 | Gurren Lagann YOKO Portraits. Gurren Lagann is the awesome new robot anime from Gainax, creator of Evangelion, and the main character Yoko is quite the enigma. Enjoy this high quality photobook featuring tons of great illustrations of Yoko-chan. |
 | Fraulein Revoltech #003 Soryu Asuka Langley ~ Neon Genesis Evangelion *Preorder*. The excellent Fraulein Revoltech series continues, featuring Asuka from Evangelion, rendered in a beautiful and extremely flexible form that can be bent into any shape. Now in stock! |
 | HOKUTO NO KEN ~ Parody Comic Mini Memo Book. Want to know the latest craze in Japan? It might just be these "Mad Libs" style miniature manga books which feature pages with empty dialog boxes, allowing you to add your favorite (silly?) lines for the characters in Fist of the North Star. Also usable as a memo pad. |
 | Japan Mentos - Ume (Plum). At J-List, we live to bring you cool variations of products you may already know and love, like the Wasabi Doritos we posted on Friday. This is great limited edition Ume (OO-meh, Japanese plum) Mentos, sold only in Japan! |
 | Other Delicious Snacks. Today's other snacks both feature funny English on the package. First see Kaon, a delicious soft grape candy from Meiji: "A single bite and you'll feel the tender loving care that we put into KAON." Then you can "Relax Slowly with Relax Gum," a new herbal mint from from Lotte. |
 | Hello Kitty Japanese Zodiac Face Wrist Watch. This is an elegant Hello Kitty wristwatch that features the 12 animals of the traditional Chinese Zodiac (rat, monkey, etc.) with Hello Kitty wearing the cute costumes of the animals in question. Amazing what Sanrio can do to 3000 years of Chinese history, isn't it? |
 | Super Micro Kaleido Scope ~ Lucky Cat & ASAKUSA with SAKURA Charm. This is an amazing line of miniature kaleidoscopes that come on netsuke phone straps (use them on your phone, keys, camera, Nintendo DS, blah blah blah). Look through the end to see a beautiful image of Japan. |
 | Comfy -- Elecom Wrist Rest, Mouse Pad. We carry products from innovative computer peripheral maker Elecom, whose corporate slogan is "Around the PC." Today we're posting the excellent "Comfy" line of mouse pads and wrist supports that give your mouse hand the help it needs for you to get your work done. These are especially cool because they stick to your desk thanks to special polymers so they never move when you don't want them to. |
 | Restocked Hello Kitty USB Optical 3-button Mouse / Mousepad. The Hello Kitty optical 3-button mouse has been restocked, too. Comes with a really cute mousepad, and works with both Windows and Mac with no driver needed. This popular item is back in stock. |
 | Girlfriend Knee Pillow -- Black ~ Hiza Makura (EMS). You already know that J-List specializes in what we've come to call "Wacky Things from Japan," items you just can't believe you're looking at sometimes. From Hello Kitty Ice Cube Trays to this Girlfriend Knee Pillow, which gives you a place to lay your head after a hard day's work even if you don't have a girlfriend, it's all part of the fun of this place. |
 | Tsukasa Hiiragi Figure Miko costume "Nakayoshi Twins" ~ Lucky Star *Preorder* Lucky Star is one of the most popular anime series in the world right now, based on a 4-panel comic about four not-exactly-average high school girls. Here are two outstanding PVC figures of the twins Kagami and Tsukasa, wearing their Miko (Shinto Shrine Maiden) outfits for New Year's. Preorder now! |
 | KAREN Gold ~ Pentel Women's Stylish Jewel Ball Pointed Pen 0.5 mm / 3 colors. the KAREN Gold line of pens for women by Pentel are really nice, featuring tips that write in black, blue and red at your preference, with a nice 0.55 mm tip on each pen head. Also, these pens feature a cute crystal ball on the ends. |
 | Delusion Toy - Moso Yugi -- Kaori. One of the most beautiful women in Japan is Kaori, a fabulously elegant bikini idol whose photographs are so hot that objects around you might burst into flame without warning. Enjoy her popular hardcover photobook. |
 | Queen's Gate -- Iroha (Samurai Spirits) *Preorder *. The Queen's Gate series is a popular variation of the Queen's Blade line of book-based combat RPG, which uses famous characters from other shows rather than original females. This is Iroha from Samurai Spirits, and you're going to love all the artwork inside. Preorder now! |
