all in a great container
  
• For fans of our Japanese food and snack items, check out Lion Ramune candy, super butter-and-soy-sauce flavored Popcorn that is one of our favorites here, and a delicious treat, "Chii-kama" (that is, cheese and kamaboko), a delicious snack that goes well with beer
  
• Finally, look for Hello Kitty tissue and toilet paper, fresh stock of wacky signs from Japan (like "please remove your shoes"), more handy chopsticks and bento related items, and more!
  

One of my own favorite hentai/bishoujo games, which I still find myself playing late at night despite my own busy schedule, is Hentai Anime Poker. Featuring five different games of strip poker, including Texas Hold 'Em, the game allows you to "plug in" other anime opponents, so you can play for hours. It comes with full instructions too, in case you're not up on all the rules of Poker, and it's a great way to practice against some challenge players who are also cute anime girls. As a special thanks to our bishoujo game customers, we're offering our "POKERPACK" (the Hentai Anime Poker CD-ROM with all four downloadable packs of opponents) for an even better price, just $24.95, $10 off the normal price and half the price of buying the game with the download packs separately. The offer ends this month.

Finally, the "top 5" (which is really a top 10) has been updated for the past week, so you can see with one click what items have been selling the most.

Greetings from J-List February 28, 2002

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Greetings from J-List February 25, 2002

Greetings from Japan!

My five-year-old daughter Rina has reached a milestone: she's lost her first tooth, and now she looks like a Canadian hockey player. In Japan, when a child loses a tooth, it's customary to throw the tooth on the roof of your house (if the tooth was a lower tooth) and under your house (if the tooth was an upper tooth), so that strong and healthy teeth will grow in. The American custom of putting the tooth under the child's pillow so that the Tooth Fairy (ha no yousei) can come and take it away, replacing it with money, is totally unknown in Japan, but the idea delighted my daughter so much that we opted for the American custom this time around.

Japan is a pretty nice place, and like many foreigners, I like living here. Japanese are very friendly to us gaijini, and there are not too many hardships associated with living here. Although Japan has become more and more open to outside thing, from Doritos to Starbuck's, there are always some things that gaijin just can't seem to get easily in Japan. One are shoes: in Japanese stores, the largest shoe sizes kept in stock are 28 cm, around a size 10 in the U.S. Going skiing and renting ski boots is also a challenge for gaijin with larger feet. Fortunately I wear a size 26 1/2 cm shoe, so I can buy my shoes here. T-shirts in Japan are often "free size," which is the Japanese way of saying "one size fits all" or "this shirt will not fit you, gaijin, get your shirts sent from home like everyone else." Finally, an item that can be difficult to procure here in Japan are U.S. condoms. Japanese condoms are just fine, of course, but they're quite a bit thinner than most condoms in the U.S., and can feel smaller. Many gaijin can't use them (for the obviously reason) or aren't comfortable using them (for fear that they might provide less protection). By the way, Japanese condom use is the highest in the world, since the Pill was only recently legalized for sale in Japan -- it took just a few months for the Japan's male politicians to approve Viagra, but 30 years for the Pill.

Japan is going ape over a cute line of plush toys called "The Dog" (the Japanese like to attach "the" to words). A very high-quality line of plush toys designed and released by Japan's Tsuburaya (the company that brought you Ultraman, in case you wanted to know), these lovable plush dogs are "strange ratio," meaning that their heads are much too big for their bodies, resulting in an incredibly cute "super deformed" look that is just too cute. Details on each dog include soft skin, stitched noses that look and feel cool, like dog's noses, sad, pouting eyes, and cute little dog-bodies. They come with string so you can hang them anywhere, or display them, or carry them with you all the time. We've got these very cute items on the new Stuffed Animals pages, so check them out now. Full sets are also available.

