Hello again from your friends in Japan!
We're having so much fun in Las Vegas. After the first day of the AVN show we took in the Canals of Venice, beautiful Paris and the Eiffel Tower, and New York, New York, all in the casinos. This is such a powerfully alive place, we couldn't be bored for even a few minutes here. Remember, if you'll be in Vegas this weekend, we hope to see you at the show. For more info on the show, see http://adultentertainmentexpo.com
I love Japanese public baths (sento) and hot springs (onsen, pronounced so that the first syllable rhymes with "go"), and take my kids every week -- sometimes twice. Public baths hail back from the Edo era when people didn't have private baths in their homes, and had to go to community facilities to bathe. Hot springs have also a long history, and popular onsen towns like Kusatsu, located in the mountains of Gunma (where J-List is located) have been in use as resort towns for hundreds of years. The other day my son saw a young boy in the bath and asked me why he had a blue bruise on his rear end. This is the famous Mongolian Spot (mokohan in Japanese, "the Old Spot of Mongol"), a blue bruise-like spot which is found on Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian children, including my own kids when they were young. The spots go away when the children reach age five or so. In Japanese, the word for someone who is still a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn is "ao ni-sai" ("still blue 2-year-old"), which is probably related to this spot.
Before I went to Japan back in 1992, I had heard that beef was expensive, and I figured I'd rarely be eating such luxuries as steak in Japan. However steak is quite common in Japan, and there are many restaurants that serve steaks. It's not even that expensive -- especially the more affordable "hamburg steak" (ground-beef steak) that's eaten more commonly than full cuts of meat. The Japanese have a great custom when it comes to eating steak: they take a sauce made of daikon radish that they scoop over your steak, still sizzling on its hot plate. The daikon sauce makes a wonderful "schuaaa" sound as the sauce hits the plate, and you protect yourself from the flying sauce by draping a napkin over your steak while the sizzling dies down. It's a fun part of eating in Japan.
Sometimes I suddenly get "pop culture dissonance," amazed at the turns my own life has taken and at the effect the tiny country of Japan has had on the world. I was watching my Star Trek movie DVDs a few months ago -- and there was good old Mr. Sulu, who, along with Miyagi-san of The Karate Kid, symbolized what Japanese were to me before I came to Japan. (And yet, the name "Sulu" is not Japanese at all, but something that "sounded Japanese at the time.") Now, we've got an anime version of Colonel Sanders selling to chicken to us, and anime-influenced Hollywood movies like the Matrix and Kill Bill. During my time in Japan, I've learned the Japanese words to both the Yamato/Star Blazers and Speed Racer theme songs, and have sung them loudly at the top of Mt. Fuji. I've had the good luck and pleasure to be able to introduce many odd and wacky aspects of Japan to so many great people around the world. Life is fun!
For the new update, the J-List staff has posted a bunch of new and restocked products for you to browse, with many excellent manga, DVD, Japanese snack and gum, toy, wacky and T-shirts items in stock for you. Enjoy them all!
Interested in the hit Japanese mannequin drama OH! Mikey? This is a deliciously bizarre parody of an American family living in Tokyo, with fashion mannequins playing all the parts of the story. In addition to the cute antics of young Mikey, there is the oh-so-dapper James, his wife Barbara, the playful Tony and Charles, Mikey's venomous cousin Laura, and more. All three DVDs in the OH! Mikey series are subtitled in English, so you can enjoy this most excellent and wacky example of Japanese television even if you don't understand Japanese. (The DVDs are region 2, so we humbly recommend the region free DVD players we stock to view.)
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