Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

My new Pac-Man pillow from Shimamura!

I went to Shimamura today and found this lovely Pac-Man decorative pillow! It feels so soft! Here are front and back photos of it. There was another Pac-Man pillow there which featured large sprites of the characters, but I like the design of this one better. Interestingly, it features the English names of the ghosts. There were also Pac-Man bath mats there too, but I didn’t get them because I imagine my wife wants to keep the ones we already have.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Puyo Puyo merchandise at Mini Stop convenience stores

So Ulan and I stopped by the Mini Stop convenience store to get their Korean cheese hot dogs a few days ago. Holy crap, those are fantastic. They’ve recently begun selling them again and they are SOFA KING delicious. Japanese conbini food is fantastic. The last time I went to America was in 2016 and I was reminded of how gross the convenience store food is there.

As we arrived, Ulan spotted this Puyo Puyo display inside. I love Puyo Puyo, although being colorblind makes me suck at it. Ulan really kicks my ass in Puyo Puyo every time. I can’t beat her even once. but you can’t just buy whatever items you want; you pay 770 yen to reach inside a box. But it doesn’t burn your skin off like the box in Dune, nor is it full of roaches like the box in Temple of Doom. You reach inside and grab a raffle ticket. What you receive depends on what ticket you get.

The grand prizes are this Puyo lamp and this plush Carbunkle doll. I have to say that I much prefer the character designs by Compile that stayed with the series until the 4th game and I don’t care much for the new designs that came after Sega bought the Puyo Puyo license and released Puyo Puyo Fever on the Dreamcast. But Carbunkle pretty much has stayed the same.

More plush.

Eye masks. I’m glad I didn’t get that ticket.

Hand towels! Here is Draco (left) and Arle (right) taking naps. How cute.

One of these acrylic mascot keychains would’ve been cool, but that’s not what I won.

My raffle ticket let me choose a hand towel. I chose Draco the dragon girl who wears a Chinese cheongsam dress. I think she was one of the villains in the original Madou Monogatari games that Puyo Puyo is based on.

So nice to see one of these raffle deals that is of interest to me. I mean, you can see Evangelion stuff at 7-11 and I’d be happy to get a figure of Rei or Asuka, but I’d probably end up with some dumb robot instead. With Puyo Puyo though, I thought this was worth a try.

Posted on

Sega pajamas at Shimamura

Since I’ve shown lots of cool Sega swag from Shimamura stores, I thought I’d share these images I found on my Flickr account. I bought the Saturn pajamas, but I wish I had gone into debt and bought the Megadrive and Dreamcast pajamas too. Drat.

Posted on

Sega Megadrive T-shirt from Shimamura

By creating an account on Mercari, I’ve expanded my ability to buy neat crap. Something I missed out on at Shimamura is this neat Megadrive T-shirt. This shirt is brand new and still has the tag attached! The front breast has the MD logo, the 3-button controller, and under that it says “16-BIT.”

This neat little tag is on the sleeve.

This is on the back. Neat!