Robot Claw – Page 96 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

The Other Two Lucky Bags

January 5, 2024

One of the other two bags was labeled as “Candy toys, plastic models and gacha toys”. Here’s what was inside:

What a diverse selection! Firstly, none of them are technically candy toys, gacha toys, or plastic models. Secondly, some of them are extremely old: the Virtual On figure is from 2005! The top two though are nicely made large figures from recent series, and overall I can’t fault the value considering this was only ¥3000.

While none of these will return with us, right now they’re decorating our hotel room until we leave 🙂

The second bag was simply described as “THE Lucky Bag” with no hint at all as to the contents. Here’s what we got:

Now that’s a lot of trash right there: useless merch from series that no-one likes or even remembers! We were laughing as we opened this one, at how bad most of it was. Sure there’s a few diamonds in the rough (the Anya from Spy Family acrylic is cool) but when one of the better items is this shirt:

Then you know the Fukubukuro sellers saw you coming and going.

Except, in this case, for that box in the lower left of the above pic. The unopened box of ‘Dungeon Maker’ acrylics. Ten of them to be precise, that look like this:

These are amazing. Tiny acrylic miniatures for RPG games, I’ve actually purchased stuff like this in the past. They’re super detailed with cute pixel art and I wouldn’t have hesitated to buy one or two had I seen them in the wild. The lucky bag contained an entire box of ten, with a retail price of ¥6600! As far as I’m concerned this is hitting the lottery and I don’t even care that almost everything else in the bag was garbage 🙂

Fulubukuro: Gacha Toys

January 4, 2024

As mentioned we bought three more Fukubukuro (lucky bags) yesterday. Here they are:

We just finished opening the smallest of the three, a ¥3000 (about $20) bag containing exclusively gacha toys. Every toy was still in the sealed capsule, and the bag was stuffed with them.

All told there were 37 items inside, most of which are shown abovez. Toys and badges from several popular series were included – One Piece, Tokyo Revengers, Chainsaw Man and Pokémon – as well as some weirder or harder-to-identify stuff. This is great value for ¥3000, and the quality was better than I expected.

Notable inclusions were a ‘premium gacha’ toy of a wasp (these cost ¥1000 in the machine) which when assembled is many times life-sized.

A 45 cm tall model kit of a power pole with no instructions. I wanted to assemble this but it’s very challenging and the QR code on the included sheet of paper only links to the official site.

And this portion of a model of a road overpass. Incredibly you need two other prizes to make the whole thing. Who in their right mind would keep buying prizes at a gacha in the hope of getting all the sets required to make this?!?

Ultimately very little is worth keeping, but I’d say this was a worthy Fukubukuro since it was bulging with stuff and fun to open. I’d give this one a thumbs up.

Back To Tokyo

January 4, 2024

We bullet-trained back to Tokyo this morning. The above is a photo of another snow-capped mountain that isn’t Fuji. The weather remained as beautiful as it has been the entire trip, and the views were grand.

Kristin’s bento this time was seafood and rice, but she also got this delightful custard dessert served in a porcelain haniwa cup:

Oh and yes, we saw Fuji again. This time it was wreathed in clouds.

We’ve got a few busy days planned before we return, but they all (mostly) involve shopping. Akihabara is as ever a good base camp, and our room is about as close to the center as possible, even giving us a grand view of one of the main thoroughfares from our window:

We’ve already done some shopping including a few more lucky bags. Tomorrow I’ll reveal what’s in them. For now though, it’s time to sleep…