In time-honored Japanese tradition…banzai, banzai, BANZAI!!

Congratulations to Ms. N. W. of West Virginia who today placed order #20000 on Japan Store. We didn’t run any kind of promotion campaign around this milestone order number, but we will be sending this customer a few extra goodies and upgrading the shipping to Express Mail just to mark the occasion.

Of course we couldn’t have got to the magical number of 20,000 without all the thousands of customers along the way. So on behalf of the Banzai Cat and all of us here at Japan Zone, I’d like to take this opportunity to send a big Thank You to all Japan Store’s loyal customers!

Mark McBennett
President, Japan Zone

Welcome to 2013, the Year of the Snake! Unfortunately the Japan Store snake has been busy feeding on bugs over the last couple of weeks. Software bugs that were causing some issues with our popular range of jikatabi products since mid-December. Thankfully it looks like the bugs are finally gone and you should now have no trouble ordering those cool Rikio Fighters or Marugo Sports Jogs. And I’d like to extend my apologies to all of you who tried in vain to order them over the holidays, along with a peace offering – a $5 voucher good on any order over $29 (which covers any jikatabi product you can think of). Just enter JS-SNAKE2013 when you checkout and you’re good to go. The voucher is good until the end of January.

Thanks as always for your patience.

Mark
President, Japan Zone

With Halloween just over a month away, this seems like a good time to plug our selection of handmade Japanese masks. We have a selection of demons and goblins who feature in the many popular folktales familiar to everyone in Japan. The designs originate in the traditional theater forms of noh and kagura dance, but they’re just as well suited to scaring the daylights out of kids and adults alike.

There is something beautifully creepy about the hanya masks in particular. Based on the legend of a woman transformed into a demon by jealousy, the horns of her jealousy are still symbolically present on the heads of unmarried Japanese women. Hence the white headpiece that is worn by the bride to hide them in the traditional Japanese wedding.

Of course, Halloween doesn’t mean you have to dress up to be scary. So our variety of tabi, jikatabi and other ninja gear can be combined to dress up as a stealthy Japanese assassin.

Most businesses in Japan close down for the annual Golden Week holidays. This year, the holidays run from April 29 to May 6. Japan Store will remain open for business but during that time most of our suppliers will be closed so deliveries of orders will probably be delayed. We will do what we can to get orders shipped out as quickly as humanly possible but we ask for your patience over the next week or so.

Following an expose by the highly regarded Environmental Investigation Agency of whale and cetacean products sold through Amazon Japan, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon Inc, we here at Japan Store have decided to no longer purchase anything from Amazon until the company imposes a ban on such products.

Not only do we object in principle to the sale of such products and the unnecessary hunting of dolphins, whales and other cetaceans, but scientific analysis of the meat being sold reveals that it consistently contains levels of toxins far exceeding the safe levels dictated by the Japanese government. And these products often contain meat from endangered and protected cetacean species, or meat that is not specifically identified and is likely to be dolphin or porpoise.

You can read EIA’s extensive report here: Amazon.com’s Unpalatable Profits

We encourage you to leave a message on Amazon’s Facebook wall here: Amazon.com on Facebook

I should mention that unfortunately Rakuten also has thousands of listings for whale and cetacean food products – almost 2,800 if you search for 鯨 (whale) and almost 1,200 if you search for 鯨肉 (whale meat). While Japan Store is not affiliated with Rakuten, we do source some of our products there and a boycott of the service would have a serious impact on the operation of this store.

And for the record, Yahoo! Japan also sells these products.

Mark McBennett
Owner, Japan Store

Update: It’s only been half a day since I posted this blog entry and the news just came in – Amazon Japan have removed all whale and whale-related food products from their online store. It remains to be seen if this will be a permanent move and whether Amazon Japan will issue a formal policy statement. But still, wow! Social media pressure rocks!

As Monday, October 10 is Health & Sports Day in Japan, a national holiday, we will be getting out of the office and doing something…healthy and sporty. So there will be slight shipping delays on items ordered over the three-day weekend.

You can find a list of all the Japanese national holidays on our main site, Japan Zone.

Here at Japan Store we escaped any direct damage from Typhoon Roke (or just Typhoon #15 as it’s known in Japan), but it has caused major disruptions in some areas of the country. Parcel delivery companies are experiencing major delays and as a result our shipping schedule is a day or more behind for most orders. However the post office is open and working as usual so if we happen to have your items here in the office we can ship to you right away.

We’re still waiting for some deliveries that should have come in this morning. Hopefully we’ll get the shipment in time for this afternoon’s post office pickup.

If not, we plan to pack and ship tomorrow (a national holiday) and over the weekend if necessary.

As always, we’ll update you once your order has been shipped.

As the continuing rise of the Japanese yen has put more and more pressure on prices, we have decided to add a new shipping option. SAL stands for Surface, Air, Land and means that packages are transported by air from Japan to your country, but by land within the country. In the U.S. for example, this would mostly affect those living further away from the west coast or areas that don’t have direct flights from Japan.

Like Airmail, SAL is only cheaper than EMS for packages that weigh 2kg or less, using what Japan Post call the “small packet rate.” So for orders that add up to a packed weight of more than 2kg, you will see only the EMS rate offered in the checkout. This will help avoid customers choosing to pay more for the slower shipping method (yes, it has happened!).

We hope this cheaper option will help offset the cost of shipping the items you need halfway across the world.

As you may know, the Japanese yen has been an increasingly strong currency for the last few years, especially as the U.S. dollar has weakened. So for a Japan-based export business like us, it is obviously important to keep a close eye on exchange rates. And every so often the yen hits a level against the dollar where we have no choice but to raise our prices or go out of business. This happened recently as the dollar fell below the 78-yen level. The debt ceiling crisis in the U.S. was one big factor and the dollar rebounded dramatically once that was resolved, but only temporarily it seems. As I write, it is below the 77-yen level and so we are forced to adjust prices accordingly.

Where possible, we look for another way to avoid passing the cost on to you, the customer. One way is to open a wholesale account with us, which allows you to enjoy significant discounts even on smaller orders, and bigger savings on bulk orders. In most cases, the only condition is that you have completed at least one regular order with us. Contact us if you’re interested in applying for a wholesale account and we’ll do whatever we can to help you battle that rampaging yen!

We got a call from Japan Post today to say they won’t be accepting packages addressed to Canada while the postal worker’s strike is going on there. Japan Store will continue to accept orders from customers in Canada but please understand that we won’t be able to ship until the situation has been resolved.

I guess this just hasn’t been a good week for Canada…

Website of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers