Last month when we went to Keyaki Walk Mall in Maebashi, I found another big display of Dragon Quest merchandise at Loft! I showed the Dragon Quest sale at Loft last year on my blog. This time it was for the release of DQ I and II.
“Welcome to the Loft Dragon Quest I & II 2025 goods campaign!”
The first things I noticed were all the plush dolls. These retro character sprite cushions look cool.
Cups and silverware.
So much random stuff. Soap dispensers, clips, pins, stickers, and so on.
There’s a pet shop in Maebashi called Wing 21 where Mayu buys crickets to feed to her beloved pet, Kuromaru. There are two meerkats in cages there and every time we go there, I call out to the two meerkats, “Little guys!” They get SO EXCITED to see me every time. So this time the pet clerk lady asked me if I’d like to hold one. My facial reaction alone was enough for her to know that I really wanted to. So, I got to snuggle and smooch this little meerkat. SO CUTE! I want one! But, no pets are allowed in our apartment. Plus these little guys have gotta be super expensive. They’ve been there for a couple of years now and they do not have a home yet. Kinda sad. There was a third one, but that one must’ve been sold about 3 years ago. She didn’t recommend that I hold the other one, because it is too “high tension.” So I guess it gets too excited and acts up if you hold it. It was pretty jealous that I held the other one.
One of the places I visited with friends in the Phoenix area is a new Daiso in Chandler! It provides an identical experience to a typical Daiso in Japan. Items just cost more than 100 yen, of course. When we used to live in Arizona, these types of items were available at Asiana Market and other Asian stores, but now Daiso officially exists in Arizona. Wow.
Walking into the store, it looks so much like a typical Daiso store.
Lots of neat crap for kids, of course. I wasn’t expecting to find Touhou merchandise!
Gudetama and Cinamarroll stuff too.
Yep, this is typical Daiso goods! Straight from Japan.
Price conversion charts are posted about the store to let people know how much the items cost in US dollars.
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!'”
