LEGO Japan

  • May 15, 2026

I received the above for my birthday. It’s a new LEGO landscape, in a shadow box format. This is a popular set, and has been periodically unavailable since it was released.

This is my first LEGO set where the pieces are in paper bags. The bags are very strong and won’t tear easily so they seem like a good replacement for plastic. I believe the plan was for LEGO to transition all sets to using paper but since they announced this years ago that’s obviously taking them longer than expected.

Assembly begins with the frame, which is easy if a little repetitive. It’s bigger than I expected, about 40 cm on each side. Can you see the ‘mistake’ I made (and later fixed)?

The landscape is a fun build, and creates a very convincing forced perspective diorama. It doesn’t have a lot of unusual build methods or weird pieces, and was easy compared to other kits I’ve built.

The vibrant colours are the obvious standout feature of this set, with the sunset and brilliant water and (of course) cherry blossoms. Of course this is a somewhat fantastic Japanese landscape, but it does a great job including many iconic elements at micro scale.

A nice little touch is that the water running out of the frame is hinged which allows the set to stand vertically on a shelf (it can also be hung on a wall). This is a wonderful set, and I’m sure Lego will release other shadowbox landscapes in the future.

Postcrossing Update

  • May 13, 2026

Another six months have passed, and it’s time for another Postcrossing update. I do these periodically to review all the cards I’ve received, before they are put into attic storage.

Those are my numbers since the last update, an increase of about 275 each. I’m averaging just shy of 50 cards a month, as I have been for about a year now.

For the first time in over a year, I received a card from a ‘new’ country: Iceland. The card is shown above, took 43 days to arrive, and the seller wrote that their school was closed the day they wrote due to a snowstorm! Even though it was my first Icelandic card in 8 years of Postcrossing, it was still the 40314th card sent by an Icelandic user, which gives you an idea of the number of people that uses this hobby.

A good amount of cards I receive continue to be ‘multiview’ tourist cards, which I mention (on my bio) I like. These are not as available as they used to be, so they’re often older cards, and I always want to step into them to visit the locations when the photos were taken!

Animal cards weren’t as common this half-year, and in fact an increasing amount of cards are just art (sometimes AI) or generic designs. I expect this is due to tourist postcards becoming increasingly unavailable in many cities around the world.

I received six dragon-themed cards! In my bio I also say I like fantasy art and I get it a fair amount of it. All three of the above came from Chinese senders.

Of course I need to send cards to receive cards, and getting 50 a month means I write that many as well. What do I write? Usually something trite about me, my job, what I’m doing that day and mundanities like that. It’s not easy writing the same thing on ten or more cards at a time, so I sometimes mix it up with a movie review or comments on the card image.

The Australian maxicards continue to arrive. As I’ve said in the past, these will get a dedicated post one day…

On the topic of stamps, next week the USA releases its first Postcrossing stamp! This is remarkable enough, but the fact it’s a triangular stamp makes it even more notable. The official release will be at a massive stamp show in Boston that runs for the entire week. I’d love to go, but alas I must visit Australia 😉

In the last update I mentioned I had considered slowing down with this hobby, although as evidenced that hasn’t happened! Not only did a renew the postbox for another year (which costs over $200 now!) but I didn’t reduce the amount of cards I sent in any way. I guess I’m in it for at least another several hundred cards!

Mushi Jingi

  • May 11, 2026

Daiso is a Japanese ‘dollar store’, but don’t let that categorization fool you: it’s much, much better than USA equivalents. This is because Daiso mostly sells its own high quality products, and stocks an incredible variety of items in almost every category. Every trip to Japan includes a stop at a Daiso, and in the past we’ve bought things from laundry bags to packing tape to candy for extremely low prices.

This is the first booster pack for a game called Mushi Jingi. This is Daiso’s first trading card game and was first released in 2022. Each pack contains five cards and costs a mere ¥100 (about $0.64)!

This is an insect themed game (according to Google, the name variously translates into ‘Insect Honor’ or ‘Sacred Insects’) and my cards came in three rarities (Normal, Rare and Super Rare). I assume every pack contains at least a foil SR card, but the backs of each pack show there’s an even rare type (LR) which I assume is even flashier.

Each card has a power, type, ability and text at the bottom. The art is consistent amongst all the cards I’ve seen and is detailed but simple depictions of insects. I’ll translate a couple of cards further down in this post.

The cards are not flimsy and feel like higher-price games but the cardback is a bit dull. I’ll give it props for summarizing the damage rules, but I believe it could have been prettier.

As a game aimed at children, gameplay is apparently fast and easy, and the low price makes building a deck very inexpensive. This seems like it would be a fun game to buy a box of and test drive!

From what I read the game has been a success, and to date there have been seven total expansions. On our recent trip I bought one pack from each of the first six, and the seventh has been released since. The packs depict characters but none of the cards I opened feature any of them so I wonder if they’re used in an associated manga or anime?

Here’s one of the action cards translated, and if you read carefully you’ll see that ‘Tengyu’s Broxade Jaw’ only powers up beetles of the Cerambycidae family. This is the sort of feature I couldn’t imagine would ever make its way onto an English-language TCG, and it is because this game aims to be educational as well 🙂

Here’s one of the SR cards translated, although Google kept Kiniro and didn’t translated it to ‘gold’. This guy is from Papua New Guinea, widely known as my homeland, which means this beetle – the Papuan Golden Stag – is from my clan!

It’s a beautiful beast isn’t it? And if it weren’t for Mushi Jingi I probably would not have learned of its existence, much less that it uses its jaws to cut meat and suck out juice!

As I said I think it would be fun to buy a few boxes of this game, build decks, and give it a spin. It’s so inexpensive that I’m sure parents in Japan have been buying lots of packs for their kids, and I understand why it’s lasted four years already.