Japanese Corporate Fashions & More

Hello all. Another slice of life from Japan for you. It will be nice to have Christmas again, and my kids are looking forward to it, as kids are wont to do. My wife, who never celebrated Christmas until she married me, always goes through a period where she pooh-poohs it all, but she comes around when the time comes. Here are some pictures for you to check out. These are pictures I had handy from Daisuke's wedding a month or two back. Japanese weddings are BIG affairs and this one probably cost $50,000. It was great fun. The glasses seen below are interesting glasses we were given which turn any pinpoint of light (such as a candle) into a heart in your vision. If people tell me they like the pictures I'll try to post them every post. I got a much improved phone with a camera in it, so the ability to go somewhere and say, hey, I should take a picture of this, is greatly improved. Today's J-List post is below: Hello from all of us in Japan. We hope everyone is having a great holiday season. We're all getting ready for a nice Christmas here in Japan, with presents under the tree and our Christmas Cake reserved from our favorite bakery. We thank everyone for your kind support this past year and wish you all the best holidays ever. Japan can take the strangest things and turn them into a fashion trend. Over the past few years there's been a bizarre minor trend towards wearing corporate symbols on clothes, usually famous companies like Texaco and British Petroleum which aren't active in the Japanese market at all. The mini-boom in corporate casual wear is attributed to Japanese pro wrestler Sakuraba, who made a shirt that replaced the famous Union 76 logo with "39," numbers which stand for "saku" according to a Japanese number code that I have yet to figure out, the first two syllables of his name. Today, it's quite common to see people sporting the "76" logo on their clothes here, despite the fact that they probably have no idea what the company sells (since Union 76 doesn't exist here). One concept that comes up a lot in anime or dating sim games is the childhood friend, called osana-najimi (oh-SA-NA NA-ji-mee), a word which seems impossible to remember until you break it down (osanai means young, and najimu is a verb meaning "to become friendly with"). At least in rural parts of the country where we live, Japanese tend to not be very mobile, and my wife's family has lived on the same land for generations, since the Edo Period at least. My son goes to the same elementary school that my wife went to when she was a child...which is the same elementary school her mother attended, too, back during World War II. Because everyone in our city has been here for years, my wife has many osana-najimi friends who she's grown up with, people she's known for years and years. In my family, we moved frequently whenever my mother got a new job or bought a new house, living in several states and in New Zealand before settling down in San Diego, so the concept of having roots that go back that far is really staggering to me. Are you looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy person on your list? We humbly recommend J-List gift certificates. The spiffy J-List gift certificate system allows you to gift the gift of cool things from Japan to anyone with an email address. We'll send them their gift certificate, complete with a warm message from you and a PDF file that they can print out, or send it to yourself, print out the gift certificate, and present it to them in person. It's the perfect last-minute gift for the Japanophile who has everything. We'll be processing these gift certificate orders every 8 hours as we get close to December 25th. Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work." See the JBOX.com site if under 18 or offended by this kind of stuff.

	I@m Pan Taron. Japan is the land of characters, be it Hello Kitty or Bad Batz Maru or this cool new one, Panda-Z, a giant robot flown by the young Pan Taron. Here's a new toy line that features figures with little shirts Pan Taron can wear.
	Inuyasha Figures. For fans of Inu Yasha, here's a worthy set of figures that just came out. I haven't seen the actual figures yet (Daisuke took the pictures and sealed the boxes) but ALL the toys Furuta has put out in the past have been extremely good quality.
	Mission. Exposure in Tokyo. I am not familar with the name of Jun Seto which means she must be a new face in the JAV pageant -- JAV meaning Japan Adult Video by the way. This is a nice "indies" offering exploring the Japanese fetish of stocking legs.
	Japanese New Year's decorations. New Year's is a big day in Japan, and there are many interesting traditional decorations that people put out in the last week of December through the middle of January or so. Here's a nice "lucky Daruma" decoration to hang on your door.