For our Monday update, we've got a bunch of excellent items for you, including:

• First, some great new Japanese adult magazines for you, including the new issues of Shuffle, Gachinko Musume, and other nice amateur and kogal magazines
  
• For fans of low-cost magazines (and we know you're out there), we've got new magazines on magazine page 3, including some rare and lovely backissues of magazines from 2+ years ago
  
• We have several really nice new photobooks for you, including the very erotic hardcover nude photobook of Harumi Hitose
  
• If you love Japan's sexy Race Queens and Campaign Girls, see the new Racq Queen Magazine ("Can Gal Magazine"), a super sexy photobook featuring all the best RQ's in Japan today
  
• We have some rare hentai game and anime art books that are very cool, and will prove to be very hard to find if you don't pick them up soon
  
• We have fresh hentai manga in stock, including some very nice offerings by Japan's professional adult manga-ka (manga artists)
  
• J-List carries the biggest selection of quality Japanese erotic DVDs you will find, and we've got more items for you, starting with a fantastic new erotic performance by Ai Nagase (who is Tomo's favorite girl) (region free)
  
• Bunko Kanazawa has done some of her best erotic work with Soft on Demand, and now they're reissued her "Tekoki Lewd Woman" release at a great new price (region free)
  
• For those interested in not just "tekoki" (hand job) but love as well, check out the new romantic/erotic offering from Deep's (region free)
  
• A very special item for fans of the lovely Aika Miura, courtesy of Moodyz, a great bukkake & zamen fetish DVD for collectors
  
• Finally, the new M's Video Group and Waap Entertainment combination DVDs have proven to be an amazing seller, and we've got more on order since the ones we had sold out. We've got a new item for you, the very special Encylopedia of Semen 2001 by Waap and MVG!
  
• On our plus & stuffed animal pages, we've got the above-mentioned incredibly cute plush series called "The Dog" (both individual and full sets are in stock).
  
• For fans of Japanese snacks and food, we've got several new items for you including delicious tamago and nori (egg and seaweed) furikake that's great for kids, real Japanese miso soup of "nama" (raw) type (real miso, not freeze-dried), rare Sesami Street cookies, and chocolate strawberries on a stick
  
• Also: successor to the incredible hit product Black Black, the caffinated spicy gum with menthol that keeps you awake, we've got Black Black Candy!
  
• For fans of the hit Rumiko Takahashi we've got a very cool line of Inuyasha display figures which are very detailed and come with their own stands
  
• For fans of Licca-chan, the cute fashion doll from Takara that is the demure, cute and innocent "anti-Barbie," we've got some cute Licca stickers
  
• For Godzilla fans, a cool Godzilla vs. three monsters playset that is really nifty
  
• Finally, find many other cool items, including fresh stock of loose socks "socks glue" to hold up your loose socks, limited stock of our popular "Lunchon" non-cute bento box, fresh stock of the Evangelion Kubrick cute anime toys, and much more!
  

We're having a special this month on our licensed "doujin-soft" CD-ROMs, which are collections of CG artwork collected from Japanese hentai illustrators at the Comic Market, the mecca of Japan's underground doujinshi culture. We think these collections are great for all collectors of adult computer graphics artwork, and so we're giving free shipping (in the US/Canada) this month. Among the really nice titles we recommend are the Borderline series, the Creamy Angel bukkake CG series, Light Up! (a fun rock-paper-scissors game for Mac/Windows), and of course the classic hentai Evangelion CG collection, Dream World II.

Greetings from J-List February 22, 2002

Hello again from your own little window to Japan!

A very big change is coming for my family: my son is starting Elementary School, and that means that many things will be changing. Japanese compulsory education (Elementary and Junuir High School) is standardized on a national level, through the mighty Ministry of Education, and from the upper reaches of Hokkaido down to balmy Okinawa, Japanese schools are designed to one thing: output standardized, happy Japanese kids that can get along and be happy in Japanese society. To that end, the various elements of schools and learning, from textbooks to desks to what teachers do and how they do it, are made uniform throughout the country. My son must do exactly what everyone else does, starting with walking 1.2 kilometers (about 3/4 of a mile) to the school every morning, wearing an official school-approved school backpack called a "landoseru" (which comes from the German word Raenzel), writing with approved pencils and notebooks, wearing a school-approved bright yellow hat, and so on. It's not just my son who will need to conform to a whole new world of changes, though. My poor wife now has to interact with a whole new group of people, from teachers to other parents, and do everything expected of her as a mother in Japan. She will constantly be worrying (perhaps unnecessarily, but who can say?) about our appearance in the eyes of others, which is known as "hito no me" (hee-toh no meh) in Japanese. Among other things, she has to get up extra early and be a crosswalk guard, waving a yellow flag to alert cars that young children are walking along the road.

