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A trip to Mandai in Takasaki, August 2025

So a couple of weekends ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Mandai in Takasaki and look at the neat stuff there. I first checked out the plastic model section. Here’s an Imai kit of the Big Mighty from Mighty Jack. Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans will know about Mighty Jack. I believe I saw the toolings for these models when I worked at Aoshima 9 years ago in one of the company’s storage warehouses.

Imai made a classic Batmobile in 1:42 scale. Weird scale. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kit before.

There were many vintage Arii and Imai Macross kits too. I was tempted to get this one, but decided not to.

Here are vintage kits of Macross, Ideon, Harlock, and Yamato.

Vintage Mospeada, Ideon, Dunbine, and L-Gaim kits.

They have new kits too, of course. Evangelion, Xabungle, Layzner, Dunbine, Sakura Taisen, and Super Robot Taisen. I’ve watched YT videos of that Asuka kit and she looks great, even unpainted.

Plenty of scale aviation kits too! I don’t see those 1:100 scale Platz jet fighter kits very often.

I saw this Street Fighter II bath towel and Chun-Li doll. I was tempted to get the towel, but I couldn’t resist the doll. “Ha ha ha ha! Yatta!”

Lots of Famicom and Super Famicom games, of course.

All the expensive games are kept in the display cases, of course. I didn’t know that Clock Tower was ported to the Wonderswan.

I played a few rounds of Shanghai on a Blast city cabinet in the Gunma Leisure Land game center downstairs.

King of Fighters was playing on a Nesica cabinet.

There was this nice sculpture of Rei on an Evangelion pachinko machine. I don’t ever remember seeing Rei with long hair. Maybe it’s from one of the new movies I never bothered watching.

Here are the signs for the restrooms: Jojo for male and Hatsune Miku for female.

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Book Off in Phoenix, AZ brings a Japanese shopping experience to Arizonans

On my trip to my hometown of Phoenix, AZ during my summer vacation, I was able to visit a Book Off on Bell Road! It opened within recent years. There have been Book Off stores all along in California. When Mayu and I used to live in America, we would visit the Book Off locations in Torrance, Garden Grove, Los Angeles and other areas. But now both Book Off and Daiso stores have opened in the Phoenix area.

Here are the signs outside.

Look at all the books! The books are in English, of course. Otherwise, the experience is just like a Book Off in Japan. This makes Book Off a direct competitor with the long-standing Bookmans store locations in Arizona.

The store clerk says that so much of this stuff is imported from the Book Off locations in Japan. I guess they buy so much stuff that they just export it to the USA for sale there.

So many anime figures for sale in the display case.

So many pin buttons, keychains, and small figures. Just like a Book Off in Japan.

They have import Famicom games from Japan! Star Wars, Red Arima, Parodius, Galaga… neat stuff!

Import Famicom and Super Famicom games too.

Domestically-released modern games are sold used there as well, of course.

This is the Grave of the Fireflies movie soundtrack on vinyl record. I was surprised to find this.

Huge selection of used, English-language manga. I bought several used volumes of Spy Family.

Gunpla! There were also other model kits there too. I even saw an Eggplane Girl resin figure by Hasegawa there, and for a good price. This is so cool.

Dollar books. Very neat. I didn’t have time to look at the SF book selection there. It would’ve been nice if I had more time to spend, but I had quite a busy itinerary with my friends Kevin and Brian. (Our next destination was Andy’s Hobby HQ which I featured in my previous blog post.)

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Images of Jean and Nadia’s wedding in the novel, “Jean and Nadia’s Longest Day”

I posted before about how the Nadia movie was a real dud, especially since it reset the characters and failed to feature Jean and Nadia’s wedding in this post here although it was featured in a doujinshi manga I included scans of here. Well, I recently learned of this novel published by Tokuma Shoten called “Jean and Nadia’s Longest Day,” written by Hirotoshi Kobayashi and illustrated by Kazuhiro Miyake. I bought it from Rakuten rather cheaply. There are novelizations of the TV series in three books, but this one is under the “Nadia Stories vol. 1” category. Vol. 2 in this series apparently involves an older Marie and Samson. Maybe it’s a story about how they get married? It’s the same writer and artist team.

In this book’s prologue, it says that Jean and Nadia were married in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I’ve only read the first page so far. It’s pretty easy to understand so far, with only a few kanji I had to look up. I’m sure the reading level will become more difficult though as this is an adventure story after all. By the looks of it, the antagonist in this story is some weird non-human with some weird Illuminati-style horns growing out of his forehead. Anyhow, it’s neat seeing Nadia a bit older. Aside from the full color images I’ve scanned below, there are some occasional black and white illustrations interspersed through the pages of the novel.

An older Nadia, apparently sewing her wedding dress?

Nadia as a happy bride. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto did not do the artwork for this book, but as I mentioned above it was done by Kazuhiko MIyake. Not bad. So now I’ll show you some of the black and white pictures from the book, namely the ones featuring Nadia.

