Category: Japan

The Japan Postcards

July 2, 2025

In my two weeks in Japan I sent a vast amount of postcards! It’s so easy to find good ones there that I just kept buying, and the same is true for stamps. I hope you liked the ones I sent you.

I sent a ridiculous 52 cards home, or about 3.5 every day. About a third were typical tourist cards, and some are shown above. I find writing cards in hotel rooms very relaxing, and every evening I’d do that with anime on the TV and snacks close at hand.

The Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford cards were purchased in Japan a few years ago, and the other two were found in antique shops here and Australia. I actually found a sizeable stash of geisha cards; maybe I sent you one of them?

The Kamen Rider card game from the Ishinomori museum I visited on a day trip, and I regret not buying more from their selection. Almost every museum or attraction in Japan sells postcards, and they’re often good ones. I assume the Japanese must still enjoy sending them.

Illustration cards are very popular in Japan as well, and I’m always spoiled for choice. The ones above were purchased in various locations but the top right one, which depicts a ningen yokai, is something special. The black, blue and gold are not printed ink, they are pieces of paper glued to the background! It’s hand made and was quite expensive (¥780) but it was one of about a half dozen designs and so well done I wish I’d bought more.

The card on the left is some sort of melon girl mascot (for Matsushima?) and I bought a blind pack of three cards (there were 20 different varieties), and the one on the right was in a pack of cards I purchased in Sendai. As for the middle one, it’s over 30 years old and came with a VHS tape we bought decades ago 🙂

On previous trips some of the unusually shaped cards took ages (sometimes months) to arrive and I always wondered why. I’m happy to say I now know it was always simply me not putting enough postage on.

So now I know how to mail large or unusual cards from Japan, and I took the chance to send this gigantic lenticular example, which is twice the size of a normal card! It arrived in only a week or so, which means that next time I may be able to send and even bigger lenticular card I purchased a few years ago.

As for the backs of the cards, I took the chance to imprint eki stamps on them whenever I could. I didn’t find as many as my last trip, but most of those I did was of extremely high quality. The Hakodate Ropeway stamp in particular is amazingly detailed, and I wish I’d had more than onky two cards with me when I found it (up on the mountain). Why can’t all eki stamps be that good?!

It’s fun buying stamps in Japan. It’s almost always the same routine: the postal workers are hesitant and nervous until I show the translator screen and then they seem surprised and delighted that a tourist is actually buying postage stamps!

Often two or three clerks help me at the same time, and I assume this is because I’m a foreigner and some of them want to practice their English. With the exception of the larger post offices in Tokyo, very rarely do they actually speak English but sometimes they seem to have a basic understanding.

You may recall the old Japanese stamps I received from a Postcrosser? I used them all during this trip and I was pleased to see they all ‘worked’!

Much like Australia, Japan issues collectible stamp sets and while the majority are anime-based, how could I resist these cute animals? Maybe next time I’ll get the Frieren or Dungeon Meshi ones…

While I’m traveling solo in Japan I rarely speak, and perhaps this is why I don’t run out of things to write on postcards. The ones from this trip are now in my Japan binder, which is so full it’s time for me to begin a second one. I’m already looking forward to the cards I’ll send myself from the next trip 🙂

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

June 27, 2025

It was a good Japan trip as far as my gamebook collection goes, with both old and new products found. This post lists everything I bought.

I’ve got a lot of Japanese Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (about 2/3rds of the original run) but somehow the third book – Forest Of Doom – had eluded me. I was surprised to find a copy for very cheap (¥1000) at Mandarake.

According to the publication history, this is the 17th edition from March 1986. For a nearly 40-year-old book it’s in astonishingly good condition, as if it just came off the press.

Japanese FF books included pull-out adventure sheets and this is perhaps the best example I have yet seen. I don’t think this book was ever opened, much less read, and it’s now got a permanent home in my collection.

I also bought the book on the left, which shares the cover art of Dungoneer, the first rulebook for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG. The Japanese book has a different title (Advanced Fighting Fantasy volume 1) and is slightly shorter, with some material removed. It seems Japan compressed the three AFF volumes into two, but there’s detail here I have yet to discover. Again this book was extremely inexpensive (¥500!) which shocked me since I wouldn’t have hesitated to pay twenty or more times as much.

I finally found the 4th Group SNE FF reprint box set, which allegedly published early in 2024 but I had never seen in my previous three trips. This collects the Sorcery! set and Secrets Of Salamonis, which receives its first Japanese printing here.

These trade-sized reprints continue to be definitive, with beautiful presentation, paper quality and reproduction. The bonus book in this set is unsurprisingly the Sorcery Spell Book.

Even though I already owned five (!) complete sets of the Sorcery series (including the Japanese versions from 1985 and 2004) I’m happy to add this new set to my collection.

