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.
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.
The front and back of a neat Saturn pillow I found at Shimamura this week. It was actually put in the men’s section, discounted from 1300 yen down to 300! Swanky.
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.
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.
Ulan asked me what picture I wanted her to draw, so I asked her to draw a picture of Yoda fleeing from seagulls. This is what she drew.
“One day I was walking and I found this big log. Then I rolled the log over and underneath was a tiny little stick. And I was like, ‘That log had a child!'”
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.
As I was growing up, back in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, in the far end of the parking lot of the shopping mall , you’d see a little booth with a drive-through window. A lone employee would be inside (I always wondered how he/she takes restroom breaks). There you would drop off your photographic film for overnight development. So instead of taking your film to the drug store, you could just drop it off at one of these kiosks without having to leave your car.
According to Wikipedia, the film was developed and prints made on-site. I always assumed that the film was sent off to a lab somewhere and then re-delivered to the Fotomat location. It was convenient and I remember in the ’80s how I was in the backseat of that Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme when Mom would drop off film for developing.
With the advent of digital photography, eventually Fotomat went extinct. I hope someday that many big, evil companies like Pfizer and Bayer-Monsanto will someday go extinct and their products never used again.
