Where do they get those wonderful toys?!?

As a man who has always loved toys, Japan is definitely the place to be. There is no end to the amount of knick-knacks and trinkets available everywhere. On many bottles of Coke and Pepsi there are small bags attached to the neck, filled with collectible toys. Something you simply couldn't do back home as people would just take the toys off the bottle and steal them. So far I have about half of the collection of Super Mario toys from Pepsi. They are these little bottle tops that look like 3-D replicas of the 2-D pixel characters from the video game. Coca-cola has little anime figures attached to their bottles, and we are only missing 5 of those. Which says two things. I am a habitual collector and I drink too much cola.

We have also discovered Yodobashi Camera. It is a stadium sized technology store, near where I work, with enough stuff in it to make a grown man cry. I had no idea so many cool things could legally be stored in one place, without risking peoples heads exploding. Huge high definition TV's, plasma screens, giant wide-screen computer monitors, home printing stations (that copy, scan, and can print photos), water proof cases for transforming any camera into an underwater camera, toilet seats with temperature controls and bidet function, Winnie the Pooh waffle irons, portable DVD players....ahhh! Too much stuff to mention and I haven't gotten to my favorite floor. The sixth floor. This is where you find the toys and video games. It is quite simply awe inspiring. Even Colleen was initially stunned just trying to take it all in.

The range of toys really was quite huge. Star Wars, Power Man, Godzilla, Studio Ghibli (figures from Miyazaki films), McFarlane Toys, Steam Boy, Anpan Man, Hello Kitty and thousands of other Japanese anime toys based on series I have never heard of. They had an entire aisle full of figurines of cute Japanese cartoon females wearing bikinis, lingerie or just skin tight outfits. They had a huge display of Ipets. A robot dog that works like an Ipod but it dances to the music it plays and demands your attention. You feed it with songs. Weird. They also had large screens set up where you could play all of the latest video games on the newest game machines. Oh, and did I mention guns? Along with the incredible collection of models of everything you can imagine, they had a huge locked display case of realistic looking guns, that feel just like the real thing. Same weight, same look, they just don't fire anything, or if they do it's just BBs. They just don't have gun crime here, so no one cares about how real they look. The Police don't even carry guns here. Colleen finally managed to drag me out but not without a few toys. I picked up some Twisted Land of Oz figurines. They are Wizard of Oz figures but with a much more gruesome twist on the story. Click to see the Wizard, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow.

Last week Colleen posted some pictures of where she works and some people asked where my pics were, so here they are. I have also added some photos that we have taken while out and about. Some of them from the Namba district, which is where Colleen works. We went on another Ferris Wheel. There are also a few new pictures in the signs section. This is my favorite so far. Bad grammar, bad photo editing. Also check out the Garbage trucks here. They are so tiny. If you haven't read Colleen's blog about the garbage men yet, I recommend it.

I have only one more old journal entry to add. It's from April 11th, and here it is.

April 11

Mostly uneventful day except for getting my hair cut today. I tried to get "real short on the sides and in the back, just a trim on top, I usually kind of mess it up, a little spiky", but what I got was an exact replica of a hair cut I found in one of their books that was as close as I could get to what I wanted. Okay I guess, but it is a little humbling when the best you do is point and grunt, and hope that the hairdresser doesn't plan on dying your hair the same color as the sharp looking Japanese man in the picture you pointed to. Expensive haircut but they massaged my head, cleaned my ears and the hairdresser held the door for me when I left.

Work was nothing special but I have started to notice that in Japan there are duplicates of people I know back home. I mentioned this in the staff room and suddenly all of the other teachers chimed with similar sentiments. They had all met the Japanese version of someone they knew back home. For example twice now I have had this one student who is a Japanese ringer for my friend J.D. He has the same face, the same mannerisms and he is always wearing a baseball cap whenever I teach him. I also had Erin Maddill's clone today, flighty young highschool girl who loves to talk, play music and can't live without her cell phone because she "gets lonely a lot and needs attention from her friends" as she put it. Same smile, same gestures. Scary!

End transmition.