Japan loves character goods, which are simply merchandise featuring a particular character. Often the characters exist solely to be merchandised; sometimes they originated elsewhere (comics or games usually).
The merchandising of popular characters is at an incredible level, with goods of all shapes and sizes to be found virtually anywhere.
Right now, it seems these are the most popular individual characters:
Rilakkuma
This guy has been around for 10 years now and rules the roost at the moment. Rilakkuma goods seem to be more common even than the venerable Hello Kitty (who I ignore in this article) and run the gamut of stationary, toys, clothes, food, electronics, kitchenware and just about everything else.
Here’s a photo of one single UFO Catcher machine stuffed with Kuma stuffed toys:
It was 4 years ago I was introduced to this guy via buying a pair of socks for SFL. And even then it was only because he is a bear. I’ve grown to like this character a lot 🙂
Nameko
He’s an ugly mushroom! He’s new, unusual, and riding a strong popularity wave. I hate him a bit, but Bernard has warmed to him. Right now his merchandise seems restricted to stationary and toys, but it is certainly abundant. I wonder if he will end up a fad?
Airou
This character is based on sentient cats from the Monster Hunter game series, which automatically earns points in my book. The fact he is cute and a cat only helps.
Although Airou doesn’t seem to have exploded beyond certain genre stores, there is an incredible variety of merchandise available and due to the success of the game the character is very well known. One of my favourite characters to be sure 🙂
In terms of series (as opposed to individual characters), there is no doing that One Piece rules the merchandise roost, with goods even more abundant than established lines such as Gundam or even Tsubaraya (Ultraman, Godzilla etc.). One Piece is the most successful manga series of all time, and undoubtedly the most merchandised!
There is an origami ‘museum’ not too far from where we are staying. Naturally, since Bernard is an origamist, we visited yesterday.
The museum, which is in the building of a company that makes traditional washi paper, consists of a small gallery, an impressive store, the area where the paper is made and died, and rooms for instruction. It is all very impressive, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.
As we were leaving, a friendly old fellow intercepted us at the lift and told us he would give us a demonstration. This was none other than the chairman, and we were treated to a private demonstration of his skills (and his English!) for the next 20 minutes or so. It was wonderful!
If you’re ever in Japan, this place is worth a look.
The above is a random sketch in one of many sketchbooks in one of many arcades (‘game centers’) in Akihabara, where we spent the rest of the day. I didn’t take a great deal of photos throughout many hours of shopping, eating, UFO Catching and gaming, but I’m quite pleased to say many of the items on my shopping list were found in that several hour period. The rate at which my wallet bled cash was amazing!
Notable pickups included;
– The two DS Wizardry games that were never translated
– Musha Gundam 2
– Vast amounts of monster hunter figurines
– the new Yamashita art book
– certain souvenir items for friends that I was after
The latest and unquestionably greatest of the current crop of UFO figures is a magical girl Kirino from Ore no Imouto. Here’s a picture of an advert for it outside of one of the mega-arcades:
Bernard and I both won one 🙂
The monster hunter cat mascots (‘airou’) are a very big deal here, with vast amount of available merchandise. Twice now KLS has joked (?) about buying one of the big guys seen above!
Game Center highlights included the dozens of classic game posters on display at a Sega arcade, a punching game which nearly broke my hand, and Y200 for what seemed like an hour of darts 🙂
It was another very long and active day, and I fear Bernard may be at the apex of ruination. Even I am in an advanced state of decrepitude, and as I lay here early the next morning writing this the question of how to even rise from the futon is a challenging one!
But I’ll soldier on. As I always say on vacation, I can rest when I get home 😉
Predictably, we couldn’t sleep much our first night, and took advantage of this to plan a trip to the famous Tsujiki fish markets. We left the ryokan around 5:30 am and headed over…
…only to find it closed to tourists until 9 am! So, at about 6:30 am we were loose in a city that wouldn’t wake for about 3 hours 🙂
That was taken at a fox shrine near Tsujiki, as we debated our next move. Eventually we decided to stroll over to the imperial gardens before heading to another attraction around 9. The walking had begun!
Bernard’s camera is stupid-impressive, but also stupid-heavy! Here he is self-portraiting during a break we took after finding the imperial gardens closed! Asakusa here we come!
That’s a look back along Nakamise-dori from within the famous Senso-ji temple. It was about 11 am by now; the day had barely started yet we’d been gallivanting for hours already. Senso-ji was great though, with lots of people and the tourist shops selling everything a man could want…
Our first lunch (Burger King!) over, it was time for Odaiba. While no Alihabara or Nagano, it was here that Bernard would be introduced to the wonder of the Japanese arcade 🙂
This photo was taken while I was still in the late stages of shock after just coming across a Monster Hunter shop in Decks mall. Since I believe in supporting the economy, I made some modest purchases and was awarded with a special bag, Airu (the cat mascot) hat and even a sticker!
That’s a real scale Gundam outside Diver City mall at Odaiba. Note KLS for scale. This was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen!