To my surprise there was also a fifth reprint box set available! I later learned this one was only just released, which explains why I saw it in many bookstores. It contains a collection of five books, including two new to Japan: Howl Of The Werewolf and Crystal Of Storms.

Two of these are particular interesting. Starship Traveler hasn’t been reprinted in over two decades, and it’s long been rumoured the reason was due both the cover and internal art. This reprint seems to confirm both, with a new cover and new internal art:

The copyright page reveals the art was taken from the TinMan digital version of the book, and while the style is different from the line art common to the series, the reproduction is excellent and overall I think it suits the book well.

Scorpion Swamp has never been reprinted (in any language), and there have been a few theories as to why including art or the author not allowing it. And yet here it is, with a new cover and internal art:

The above picture contains the original art on the left and the art from this reprint on the right. As you can see the artist (who also did the art for Secret Of Salamonis) has drawn new versions of all the old pieces, and his style matches the series perfectly. The art is copyrighted 2025 to Ian Livingstone and I suspect this was done to enable future reprints, possibly including in the new American Steve Jackson Games versions? Let’s hope this means the other books that have never been reprinted will see new versions as well.

Moving away from Fighting Fantasy, to my surprise I found this:

This is a gamebook based on the Xevious arcade game! I would have thought this was somewhat well-known amongst hardcore gamebook collectors (how many exist?) and therefore I was surprised it only cost me ¥1000.

Flipping through it is most definitely a robust gamebook with inventory and systems, almost certainly modeled after a FF book. Even though it’s a different publisher, the back of the book even includes ads for other gamebooks including FF and the Back To The Future one I bought a few years ago.

What a strange beast this book is! The art inside shows almost no space battles, instead seeming like a standard adventure with fights against monsters and villains. Xevious also had some novels written about it, but I don’t know if there’s any connection between those and this gamebook.

Speaking of space-themed Gamebooks, the above was almost inadvertently found in a bargain bin at BookOff and cost a mere ¥100! I thought it was Star Wars related at first, and was shocked to realize it was a gamebook.

This is an interesting CYOA style book where each section has at least a half-page illustration. The text seems simple enough that I think this will be playable with a translator. While it’s not licensed item, the Star Wars ‘homages’ are obvious, from the cover to the hero’s robot which looks exactly like R2. Based on an add on the final page, this seems to be the first in a series of two books; I’ll be looking out for the other on future trips!

And lastly we have a Queen’s Blade book, Alicia the Dark User of Wonderland. I’ve got a lot of these two-player books which sprung from a US series called Lost World but took on a life of its own when rebranded with anime girls in Japan. I see these occasionally in Japan but often skip them since they’re a bit heavy and I don’t want to fill my suitcases with them 🙂

Japan Pickups: Wizardry

June 20, 2025

My Wizardry game collection is close to complete and it’s been a while since I’ve found anything I didn’t have, so finding four items on the recent trip was a pleasant surprise.

The special edition of the remake of Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord comes with an art print and two booklets. Wizardry The Five Ordeals released just a couple of weeks before the trip and was widely available everywhere (it’s a port of a Japanese PC game). I’m looking forward to playing this one!

Elminage is a game series that is Wizardry in all but name and was developed by some of the same people that made the Japanese Wizardry games. I already owned two of the games and with the addition of Elminage II and Elminage Gothic I now have the entire series. Both of these games were quite expensive, and it’s worth mentioning that I can’t play Elminage Gothic since it’s a 3DS version and my 3DS’s are religion locked to USA games.

Incidentally, my collection of Wizardry games now exceeds 50! I believe I own every game in the series including all the Japanese ‘gaiden’ games, so from this point expanding my collection will only happen via new releases or if I manage to obtain more of the original computer versions.

I also purchased on this trip the above three Wizardry guides. Each of them are full colour with dozens of pages of monster and item art, and detailed maps of each game level.

As with the dozens of other (Japanese) Wizardry guides I already own, these are beautiful books with production levels that far exceed what we had in the west at the time. It’s evidence of how popular this series was in Japan that I now own multiple comprehensive guides for each of the first few games, each released by different publishers and yet I’m not aware of a single western guide for any of the first five Wizardry games!

Lastly I found this Wizardry fanzine in the retro game section at Shosen Book Tower in Akihabara. As you can read on the translation at right, it has a lengthy interview with Superdeluxe games about the collectors edition mentioned above, as well as a wealth of other wizardry-related articles and artwork. This book is obviously a work of love by dedicated Japanese fans and will require close reading via translator since I suspect there’s some good information in its pages 🙂

My Wizardry book collection exceeds 50 titles now as well, and continues to expand via novels, manga, game guides and RPG manuals. With hardly any information on such books available online I have no idea how much else is waiting to be found on future trips…

Robot Claw