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Greetings From J-List

5/23/2013

Hello again from J-List. I've made the hop from Japan to the U.S. once again, where I'll be for a couple months for the summer anime convention season. The first con we'll be doing this year is the Phoenix Comicon, our first time appearance at this event, and I made the drive to Phoenix with the J-List San Diego staff today. If you'll be at the show, we certainly hope you'll come see us at booth 480 and check out the products we've brought, plus pick up free stuff.

Being back in the U.S. is always nice, and I enjoy surfing the culture shock -- actually, reverse culture shock since I'm originally from here, though it's hard to remember that at times. There are the obvious differences, like the "small" drink served in shops in the airport being larger than anything seen in Japan and the lack of toilets that wash your butt for you, and I'm slowly getting accustomed to being back home. Now if only the jet lag would go away...


We're going to have fun at the Phoenix Comicon; there's a "proper" way to sit in Japan.

Language reflects culture and vice-versa, and there are many examples of this in Japanese. Japan is a place that usually values one "correct" way of doing things -- for example, studying hard to get into a famous university then going to work for a respected company as a salaryman is seen in a better light than, say, quitting your job as an English teacher to start a company selling all forms of Japanese pop culture, as I did with J-List. There are many words that represent this tendency to prefer doing things the way they should be done, such as ちゃんと chanto ("properly") or きちんと kichinto ("correctly"). Ditto for writing Chinese characters -- each kanji has an exact stroke order that must be learned, and when people count something on paper here, they write the five-stroke kanji for "correct" (正) rather than make "chicken scratch" tally marks as we do in the U.S. There's even a proper way to sit, called 正座 seiza (meaning "correct sitting"), which is a polite way of kneeling with your rear end resting on the bottoms of your feet. Seiza is widely used in martial arts, flower arranging, and zen meditation, as well as many formal settings when you need to show respect to others. One time a few years ago my daughter attended tea ceremony with the Girl Scouts during which everyone had to sit in seiza style for two hours or so. My "gaijin" daughter had no problem maintaining the kneeling pose, but my Japanese wife's legs kept falling asleep, to the great amusement of the instructor.

A couple of weeks ago I went driving with my wife to neighboring Nagano Prefecture to stay in a nice onsen hotel, which is a hobby of ours. While we were en route, I asked my wife to input the hotel's address into "car navi" (whatever an in-car GPS navigation thing is called in English, I've lived in Japan too long to know for sure). A funny thing happened though: she wasn't able to read the kanji in the hotel's address, so she couldn't input it into the GPS system. You'd naturally expect a non-Japanese like me to be unable to read kanji occasionally, but names for places can also be extremely challenging to Japanese who aren't from that area. (It's especially bad in the Tohoku region of Japan, where most place names were taken from Ainu, the language of the aboriginal people of Northern Japan, and no one who's not from there can read anything.) We eventually arrived at the hotel and it was very nice. I am happy to report that the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands isn't doing permanent economic damage to the relationship of Japan and China, as the hotel was positively overrun with several busloads of Chinese tourists who had come to Japan to shop and experience the joys of volcanically heated baths.

Remember that J-List loves Hatsune Miku, and we carry dozens of her products from Japan, including figures, PS3 and PSVita dancing games, plus Miku-chan's pantsu. Click to see the most awesome Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid products, as ranked by our customers.

Today's New & Restocked Items

Hiragana Times June 2013 NO. 320

Hiragana Times June 2013 NO. 320

Get all the information you need to know about the Japanese language and what's happening in Japan with another great issue of Hiragana Times, which provides both a chance to practice reading nihongo as well as learn new things about the country. Highly recommended item. This month's issue features an great article on Fukui Prefecture and Hokuriku culture. VIEW PRODUCTS

New and Restocked NSFW / 18+ Products

Tsubomi 7th Anniversary TMA Special Blu-ray Box (Blu-ray Disc) ***12 Discs 1860 MIN***

Tsubomi 7th Anniversary TMA Special Blu-ray

To celebrate Tsubomi's 7th AV debut anniversary, TMA has release this awesome 12 Blu-ray disc collection with more than 31 hours of high definition video, their uncut versions, in this collector pack that fans will definitely want to grab. VIEW PRODUCTS

Peach Princess's 'Brave Soul'

Huge Price Drop on English Eroge & Visual Novels

Do you like your eroge fully translated into English, with uncensored graphics? We thought you might, and that's why we went through and dropped prices on nearly 50 of our popular English game titles, from the outstanding full RPG Brave Soul to the futa work of art Cat Girl Alliance to a ton of excellent "harem" games you will love. Click to see the reduced price games now. VIEW PRODUCTS