By "everybody", I mean just "me" because Japanese-Games-Shop.com is a one-gaijin show!
...And the reason why I haven't posted on this blog or added anything new to the website for a while is because my nose was firmly attached to the grindstone in the run up to Christmas. As you can see in the photo below, the site has been getting a lot of traffic...!
New Years Resolution: Add more stuff to Japanese-Games-Shop.com
Now that the New Year has arrived I have found some time to expand the range of products. This month I am concentrating on manga and have added three new lines already.
Crayon Shin ChanI must admit that this is one of my all time favourite manga series. It was a huge hit in Japan in the 1990's - yeah, I was here then too, so I remember it well. I even bought a Shin-chan character bottle of bubble bath to take back to the U.K. as a memento, but my sojourn in Japan has outlasted both the bubble bath and the bottle...
Crayon Shin Chan is a nursery school kid who indulges in thoroughly "inappropriate" (ghastly word) speech and behaviour. The manga was originally aimed at the adult market, but once it was turned into a television cartoon is became immensely popular with kids too, doubtless because they take great delight in identifying with, and most likely copying, Shin-chan's impertinence and lack of decorum.If you study written Japanese then this comic will be a stimulating and enjoyable challenge to your reading comprehension skills. The basic dialogue uses a lot of everyday language and common expressions, but there is also a lot of word-play as Shin-chan inadvertently - or deliberately - makes linguistic blunders that embarrass his parents or outrage whoever else happens to be in ear-shot of them... However, like many manga, the kanji characters are drawn with furigana syllables down the side to aid reading comprehension.
NobunagaThis is a very different calibre of manga... Nobunaga is one of the greatest Samurai generals of Japanese history. The manga series is a dramatic retelling of his life and struggles.
The illustrator, Ryouichi Ikegami, deserves to be better known in the West. In 2001, he won the Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga as the artist of another manga series called "Heat", which I will shortly be adding to my manga listings...The language level of this series is quite demanding, partly because of the historical material it deals with and partly because of the lack of supporting furigana. This is a manga series for big boys and girls!
Howl's Moving CastleThis is the comic version of the 2004 animated film, "Hauru No Ugoki-Shiro", directed by possibly the greatest animation artist of this generation, Hayao Miyazaki.
The Japanese animation film is an adaptation of a young adult fantasy novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones. It broke box office records in Japan, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.The film-comic series faithfully reproduces the animation in full-colour. If you are not familiar with the film, check here for a synopsis and some nice stills.
The Japanese dialogue in the film-comic is relatively straightforward and every kanji character is supported by furigana.
The nice thing about these comics is that they are Printed in full colour on good quality paper.
David Hurley
Japanese-Games-Shop.com
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