The only nice thing about the Nadia movie were the older character designs, and the art i this book remains faithful to that image of an older Nadia.

OK, so apparently Nadia makes a re-appearance at the circus she was once the star of? She’s wearing the same clothes, but they’re getting a bit small since she’s no longer 14 years old. Her top barely fits her tits now.

Looks like Nadia’s not having a good day. She got attached to yet another Y-shape, although this time it’s some sort of wall recession. The guy at the bottom is the villain of the story.

I’ll give the book a shot, but I’ve no idea how far I can get into it as I am not fluent enough, even for this novel aimed at adolescents. Nearly 10 years ago, I got to the point where every new kanji started looking the same, and all the pronunciations started sounding the same.

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Rei and Asuka sofubi figure set complete

Here they are. I had to buy more 2mm brass rod because the length I had in Asuka’s leg wasn’t long enough and she began leaning forward. I removed it and put in a longer segment and now there’s no more problem. I’m still thinking that I might paint the base and print out a custom decal for it.

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Evangelion trio iron beads sprite

I made this for a teacher I work with. Evangelion is his favorite anime. He suffers from epilepsy, and the stress from work is once again keeping him from doing his job. He came back last year and did well, but this year has taken a toll on him again, unfortunately.

I used Perler Nano and Iron de Beads (local Japanese iron beads company) mini beads for this. Shinji’s fleshtone is Perler Nano Sand, Rei’s is Nano Cream, and Askua’s is Iron de Beads Fleshtone. Rei’s hair is two tone Iron de Beads Aqua. These colors matched her hair perfectly. Iron de Beads are slightly taller, but they melt well and I like them way better than Hama Minis, which are too small and cause problems.

This is where I got the pattern from. It was done in Lego! I found this image on Pinterest.

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Pearl-clutching nincompoops on Pinterest’s comment section on Evangelion art crack me up

So I guess no girl is safe from exploitation until cartoon girls are safe from exploitation? That seems to be the philosophy of these goody-two-shoes commenting on Evangelion artwork on Pinterest. Nevermind that there are countless American teen movies like American Pie centered on “getting lucky” with plenty of T&A. I was a bit disturbed watching the second season of Stranger Things because it features high school kids having sex. But here’s Evangelion, a show I don’t even really like, although I do like the character designs because I am a fan of Sadamoto’s art style. I do not care what the arbitrary age of the fictitious Evangelion characters are, in the same way that I do not care what the arbitrary age of the characters in those teen movies are, who are portrayed by young adults posing as teenagers. Here we have drawings of girls, voiced by adult voice actresses like Megumi Hayashibara, yet these goofballs are acting as though actual children are being exploited. Yet these same people most likely watch Hollywood movies featuring people who were at Epstein Island, and vote for politicians who are complete pedos like Joe Biden, the Kid Sniffer In Chief.

So above we have a picture of Asuka laying in bed, playing with a puppet. It’s cute and charming. It’s sexy, but not sexualized. Did this happen in the show? I don’t remember. I leave snarky responses to these people. Stuff like, “That’s actually not Asuka, but her 24 year old cousin Shirley.” Why do these people pretend to give a crap?

Holy crap, it’s just a drawing people. If you don’t care about the context of the show, some arbitrary age doesn’t really matter to you. I must say that there’s a difference between sexy and sexualized.

This is just Asuka wearing the suit she wears in the show. I don’t even see why anyone would object to this.

I tried watching the reboot Evangelion movies, but gave up after the second one. So I don’t know why there is a long-haired Rei, or why Asuka has an eye patch, nor did I even know that there’s a 28 year old version of Asuka. You can see here that she’s certainly not built like a 14 year old. Some in the comments are pointing out that she’s 28. Either way, I don’t care as she’s just a drawing. Stupid.

This only seems to be a thing with Evangelion. I saw Ranma 1/2 first when I was in college. Plenty of nudity and shower scenes. It’s just a part of the show, and not once did I think “Oh my gosh, these are teenagers! This is wrong!” It’s just a part of the story. It’s not like they’re having sex or anything. Again, sexy but not sexualized. I haven’t seen the reboot of Ranma 1/2 that’s on Netflix, so I don’t know if the nudity has been toned down. I imagine it probably has. And no such comments on images of Lum from Urusei Yatsura. Or perhaps the sexiest of such schoolgirl anime characters, Madoka from Kimagure Orange Road. Her character is the type of beautiful, unattainable girl with a fantastic body from your school days. There are so many sexy images of Madoka, and so many of them are not as a junior high student, but as a young adult. None of these pictures on Pinterest have any stupid, “OMG she’s only 14” comments.

Seriously, I’ve seen some pretty disgusting stuff while visiting various anime shops in Tokyo and such that are definitely aimed at chomos. Stuff involving naked girls whose years are in the single digits. That’s just disgusting. But speaking as a father of a teenage daughter, there is nothing that these self-righteous internet commandos posting self-righteous comments on Eva girls on Pinterest that would keep her safe. They just post this crap to feel good about themselves.

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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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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.