Recently we've been on a big hot springs kick, and every Sunday for the past few weeks we've gotten into our Mazda Bongo Friendee (similar to an MPV, but taller, and the roof opens to give you another compartment) and going to various onsen towns around us. Japan's various traditions of bathing are quite famous all over the world, and rightly so. Most Japanese take baths in the evening, although younger people replace this tradition with a shower in the morning. In Japanese homes, the actual bath-room is a bath and a separate tiled area outside the bath, with a drain for water to escape (Japanese are amazed that we refer to the toilet as "bathroom" since it's totally different). You always wash your body thoroughly before getting into the bath, and never use soap or shampoo inside the bath itself, as the water will be reused by other family members, and saved for several days. All baths here have heaters to allow you to re-heat the old water, and ours has a one-touch computer that will fill the bath to the pre-set temperature and level for you. If you're a parent living in Japan, you always take your kids in the bath with you and wash them. This warm concept of mother or father taking a bath with their children is called "skinship" by the Japanese, a Japanese term that serves its purpose well. Japanese are great fans of public baths (sento) and hot springs (onsen), too. Since the water is "everyone's water," everyone must wash thoroughly before getting into the baths, although I've seen quite a few old men who skipped this step. As a foreigner living in Japan, I consider myself an "ambassador of goodwill" and what not, so I make sure I follow the rules even if not everyone else does. The Japanese are famous for bathing with men and women together (kon'yoku), but this is actually very rare, and I've only encountered a combined bath once in all my years in Japan. If you are interested in learning more about Japan's hot springs culture, I recommend Peach Princess's excellent game Tokimeki Check-in!, which accurately captures the spirit of a traditional Japanese hot springs inn, from yukata to the ping-pong tables that seem to be required at all Japanese onsen hotels.

Unfortunately we continue to get a small per cent of customers with ordering problems. It seems that some users using the normal checkout (not the express checkout) make orders and receive the automated "thank you" email from the J-List database. Unfortunately, the orders never reach us on our end, and are thus never processed. If you have made an order through the J-List website in the past couple of weeks and never received updates about its status from us, please email us and we'll figure it out for you. Thanks!

For the new update today, we've got a very nice selection of new items for you, including:
o The excellent new issue of Gokuh, which is heavily laden with lovely photographs of the top AV idols in Japan today, Manatsu Hirose to Anna Ohura to Kurumi Morishita and beyond

For fans of models and idols popular in the early 1990's, some premium copies of Nowon, the "special photographic magazine"

We have fresh stock of some nice photobooks for you, including new hardcover nude and sexy photobooks

For fans of various fetish themes, see the newly posted "gouka bon" (high-end Japanese bondage and fetish photobooks)

For fans of erotic hentai manga, a special treat: we now stock the excellent adult comics of White Lightning Productions, including the English translations of the Blue Eyes manga series, as well as other titles. For ease in ordering, all titles will be stocked in San Diego

We have some excellent new erotic hentai manga for you, with not only new volumes but fresh stock of many very nice books

Also: for fans of yaoi comics (homosexual male/male comics that are drawn with incredibly skill) check out our new postings

For DVD collectors, we've got some nice items for you, start with a super item, Kyoka Usami Best Selection, featuring the best AV erotica from the lovely Indies AV (one of my favorites) (region free)

For fans of lesbian love and sex, the very deep and erotic Futari ~ Two, a new all-female production from SOD (region free)

We've got a great item from Big Morkal, featuring *4 hours* or incredibly hardcore sex with 19 different models (region free)

For Indies DVD lovers, see the very nice all-new production from Sally Yoshino (region 2)

From Attacker's Idea Pocket label, a great 2-in-1 Angel DVD featuring the famous Shiho Fujiwara, who is active in the U.S. under the name Sakura Sena -- we love her "body conscious cat girl" cosplay sex the best

We've got a dynamite new remake of "Dream Shower" for Waap by master adult video director Kazuhiko Matsumoto, of M's Video Group

Finally, Tomo has received a huge order of adult DVD titles from our distributors (as in, four huge boxes worth), so you can order these titles right away, without waiting

For fans of our very nice anime statues, see the newly posted cold cast recreation of Ai Amano from the popular manga and anime Video Girl Ai (one of Peter's all-time favorite manga series), a beautiful 1/6 scale cold cast figure

We have additional stock of the positively beautiful cold cast statue of Urd, from the Ah My Goddess universe, along with new photographs so you can see how beautiful and detailed this dynamite 20 inch high statue is

For AMG fans, we've got another treat: the new volumes of the Kodansha Bilingual Comics for you

We have fresh stock of several of our popular collectible card items, including Morning Musume, and the authentic Japan Sumo Wrestling collectible cards

We've seen a huge rise in Hello Kitty popularity over the past week, and have restocked many categories of Kitty-chan items, including Hello Kitty mayonnaise cups, Kitty straws, toilet paper, chopsticks, hotcake mix, and many more items

Yasu has been working hard to get more anime & toy items for J-List, and we've restocked many items, including the Hot Wheels that are only available in Japan, the cool Ichiro little baseball player figures, and the very popular My Neighbor Totoro tin toys, including the deluxe tin bus stop!

Also: fresh stock of one of our favorite Hello Kitty items, the culturally significant Hello Kitty Daruma and Kokeshi dolls, little Kitty-chan creations based on beautiful traditional wooden dolls from Japan

We've restocked our selection of authentic Japanese loose socks, those fun, baggy socks that high schools wear

For fans of Japanese food and snack items, look for a general restock of items there, with fresh stock of Sakura Drops hard candies, miso soup, dried salmon for making delicious onigiri (rice balls), and more

Finally, see cool ice cube trays that make wacky ice cubes, new elegant chopsticks from japan, Japanese socks for girls with smaller feet, fresh stock of our Japanese notebooks that have funny English written on them, and more!

J-List sells many nice bishoujo games from English, which have been licensed from the original Japanese companies, uncensored, and translated into English. Two of my favorites are Legend of Fairies and Fairy Nights, two "novel type" games for Windows or Macintosh (all versions of both) in which you work your way through an interesting tale of sexy fairies and "battle mahjong." These great story-based games are part 1 and 2 in a series.

The J-Mate site has been updated yet again, with new reviews of items you can get at J-List. We've got reviews of the very nice new Kyoka Usumi best selection DVD, as well as a nice review of the very interesting Black Bukkake DVD. The URL is http://www.jmate.com/

Greetings from J-List February 20, 2002

Hello again from your friends in Japan!

Japanese is a linguistically impoverished language -- there are only 5 vowels, all paired into syllables with consonants (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.). This is where the thick accent Japanese speakers of English sometimes have comes from. One of the vowel lines -- the "ta" line -- is missing a useful syllables, the sound "ti" (sounding like "tea") as well as the linguistically related "di" sound (sounding like "dee"). Without a way to express these sounds in Japanese, foreign words like "Disneyland" and "party" could not be correctly represented, and subsequently entered the Japanese language as "Desneyland" and "parteh," which sound strange to the English ear. A "patch" was introduced at some time in the last few decades, a way to write "ti" and "di" in katakana, but unfortunately for a generation of older Japanese, they learned a slew of foreign loan words with odd pronunciations. Now, pronouncing words like "panty" as "panteh" or the letter T as "teh" (rhyming with "way") instead of how they sound in English is the mark of an old fogey here (although, as a foreigner, it's kind of fun to do it on purpose sometimes).

Japan can seem a very digital place, full of little gadgets that make like easier (or sometimes more complicated). It can be a very analog place, too, though. While we work at J-List, with all our Macs in our own little corner of the ultra-democratic online republic that is the Internet, we often hear the local yaki-imo man driving around with his truck of hot, baked imo (sweet potatoes). Selling baked sweet potatoes is an old profession, going back to the Meiji Era, and the song they sing (or play through speakers, in this modern era) is a classic part of the background of living in Japan. We found a site that has a recording of the song here, if you want to hear it for yourself: http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/sounds/ishiyakiimo.html

J-List stocks all the best bishoujo games available in English, since we love these games and want everyone to try them. Often, older games go out of print and are no longer available. If you're interested in Three Sisters' Story or May Club, two very nice games we're running low on, you should pick them up soon, since our current stock could be ending very soon.

For today's update, we're got an extra-special collection of items for you, including:

• First, we've got some nice new magazines for you, including the lovely new issue of Aishite Ageru ("I'll love you"), a nice hardcore magazine from Japan
  
• For photobook lovers, we've got several very nice new photobooks, including the lovely new photobook from Mai Hagiwara (out of retirement at last), as well as the beautiful hardcover nude photobook of Aoi Toki
  
• Also fresh stock of several popular photobook items, including the popular U.S. Playboy's Eye, featuring famous Japanese AV idols who have been honored by being run in Playboy Magazine, as well as fresh stock of the Yinling Joytoy photobook
  
• For hentai manga fans, we've got yet another volley of titles for you, by Toen Comics, Shinyusha Comics and other popular manga studios, along with a big restocking of adult manga that had sold out recently (including Blue Shangri-la, get them before they sell out again)
  
• For fans of doujin (underground) CG, we've got some very cool doujin-soft CD-ROM titles, although they will go quickly
  
• For DVD fans, we've got a huge bunch of new titles for you, starting off with a great new Deep Kiss lesbian DVD from Soft on Demand -- which of the lovely women will be chosen as the Deep Kiss Queen? (region free)
  
• From Natural High, a division of Soft on Demand, a great bukkake DVD for you (region free)
  
• Emily Yoshikawa is unique because she's the first "Latina" AV idol, being half Japanese and half Dominican Republic. See her great new erotic video with great new sexual performances
  
• For fans of extremely unique Japanese indies adult video, enjoy the new Area of Waap, a very cool bukkake performance that's all the more special because it's directed by Kazuhiko Matsumoto of M'z Video Group (region 2)
  
• For fans of the high-quality hentai anime series by G-Taste creator Hiroki Yagami, we've got a great new one, featuring anime lesbian play and more (region 2)
  
• Finally, we've got a big restock of adult DVD titles for you, including Mai Hagiwara DVDs, Aika Love You, the long-running Go Go Kanabun (subtitled in English!) and more
  
• One of the fastest-selling products in the history of J-List has been the Hello Kitty vibrators, which have struck a cord with J-List customers as a cool icon of Japanese pop culture. We were in danger of selling out of our stock in just a few days, but we fortunately got more units in. If you want one of these cool items, get them before our distributors run out of stock
  
• Also, a cool follow-up to the Kitty-chan vibrating shoulder massages, a super new Doraemon Vibrator!
  
• Another spiffy item, we've got stock of the very cute Soot Sprites (aka Dust Bunnies) keychains from Hayao Miyazaki's anime masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro
  
• For fans of our "cold cast" anime statues from Japan, we've got two new items for you, Mitsune Kanno and Shinobu Maehara, rendered in beautiful 1/6 scale resin "completed figures" for you
  
• If you love the Ah My Goddess bilingual manga, which let you read the series in English and Japanese, well, we've got a big restock of these books for you
  
• For fans of things for your kitchen, we've got new bento boxes and bento food shapes, fresh stock of the ever-popular sushi mold for making perfect nigiri-zushi, more of the popular Puchi Onigiri race ball maker, and more
  
• We've restocked the very nice hiragana practice notebooks, that help you teach yourself to write in Japanese
  
• We have some other cute items from Japan, including Hello Kitty cups, colored glue sticks, and a rare Hello Kitty reusable container filled with gum
  
• Finally, find cool Japanese "onsen" powder that turns your bath into a real Japanese hot springs, new wacky signs in Japanese, restock of delicious Japanese gum, and more!
  

The "About J-List" page has been updated with the image of Mayumi, the newest face around here at J-List. You can see her picture, as well as see pictures of all the J-List staff, as well as maps of where we live in Japan and other information. The link is at the top left of the J-List product pages.