 | Uncho Kanu 1/7 Figure LTD ver. ~ Dragon Destiny Figure. For fans of Ikki Tousen (aka Dragon Destiny), the hugely popular anime and manga that's essentially is a retelling of a famous Chinese historical tale using fighting high school girls in Tokyo, we've gotten the long-awaited Uncho Kanu "cast off" figure in stock. Because this is 1/7 scale, it's extra large and extra detailed, with everything you want to see right there. Very touchable. |
 | Mao Hanyu Love Pillow Cover ~ Miageta Sora ni Ochiteiku. There's no cooler way to show your cred as an anime fan than to have one of these life-sized dakimakura (hug pillows) in your room. This is the very "H" pillow of Mao Hanyu from a popular dating-sim game. |
 | Shirow Masamune's Jashin Hunter. If you're a fan of Ghost in the Shell creator Shirow Masamune, you really should consider picking up the Jashin Hunter novels (vol 1 & 2), illustrated by the master "H" artist. |
 | Cosploid -- Miyu Hoshino. You can't have something popular in Japan without someone making an "ero parody" of it, and that's what you get with the new Cosploid, a fun anime cosplay that parodies virtual idol Miku Hatsu as well as many other popular anime series, from Gurren Lagenn to Zero no Tsuikaima to Little Busters and more. Fantastic! |
March 3, 2008
Cool Products: Lucky Star Figures, Gurren Lagann art book, Miku Hatsune “Ero” Parody
Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.
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January 21, 2008
Karaoke Update: The Age of the Singing Otaku
The J-List staff had fun at our New Year's Party on Friday, and afterwards we engaged in that famous Japanese past time, karaoke. While most people outside of Japan might imagine getting up and singing in front of a lot of strangers on "Karaoke Night" at a bar, in Japan people usually go to a karaoke box with individual rooms so groups can sing together privately, which mitigates a lot of the embarrassment of belting out songs in front of others. Karaoke uses extremely advanced technology in Japan, with a networked system that streams the songs and video to the machine you're singing with from a central location, which allows the most popular songs to be accessible to everyone immediately after a song's release. Looking at the selection of songs available, I was amazed at how much Japan had changed since my arrival back during the first Bush Presidency. Back then, there was a tiny section of "Anime & Hero" theme songs towards the back of the song book, but with the mainstreaming of anime and video game culture over the past decade, the number of anime-related songs available to sing has exploded. In addition to the main book of Japanese songs and a second book that listed offerings in English, Korean, Chinese and Tagalog (pretty international for Japan), the karaoke box we were at had a third book filled with songs from anime and video games. No matter what minor or esoteric song we searched for, from all the Final Fantasy themes to Dance Dance Revolution tracks and even some songs from the dating-sim games we publish in English, we found them all in the song book. Clearly, the age of the singing otaku is here.
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January 18, 2008
Pictures from the J-List New Year’s Party, If You Want Them
Okay, since I managed to get back earlier than I thought, here are some pictures. The izakaya was a place called Hokkatei, combining the first two characters of Hokkaido with Tei, meaning stop or in this case restaurant. Good seafood, considering we're as far from the sea as you can get.
Since Forget-the-year and New Year's Parties are quite common in Japan, restaurants like this have pre-set menus ready for us. We got the sashimi and nabe set, which was lots of fish (which you really appreciate when you come to live in Japan), and three big pots of kim-chee soup. Yum.
A rare glimpse of the J-List crew. Hilariously, the girls all sit on one side, and the guys on another side, no matter what we do. It's like we're all in Elementary School. This is us about to do the clap I wrote about in today's update.
This is atsukan, hot sake. It warmed us nicely.
The nabe was delicious, too. This is kind of like sukiyaki, but deeper, and with different ingredients, including kim-chee, tofu, vegetables and meat. When we'd eaten it all, they put rice and crab meat in and stewed it some more and it was heavenly.
Later it was off to the karaoke box. They actually have disco balls in them, isn't that cool? Do they have disco balls in the U.S. at all? I've been gone way too long to know the answer to that.
There sure was a lot of anime and even video game music to choose from, testimony to the rise of otaku culture in Japan. Here you can see the full selection of songs from Air, one of the PC dating-sim games that was so popular they made a mainstream anime out of it.
I've posted before about how good karaoke is for learning Japanese. The only problem I had with it was, it's so effective at teaching you how to read and pronounce kanji properly, you outgrow it quickly.
Just what we all need, a medley of songs from Macross 7. Well, that was our fun little party. Hope you are going to have some fun this weekend, too. And of course, kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai shimas, which essentially means thanks for your past support, and we hope you'll continue to help us out in the future.
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Off to the J-List New Year’s Party now
I'm rushing to finish this update a little early since tonight we're having the J-List Shin-nen Kai, or New Year's Party. Similar to the Bo-nen Kai or "Forget the Year Party" held at the end of the year, a Japanese-style New Year's Party is an opportunity for companies or other groups to officially mark the start of a new year, and be brought closer in the process. We've reserved a room at a local izakaya, a traditional bar-restaurant that serves delicious food in addition to frosty mugs of beer and bottles of hot sake (got to have the hot sake!). J-List isn't a very formal company, and we're all pretty relaxed while we go about our business of bringing Japanese pop culture to the world, but I'm always surprised how ceremonial these company get-togethers automatically become. Once everyone is present, the organizer of the party (Yasu does it every year) will stand up and formally announce that the party has begun. After short speeches from Tomo or myself, we'll have the kanpai (cheers) and start eating and drinking. When the beer is gone we'll gather again and Yasu will announce that the party has come to an end, upon which everyone will clap their hands together loudly once, which symbolically ends the event until next year.
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January 7, 2008
A useful word of Japanese, Japan’s seasonal nature, and how to teach an 80 year old Japanese war veteran about the Internet
I've got a bit of a problem. On January 1st we did what we always do, visiting my wife's family, including making our annual trip to her 80-year-old uncle's house. He fought during World War II on the Ise, essentially a battleship on the front and a flight deck on the back which could launch a squadron of fighters. We like to listen to his war stories -- he talks about how he got the scar on his face from shrapnel from an American bomb, and how the only reason he survived the war is because they took the fuel from his ship and gave it to the Yamato for its final sortie. I like my kids to talk with him as much as possible, since it's hard to get the kind of insight he can offer us about the past. Anyway, he's decided he wants to learn how to use the Internet, and is hoping we can help him get online. Now, it can be a challenge for any older person to learn something that complex, but it's doubly hard for him. When he was growing up, it was considered "unpatriotic" to use foreign loan words from English, which resulted in words like "curry" being translated into kanji meaning "yellow sauce with meat on rice" (黄色肉入り汁かけご飯）for the duration of the war, and as a result, people from his generation understandably know almost zero English. Yet here I am trying to explain alien terms like "mouse" "browser" and "window," words that can't be translated into Japanese since they're exclusively used in English. It sure is a challenge.
One of the more useful words of Japanese you might want to learn is nani, which essentially means "what," and is one of the first words that old-school anime fans from the 1980s like me learned -- we didn't have any of these newfangled "subtitles" or "English dubbed tracks" you kids have nowadays. While you can occasionally hear nani?! (what?!) when watching anime or dramas in Japanese, the word usually takes a more polite form in everyday use. The most common usage would be nan desu ka? (nahn dess kah), which is just "What [is it]?" with an implied subject that's usually clear from the context. If you want to ask what a specific object is, point to it and say kore wa nan desu ka? (ko-REH wa nan dess ka), which is "What is this?" In Japanese, there are "counters," words you use to count different types of items, like mai (for counting flat objects, like sheets of paper or coins) or hon (for counting cylindrical objects like umbrellas). You can combine these counters with nani to ask thing like "how many playing cards?" or "how many pencils?" which would be nanmai? or nanbon? respectively. Put this kanji together with the character for "hour" and you get nanji, what hour, e.g what time is it now. Since this word has the same pronunciation as that dreamy bread served in Indian restaurants (naan), all foreigners are required to make the same corny joke, holding up the bread and asking kore wa nan desu ka? (which would mean either "what is this?" or "is this naan bread?").
