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Kuroda Toy Store in Maebashi

Mayu discovered a store called Kuroda Toy Doll （黒田人形店）in Maebashi’s Central Shopping Arcade on the internet and on Saturday we went there to check it out. Shoutengai （商店街）are covered shopping arcades and a tradition of Japan. Unfortunately, sometimes these shopping arcades have grown unsuccessful over the years with empty real estate. In English they call this one Maebashi Rose Avenue and this is where Kuroda is located. We’ve only ever been to this shopping arcade once before, when we happened to be in the area during the Tanabata Festival in July several years ago.

Kuroda specializes in traditional toys, so basically nothing which involves video screens. The first thing I noticed upon entering was their selection of Tomica cars.

Misato’s car from Evangelion.

Macross and Gundam Tomica!

Back to the Future Part III and Castle of Cagliostro cars. I bought the BttF III Delorean with the ’50s tires at Village Vanguard earlier this year. I hadn’t seen the one with train wheels until now.

A nice, modest selection of plastic models was there. Here’s the Gunpla selection. I bought the F91 Gundam kit at this store.

Here are car, ship, castle, and other plastic models.

An RC Delorean from Back to the Future! I’ve never seen this before.

There were many older anime and game figures. Here’s Kasumi from Dead or Alive and Mai from King of Fighters.

Plenty of traditional, wooden toys too. A meow-meow tower and… a toy for Klingons? Oh never mind… that would be “Qapla,” not “Kapla.”

There were so many different toys there, such as kendama, plush dolls, and so on. My daughter Ulan wanted the bullet plushy from Super Mario Bros and I got the F91 Gundam model. It’s a neat store.

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New buttons I got at the Mikado Game Center

Mikado had these pin badge buttons in their gachapon capsule toy dispensers, so I got three. One big one that says “PUSH START” (I’m not sure why it says “2006” because according to the Japanese Wikipedia, it started in 2009), and a set of buttons for the Mikado location in Ikebukuro (top) and the original in Takadanobaba (bottom). As I mentioned in the previous post, Mikado is a legendary spot for retrogaming.

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Coming of age in the 1990s

While I was born in the ’70s and consider myself a child of the ’80s, I came of age in the ’90s. I began high school in 1990 and graduated college in December 1999. Rayon shirts with neon-colored, geometric designs buttoned up to the top of the collar. Going from dialing into local BBSes to logging onto the internet through a local ISP. $1 Whoppers at Burger King. Caller ID box next to the family telephone, but no answering machine, and the phone tag that ensued. The unfortunate death of New Wave and Shoegaze music at the hands of Grunge. Reading Star Wars novels and that sense of excitement for the Star Wars series we had before Greedo shot first. The popularity explosion of coffee houses. A bubble economy of the dot com era that defied all economic rules. Buying a Super Nintendo, Sony Playstation, and Sega Saturn. Struggling to find love as well as myself, and the heartbreaking journey that entailed. Calling the girl I liked but getting her moody little sister who probably never told her I called. And best of all, writing letters to my pen-pal in Japan whom I proposed to in January 2000, then married a year later. I was a kid in the ’80s, but became a man in the ’90s. Check out this video and reminisce of the golden decade of the ’90s.

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Weird Nadia merchandise found on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions Japan

Since Nadia is one of my favorite anime series, I like looking for random Nadia-related merchandise on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions Japan. Some of the stuff is pretty cool, like Nadia pencil boards, a Nadia ruler, and a booklet of Nadia postcards. Some of the stuff, however, is rather weird.

Oh look, it’s a gun… just like Nadia used in the show. Right? Not. So this is a “fire gun” that is made to resemble the Nautilus. I’m guessing that it creates sparks.

Ha! So this bottle of water came out for the 30th anniversary of the Nadia anime. At least the water isn’t blue due to food coloring. So it’s not really the “Secret of Blue Water” but rather just the “Secret of Water” in this case.

So this is a 1:6 scale Nadia garage kit by T’s System. The proportions look weird. She looks like Gumby who got pulled in both directions. I mean, look at her abdomen! She just wasn’t sculpted right because she is too skinny. The rest isn’t too bad, but dang! Look at her belly! She has the proportions of an alien who’s being starved to death. Eat a sandwich, girl! Plus whoever painted this really got her skintone all wrong. She’s supposed to have dark brown skin. Why do they keep whitewashing her in recent years? They didn’t do this to her 30 years ago. All the merch back then showed her with a proper skin tone.

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I’ve finished the Asuka and Rei sofubi heads

Here they are after painting their eyes and eyebrows. The main paints were airbrushed with V-Color paints and the eyes were done with acrylic paints. I’m particularly happy with how Asuka’s eyes turned out.

Here they are after I shaded their hair.  I used dark blue pastel chalk to do the recessed areas of Rei’s hair and an acrylic goache mix of burnt umber and red to do Asuka’s hair. For some reason, pastel chalks were not sticking to Asuka’s hair. Probably too glossy. Then I did a flat clear coat of V-Color to seal them in and stop the shine. I think I’m ready for assembly now.