Greetings from J-List February 18, 2002

Greetings from Japan. I am especially refreshed today, as I took the family on a trip to the town of Kusatsu on Sunday, one of the most famous areas in Japan for hot springs. It took so long to get there, we decided to find nice hotel and treat ourselves to some extra-long Japanese-style bathing, and come back in the morning. We feel great now.

One of the more interesting parts of learning Japanese are the many varieties of descriptive sound words, similar to onomatopoeia in English. There are two groups of these words, giseigo (literally "mimic-voice words") and gitaigo ("mimic-situation words"). Giseigo are words that mimic the sounds of animals -- the sound a small dog makes sounds like "kyan kyan" but a larger dog sounds like "wan wan." A cat says "nya nya" and a rooster "kokekokko." Pigs say "buu buu," and in the anime show Chibi Maruko-chan, there's a boy in Maruko's class who looks like a pig, and every thing he says ends with "buu." Just as foreigners like to learn the sounds that animals make in Japanese, Japanese think it's fun to study animal sounds in English, too.

Similar to giseigo are gitaigo, words that describe a situation, often with surprising clarity. For example, in English we have the words cry and sob which differ slightly in the meaning they carry. In Japanese, the latter is expressed as "shiku shiku naku" (with "shiku shiku" acting as a verbal representation of the hitching sound made while sobbing). Some other examples include "zaa zaa" (the sound of rain falling loudly, to denote the concept of "pouring with rain"), paku paku (the sound of someone eating quickly -- this is where "Pac Man" got his name from), and "shiiin" (the sound of no sound -- i.e., of perfect silence). Some others: peko peko (being so hungry you're going to faint), gasa gasa (having rough skin), tsuru tsuru (any smooth surface, or having smooth skin), bishi bishi (doing things quickly and efficiently, without delay), dara dara (doing things slowly, being lazy), pika pika (being sparking brand-new), boro boro (being old and dilapidated), and so on. There is an endless supply of these highly descriptive words, and they're quite fun to use.

President Bush is in Japan now, fulfilling a promise to visit the country that was interrupted by the World Trade Center attacks. He's talking with Prime Minister Koizumi about various ways in which Japan and the U.S. can cooperate on the economy, terrorism and some other issues. Happily, Mr. Koizumi is fluent in English and is able to talk directly to Bush on various issues, which I think is great. I think it does the Japanese people a lot of good to see their leader speaking English comfortably, and Japanese needs more role models like Mr. Koizumi for Japanese students learning English.

For today's new update, we've got a bunch of very nice items for you. For our adult customers, check out new magazines (the new issue of Bejean is especially nice), new hardcover photobooks, a very special bondage item for S&M photography lovers, excellent new hentai manga posted, and several superb new DVDs, including a new Holed Panty release from Soft on Demand that shows you more than you ever thought possible! We've also got cute new anime toy items, including a fluffy new Totoro from Sun Arrow, new Japan-only Matchbox toys, a cute item for Licca-chan fans, unique "sweet bean and green tea" flavored candies, strawberry milk mix enjoyed by Japanese elementary school kids, a major restocking of gum, Pocky and other snack products, many new wacky things from Japan, and much more!

Remember that J-List carries many items from Japan, which we group together as "wacky things from Japan." These range from unique Hello Kitty items to things you can use to help learn Japanese to other items that, while they might not be necessities, are just plain cool (Hello Kitty toilet paper comes to mind). A lot of the items we sell are perfect for gifts, and Mayumi works very hard to keep the Wacky Things categories well stocked. We love selling these fun items, since it gives us a chance to actually bring you something cool that you can buy and touch and use, rather than just telling you about the neat things they have in Japan. Check out our excellent and wacky things from Japan, today!

The J-Mate homepage (http://www.jmate.com) has been updated again, with a new interview with the lovely Airi Kago, as well as a super review of Hobibox's very nice Love Love Show, the first erotic puzzle-based bishoujo game in which you must solve puzzles to overcome your female opponents. Check out the great J-Mate site today!