One thing I've noticed about Japan: it's a very seasonal place. Spring is beautiful with its short-lived cherry blossoms, summer is hot and humid with many festivals, fall is filled with crisp brown leaves, and winter is cold and frosty. I've met Japanese who tell me with great pride that, unlike America, Japan has four distinct seasons, and they enjoy every one of them -- apparently these people haven't ventured outside of Southern California. Japanese people try to avoid being kisetsu-hazure (ki-SET-tsu HA-zoo-ray), which means doing the wrong things for the wrong season, and foreigners regular receive comments like "What's wrong? Aren't you cold?" for wearing short sleeved shirts on warm days in October -- we're too dumb to know that long sleeves should be worn after October 1 regardless of the actual temperature. Once, I was teaching a lesson using an ESL textbook with my students which featured a picture of a boy flying a kite in summer. My students were amazed that anyone would do this -- it turns out in Japan, flying kites (called tako) is something you do on New Year's Day, and almost no one would think of flying kites during any other season. Our lesson turned into quite an interesting cultural discussion.
Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.
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January 6, 2008
Lucky Cat New Year’s Display with KADOMATSU & KAGAMI MOCHI
Lucky Cat New Year's Display with KADOMATSU & KAGAMI MOCHI
A beautiful ceramic Lucky Cat (also called Maneki Neko) New Year's figure display, with symbols of Natsukashii (nostalgic) Japanese things: a sleeping cat, mochi (traditional baked rice cake), and a Japanese New Year's wreath arrangement. Three ceramic figures come wrapped individually with the backdrop, cushion, display stand, and kanji signboard. Backdrop has the kanji for fukumaneki (inviting happiness) and the signboard's kanji, Natsukashii-ya means Nostalgic Shop. New Years displays are...
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Lucky Cat New Year’s Display with KADOMATSU & KAGAMI MOCHI
Lucky Cat New Year's Display with KADOMATSU & KAGAMI MOCHI
A beautiful ceramic Lucky Cat (also called Maneki Neko) New Year's figure display, with symbols of Natsukashii (nostalgic) Japanese things: a sleeping cat, mochi (traditional baked rice cake), and a Japanese New Year's wreath arrangement. Three ceramic figures come wrapped individually with the backdrop, cushion, display stand, and kanji signboard. Backdrop has the kanji for fukumaneki (inviting happiness) and the signboard's kanji, Natsukashii-ya means Nostalgic Shop. New Years displays are...
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January 4, 2008
Learning about trust in a drinking establishment in Japan, why Japanese kids love New Year’s Day, and what is a “tish”?
When a person goes to live in a foreign country, it's natural that he encounter some words and concepts that are strange to him, and I was certainly no exception. One of my first huh? moments upon arriving in Japan being taken to a snack, which is a small drinking establishment where you can get drinks poured for you by a pretty woman, belt out a few tunes at the karaoke machine, and get something to eat, which is where the snack part comes in, I guess. I learned something about Japan during my first visit to one of these places: there's a lot more trust here than there is back home. Behind the bar at any snack you can see dozens of bottles of whisky with people's names written on them. This is called "bottle keep," where a customer will buy a bottle for his own personal use and drop by any time to drink from it, and it struck me as amazing that he need not fear that anyone would steal from his $100 bottle. There are other examples of trust in Japan's society. For example, there are umbrellas at our local post office with a sign that says, "If anyone needs an umbrella, please use one of these and bring it back later." Anyone can borrow $20 from a police box for train fare home if they lose their wallet, which should be repaid at the police box nearest your house. They'll take down your information, but since you probably have no ID (having lost your wallet) in such a situation, it's essentially done via the honor system. Finally, if you're making a large purchase of lumber from Cainz Home, the local home center, they'll be happy to loan you one of their small trucks to get it home, free of charge -- even to a gaijin like me. I don't know about you, but I find that being in a society where the trustworthiness of people is assumed naturally is just wonderful, and I'm always careful to make sure I don't betray trust that anyone puts in me.
