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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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Enjoying the modeling hobby in Japan despite cramped living spaces

Living in smaller living conditions in Japan, there is an art to maximizing the space you have. I found these pictures on Pinterest and found them interesting. One thing to note is the absence of the “carpet monster” that Western modelers often complain about. Homes in Japan may have area rugs, but do not have permanently-carpeted rooms. You’ll see tatami rooms, but not carpet. I don’t like carpet, nor tatami for that matter. Anyhow, check out these pictures.

This fellow has a bunk bed and uses the bed on top as a place to stash his models. The model workbench fits underneath that nicely. The extractor booth’s air hose seems permanently attached to the window. Very clean and orderly, with a convenient L-shaped desk.

This is pretty incredible. This person turned a closet into a workbench! Very adequate lighting, and the tiny video screen for entertainment or whatever is a nice touch. No idea what it’s hooked up to, but that would be perfect for a Raspberry Pi computer, I think.

Holy cow! This is a chaotic mess, yet I admire how much stuff he’s managed to cramp into this small space. I’m about halfway to this guy’s level. Unlike the pictures above with the clean floors, if this guy loses a small piece on the floor, he’ll have quite a task on hand to find it. I like his poster of a Mitsubishi F-2 on the wall.

I also came across these photos on Pinterest and realized that they belong together. Here are four tall shelf racks. I love his tastes in models! It’s all character modeling. Can you spot what you like? I see Knight Rider, Mad Max, Gachaman, Star Wars, plenty of Gundam, Yamato, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, plenty of Gerry Anderson stuff, Votoms, and of course Macross. He even has that big Mega Force kit! Bonus points for keeping model categories together like that. (Click the images to expand, then open them in a new tab in your browser to see even closer detail to see the boxes.)

Again we see air hoses permanently attached outside. This is a nice idea. I have to crack my window and hang the air hoses out, but that means that mosquitos can come in unless I spray mosquito repellant onto the curtain. Speaking of which, I should buy some now that the weather has warmed up.

This is a bit too claustrophobic for my tastes. This guy is working on a Ma.K kit. He’s got paint bottles to the right. What’s in those boxes? It looks like the room is larger beyond those boxes.

This is pretty cool. A nice modeling workbench in the corner of the room. With that plastic drawer there though, where does his legs go? It’s packed solid underneath. Nice extractor though. It’s illuminated within. Nice.

Incredible. This guy obviously likes a lot of Gunpla.

Good golly, that’s a lot of resin garage kits! Super cramped work area too. At least there’s anime to watch.

Alright, this is not cramped at all. Just lots of neat stuff going on all at once. Nice window to let in plenty of light, too. Looks cozy.

Nothing says “modeling in Japan” more than sitting on a small table on a tatami mat floor. Oh yes, and with a blanket for your lap.

I’ll take pictures of my own workbench. Currently it’s just a big mess at the moment. I’ll put that in another post later.

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Cherry blossoms in Nagano Prefecture, April 2004

It’s cherry blossom season now! Going through my box of old photographs, I found these pictures of cherry blossoms in a park near where my in-laws live in Nagano Prefecture. We were visiting Japan for a month when I took these. These photos were taken on Fujicolor 200 film with my Canon AE-1 Program SLR camera. Below are photos I took at night on a bulb exposure with my tripod.

Lastly is this cute picture of Mayu I took the next day at that park.

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A birthday spent in Tokyo Station’s basement

Last week, the three of us went to Tokyo to submit a passport application at the US Embassy for Ulan. It was Mayu’s birthday too. Because I could pay for the passport in advance through PayPal, it sped up the process. An appointment is required, which I did online. We were only there for about an hour. We finished there around 10:30 am, then took the subway back to Tokyo Station.

The rest of the time we spent in Tokyo was in the underground shopping area beneath Tokyo Station. There they have Tokyo Character Street, which you can see in the picture above. I covered this place on my site 12 years ago, when I did a photo journal of our trip to Tokyo Sky tree in 2013. Tokyo Character Street is a collection of speciality shops, for Studio Ghibli, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, Rilakkuma, One Piece (I hate that show), etc. It’s changed a lot since then. The Gundam Cafe is gone, and now there is a Harry Potter store, etc.

So these characters are from a comic/anime called Chiikawa. They’re like these adorable RPG characters who supposedly go on quests, but most of the time they are eating bento and drinking tea and doing cute stuff. Ulan loves these characters. 

We had lunch at a grilled fish restaurant since the “Ramen Street” area had long lines waiting for those restaurants. It was Mayu’s birthday, so I let her decide where to go. We also had 1,300 yen parfaits after we did more shopping. Tokyo can be a bit expensive!

There were actually two Ghibli-themed stores there. These Porco Rosso punch puppets were at the one featuring high-end merchandise. I ended up buying more stuff for Ulan’s upcoming birthday than for Mayu’s birthday.

There was a Shonen Jump pop-up store where I bought a deck of Spy Family Uno cards.

One store had these neat-looking Evangelion-themed storage containers.

Ulan likes Kirby, although she’s never played a Kirby game before. I got her a pocket towel at the Kirby store.

There is a whole underground shopping mall down there too, which we only barely entered. We went to the Can Do 100 yen shop, Kaldi Coffee, and the Don Quixote snack shop. Looking at the map online, I realize that it is bigger than I thought. 

Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay long in Tokyo as it was a weekday and we had to go back to work and school the next day. We took the 2:40pm shinkansen back home. We had a nice time.

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Tokyo’s Shimokitawaza area at night from January 2000

Fujicolor 200 slide film photography taken with a Canon AE-1 Program camera. This is the Shimokitazawa Minami-guchi Shoutengai (Shimokitazawa Station south exit’s shopping street). The Shimokitazawa district is young and alive, and is an alternative to Harajuku. I took this photo for my college photography class at ASU West.

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“Macross: Do You Remember Love?” movie re-released in movie theaters!

To commemorate the release of “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” on 4k bluray, the movie has been simultaneously re-released on the big screen, shown exclusively at Toho Theaters. From where I live, the two closest Toho theaters are either in Fujimi, Saitama Prefecture or Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture.

My friend Adrian and I went to see the movie at the Toho Cinema in Utsunomiya. My friend was only familiar with Plus and Frontier, but had never seen the original. It was shown on screen 6 and there was this mini poster outside of the entrance in the picture above. It was an incredible experience to see this in a theater for the first time.

It was fully surround sound, too. In 2020, during the beginning of the madness of the era of Corona-chan when every other theater seat was taped off for the purposes of the “social distancing” nonsense (junk science), several Studio Ghibli movies were being shown in theaters to keep their revenue going. I took the opportunity to see Nausicaa at the cinema. It was in stereo only, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but only the front two left/right speakers were active. If they would have just had all of the left speakers duplicated for the left channel and all of the right speakers active for the right channel it wouldn’t have been so noticeable, but only the front two speakers by the screen were active and it took a while to get used to that. It was a cool experience to see Nausicaa on the big screen, but with the sound the way it was, it felt like I was watching it on a very big TV screen, far away. Seeing DYRL really dwarfed that experience.

The beginning of the credits with the song “Tenshi no Enogu” featured the animation from Flashback, which has been the standard since the second laserdisc release. The decapitation scenes were not edited, so this was the original movie experience (plus the Flashback concert animation). I’m gonna buy this release.

I’m glad my friend could go with me. My daughter calls this the “uaki (“cheating”) movie” because she was on Team Minmay when she first saw it, and was offended when Hikaru kissed Misa in the underwater city. I have this same movie poster on my wall, so I guess she was expecting the movie to be a love story between Hikaru and Minmay and she got pissed. So whenever I’d play this laserdisc movie, she’d gripe a bit. Now I wanna get it on bluray and make her gripe more!

We both had popcorn in the theater, but after the movie we were hungry for dinner. Since we were in Utsunomiya and it was Adrian’s first time visiting the city, we found a gyoza restaurant in front of Utsunomiya Station. Utsunomiya is famous for gyoza, after all.

There were many types of gyoza to choose from. This is “pakchi gyoza.” “Pakchi” is the Thai word for coriander, or “cilantro” as it’s known by in the USA where we use the Spanish word for the herb. Many people in Japan hate pakchi because to them it smells like stinkbugs. I’ve heard that said often. I really do not think it smells like stinkbugs at all. It has such a fresh, green smell that I find refreshing. Fortunately, my wife likes pakchi. It’s amusing because most Japanese people love eating natto, which stinks and its taste triggers my puking instinct. I can’t describe its stench, but it really smells bad. So in the same way many Japanese people cannot eat pakchi, I cannot eat natto. I could taste spicy nampla (fish sauce), giving the gyoza a Thai-style taste. Garnished with cilantro on top, it was very good. The restaurant also had “negi mayo” (green onion and mayonnaise) as well as cheese gyoza. Fantastic food. I didn’t have any alcohol because I had to drive us back home to Gunma Prefecture.

We listened to a lot of Ramones and The Clash in the car there and back. It was a great evening.

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A rare 7-11 appears!

A new 7-11 opened recently in Kawaba, Gunma Prefecture and perhaps due to local town ordinances or something, this 7-11 has wood paneling and the sign is brown. It’s the only one in Japan, apparently. My wife Mayu said it’s just like the turquoise-colored McDonalds in Sedona, AZ—the only one in the world. Sedona has particular guidelines for signage, and the garish yellow and red of a McDonalds sign was changed to turquoise to comply with Sedona’s ordinances. Maybe this is why this 7-11 is made like this. This is very unique and pretty.

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Ryokuchi Park in Maebashi

The Hirose River runs through central Maebashi, and the Ryokuchi Park here is a tranquil oasis in the urban landscape. Last year, Mayu and I discovered this park in summertime. On Monday morning, we had time to kill after dropping our daughter off for her sports club activity. It had rained that morning, so this July morning was pleasant and cool.

The trees grow tall here along the river. Apartment buildings (or condos?) line either side. It is envious to think of how peaceful it must be to live here, to always hear the rushing of water in the river.

Summer ornaments decorate the trees, made by students.

A poem called “Kokoro” (“Heart”) is carved into the bricks of the pedestrian path. I didn’t stop to read it all.

Here is where there is a strong waterfall.

Here is a water wheel, but no water was flowing through it. There are also statues lining the path.

This is a place of urban beauty.

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“Fun Fun Cup” Cup Noodle arcade game

Mayu and I went to a game center today and we played this Cup Noodle game called Fun Fun Cup. Insert 100 yen and the game releases colored plastic balls which you toss into the cup. the lid opens and closes… sometimes fully open, sometimes partially open. We scored 53 balls in 60 seconds.