It was about 2 pm when we found the first of 3 major arcades in Odaiba. Oodles would be spent UFO catching and redemption machining, and a great time was had by all! Among other things Bernard won himself an AKB48 mouse and mousepad set:
I won, from a single Y500 (~$5) credit, three super cute Airu’s from the same machine:
But alas, the wonderful Rilakkuma hand puppets were cursed with a ‘weak claw’ machine and were unwinnable:
We eventually left Odaiba around 6 pm, all in a state of advanced ruination. We’d been going strong for about 13 hours, and my pedometer registered over 40,000 steps. We had bags of loot and dying feet when we got back. Delirious, I even ate a convenience store hot dog for dinner…
…before collapsing – corpselike – onto the bed! What a first day 🙂
The latest MTG duel deck to be released is Sorin vs Tibalt. I purchased it and have played the two decks against each other to see how they match up. Here’s my results…
Sorin’s deck uses the Sorin, Lord of Innistrad card from the Innistrad set, and the theme of the deck seems to be ‘tokens, vampires and lifelink’. As played, it was a fast deck with quite a bit of evasion (fliers, mostly) and some strong removal.
Tibalt’s deck uses his only appearance so far, Tibalt the Fiend-Blooded as the Planeswalker, and the deck utilizes hosted creatures, sacrifice effects and strong but optional direct damage (such as Browbeat.
In the four games I played, Sorin won handily every time. In two of the games, he won 20-0! This is as close to a mismatch as any duel deck I’ve played in the last few years, with Tibalt lacking both the speed and the removal to deal with Sorin’s creatures even if Sorin didn’t have lifelink!
In many of the games, Sorin had 2 or more flying spirit tokens out very quickly and Tibalt had little defense. A card like Lingering Souls could turn the game if drawn early, and often did.
Sometimes Tibalt gave a good fight (notable cards strong in this matchup: Vithian Stinger, Sulfuric Vortex), but usually Sorin managed to cast some evading lifelinker and turn things around very quickly.
As far as a well matched pair of decks therefore, this product gets a thumbs down!
However, as a product I’ll give this one a definite thumbs up. Personally, I owned neither Planeswalker, so it was nice to be able to get them both in one product. Secondly, a few of the other cards in the decks are nifty and I’m glad I now own copies. I’ll give a specific mention here to Phantom General, which had been notably absent from my white soldier token deck!
And of course, from my perspective, I had to get this anyway for the basic land 🙂
This past Tuesday, Florence was in town! Since she lives in the desert now, we don’t get to hang out much, so the most had to be made of it.
The decision of what to do was easy: it was time to launch model rockets!
“What, what?!” you ask? Well, I had kept it a cunning secret that Florence had purchased me model rocket supplies for Christmas, knowing this day would eventually come. Here’s a rare shot of me assembling one of the rockets a few weeks ago:
There were three in total. Before her trip I built everything and made sure it was all ready to go. A scouted out a location and bought a few extra engines. Very soon, I was to send an emissary into the cold, dark depths of space! And the very first said emissary would be no less than ‘KUMA 01‘, the bear-rocket:
We launched in Delmar park, near my house. The weather, as you can see, was perfect. KUMA is a little rocket, and it had a B-4 engine in it. What does that mean? Who knows! We certainly didn’t. I think you can gauge from this launch video how high we expected this rocket to go:
It went so high! And there was apparently a wind up there, since it traveled quite a distance (via the parachute) before touching down. In the future, remind me to snip a hole in the parachute prior to launch. Happily, KUMA survived the trip intact:
Giddy with success, it was time to move on to the big rocket, LOADSTAR. This guy is designed to carry a payload, and has a (frankly ludicrous) dual-stage that requires two engines. It was also a total bastard to assemble, and I had less than 1% confidence it would survive a landing. Here it is ready to be launched:
The launch was spectacular… ly bad! As I half-expected, the second stage failed to ignite, and therefore the re-entry mechanism did not deploy. LOADSTAR fell like a stone, nose first, into dirt:
Although it failed, I was amazed it survived intact. Kudos to gorilla glue, I suppose! I will tinker with LOADSTAR and try launching him again one day.
And then we moved onto what was perhaps the craziest of the three rockets, ATOMOS. And yes, I just made up that name one second ago. At any rate, here’s a few shots of the pre-launch procedure:
This rocket carries two shuttles, which detach at the zenith, and then glide to earth (probably bearing messages from God). This rocket kit had existed in my car for a millenia, and was actually damaged when I built it. If LOADSTAR was expected to fail, ATOMOS was expected to explode!
What’s that? The thing in the top left of the above shot? Here’s a closeup:
OMG it’s Florry, hiding behind a plastic lid because she was scared after the LOADSTAR tragedy 🙂
I had put a stronger engine into this guy, a C-5. What does that mean?? Who knows! Let’s launch:
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD IT WENT HIGH! You can see from that photo (taken on my phone…), this rocket had purpose. It raced up, screaming through the troposphere, writing “Goodbye fair Earth” with its exhaust. Maybe. At any rate, it was an amazing launch, one of the shuttles even worked correctly (the other fell like Icarus) and both the rocket and both shuttles were recovered intact.
There was only one engine left. A strong one; a C-5. It made sense to put it in the smallest, lightest rocket. KUMA 01 was on a one-way trip to infinity and beyond!
The final launch was so momentous it required two people. This may have been because the launch device had two buttons, and we both wanted to photograph the rocket as it was taking off. We hid behind our plastic shield, said a quick prayer, and pushed the button. This happened:
Look at that power! Look at it:
It was like all the angels got beneath this little bear-rocket and lifted to heaven at faster than light speed! It just went so fast, and so high, and penetrated the atmosphere and we never ever saw little KUMA again…
…at least not until he touched down safely a minute or so later 🙂
As you may be able to tell this was big fun. I already have some ideas for my second round of rocketry later this summer.
Thank you Florence, both for the rockets and for helping me launch them. 🙂