New Year's Day is known as oshogatsu, written with the characters for "correct" and "moon," no doubt a holdover from the days when Japan followed the Chinese lunar calendar. It's the favorite day of kids throughout the country because of otoshidama, cash gifts that they receive from their relatives. The amount each child gets depends on the age of the child and of the relationship involved -- kids get more from grandparents than from an uncle they rarely see, for example. My kids both made out like bandits this year, getting around $200 each, although my son got slightly more since he's older, and the oldest son in our household, which carries special status. There are two benefits from this New Year's money gift tradition that I can see. First, knowing that relatives will be handing out envelopes of cash makes kids complain a lot less than visiting family, and this brings everyone together just a little bit. Also, parents use this custom to teach the value of saving money, and the idea of a child blowing all his New Year's money the next day at the toy store is almost unheard of. My son is especially good at saving, and has managed to get more than $1000 in the bank from hoarding his New Year's money over the years. I don't think I ever had that much in a bank account before the age of 25.
Back during my days as a teacher, one of my more advanced students turned to me and said, "Peter, do you have a tish?" I wasn't sure what a "tish" was, but he made a nose-blowing gesture and I realized he was asking me for a tissue. Because Japanese is a syllable-based language in which you can express, say, the sounds ra, ri, ru, re and ro but not an "r" by itself, pronouncing English words properly can be a challenge. In addition to words like "flat" having three syllables instead of one, due to being forced through the strange filter of the katakana pronunciation system, many words end up with vowel sounds on the end, such as job (JO-bu), big (BI-gu) or end (EN-doh). My student was aware of this fact -- kind of like-ah how Mario-ah speaks-ah -- and tried to truncate any vowels at the ends of English words to make them sound more natural, which is where "tish" came from.
J-List is coming out swinging in the new year, ready to bring you thousands of great new products from Japan. From exciting toys and anime figures to fun J-Snacks to unique traditional or just plain "wacky" things you never thought you'd come across, J-List promises to make 2008 a great year for everyone with a fascination for Japan. Let us know what we can do for you this year!
Here are today's "really cool products" that I've picked out for you, out of the 30+ new items we've added to the J-List and JBOX.com sites today. Note that some products may be "not safe for work" but that all links will allow you to redirect yourself either to the J-List or JBOX.com websites. To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.
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December 31, 2007
Back in Japan and getting ready for New Year’s, my respect for hard work, and a great way to get money in 2008!
Hello again from J-List. Once again we've made the hop from San Diego to Japan, traveling the 5443 miles (8759 km) from our American home to our Japanese one. The flight was fine, although bumpier than normal due to the extra turbulence in the skies in winter.
We've returned just in time for our favorite time of year, oshogatsu, or the New Year's Day holidays. Unlike the happy, boisterous fun that is New Year's in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jan. 1 is a very solemn day in Japan. Today is New Year's Eve, and everyone is rushing around doing everything they need to get done before the holidays, like finishing up their o-soji ("big cleaning") so they can face the new year with a clean house, and readying various decorations for the home. It's customary to eat Japanese soba (buckwheat) noodles on the last day of the year, which supposedly helps everyone enjoy long lives, and December 31st is the busiest day for restaurants that serve noodles. But the most important activity that takes place on New Year's Eve is watching Kohaku, the Red and White Song Battle, an annual live show put that's been put on by NHK every year since 1951 in which female singers (the red team) battle male singers (the white team) to see which side can put on the most extravagant performances. The Kohaku show is "the" music event of the year, comparable to the Academy Awards in the U.S., and virtually every top star will be there, from Leah Dizon to Gackt to the singers in Hello! Project and enka greats Saburo Kitajima and Sayuri Ishikawa. After the Kohaku show ends at 11:45 pm, NHK broadcasts Yuku Toshi, Kuru Toshi (Year Going, Year Coming) showing solemn images of people making their way to beautiful Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, Christian churches and Muslim mosques to do hatsu-mode (ha-tsu MOH-day), the first prayer for good luck and happiness of the New Year, overlaid with the sound of a bell that chimes 108 times. Then, the TV display flashes "0:00," letting you know the New Year has silently arrived.
Japan is nothing if not the land of the "boom," and you never know what will become popular next. Right now, thousands of cell phone users are displaying an image of the enigmatic Yoshihiro Miwa as their screen wallpaper, which is rumored to increase a person's luck with regards to money, what with yellow being the feng shui color for wealth and all. A survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing who went to Tokyo to become a famous cabaret singer, Miwa was very close to writer Yukio Mishima, the guy who tried to bring about a pro-Emperor coup by the military then committed seppuku when the soldiers laughed at him. Author of 20 books and an accomplished stage performer and director, Miwa-san may be most famous internationally as the voices of the wolf goddess Moro and the Witch of the Waste in Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle. If you're curious to see if this Japanese superstition is correct, try setting your cell phone's wallpaper to this picture and see if you get more money in 2008!
One thing I really like about the Japanese is the tradition of kinben (KEEN-ben), or diligence and hard work, as an ideal for people to aspire to, essentially the local version of the Protestant Work Ethic. By and large, this diligence is usually measured in terms of time rather than raw effort, and doing an hour or two of overtime each day is probably the norm for most Japanese companies, allowing employees show their hard work to their colleagues in a unit that everyone can easily recognize, time. The highest expression of kinben is the tetsuya, the all-nighter, working so hard that you work all night long to finish your important project. If an employee in Japan works all night on a project, he will probably gain a lot of respect from his boss and coworkers (the term also applies to studying all night for a test). Recently I asked my wife what the "worst" job in Japan was considered to be, the one parents tell their kids they'll end up doing if they don't study hard (when I was a boy it was "ditch digger" but it may have changed since then). She told me that Japanese don't usually speak ill of a profession like that, since someone has to do it after all, and in fact, many of the jobs some might consider to be "bad" such as road construction or the guys that empty the BOT-ton toilets in older homes that don't have pluming yet, are actually good in a way, since they pay much higher due to the fact that few people are willing to do them.
J-List would like to wish everyone a safe, warm and wonderful New Year's holiday tomorrow. Within the month of December, you wish someone a Happy New Year by saying yoi o-toshi o (YO-ee oh-TOH-shi oh), which literally means "[have a] good year." After January 1st arrives, you switch to akemashite omedeto (ah-keh-MASH-tay oh-meh-deh-TOH), literally "congratulations on opening the New Year." It's polite to use this second greeting the first time you see a Japanese person after the new year arrives. Well, until next time, yoi o-toshi o, everyone!
Since we're giving the J-List crew some much-deserved time off, I'm presenting a few of my Most Favorite Things today, some items I think are especially cool to show you. You can view all J-List products updated in the last three days by clicking this link.
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December 26, 2007
New Year’s Decoration ~ SHIMENAWA & SHISHIMAI
New Year's Decoration ~ SHIMENAWA & SHISHIMAI
A traditonal Japanese Shimenawa wreath with simulated pine elements and gold and silver wire (representing prosperity). Shimenawa means ''enclosing rope'', and is used for separating areas as sacred spaces as part of Shinto spiritual tradition (for example a sumo ring or shinto shrine). They are also used to mark trees that are inhabited by spirits called Kodama (like in Pricess Mononoke), cutting down a tree protected by a Shimenawa is believed to lead to misfortune. Decorated with a Shishimai...
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