Archive for April, 2007

We’ve just returned to Tokyo from Okinawa, which was full of pristine beaches, amazing coral, and thankfully, no catastrophic sunburns this time.

Out of our five days in Okinawa, just one was a bit rainy and windy. We spent it on Takitomi, a tiny island that can be biked all the way around in under an hour. The island is also home to a delightful array of shishi, the protective lion-dog creatures that can be found at Shinto shrines across Japan, but are especially common to Okinawa, where they whimsically decorate rooftops and gates. So we spent some time on this rainy-windy day hunting for shishi in Taketomi.

Some are a bit scary, some are just cute, and a couple of them kind of resemble the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Just to show that we aren’t complete losers at our beloved Japanese crane games, here is our modest pile of loot from the past few days:

And this isn’t all! We also won a few very lame things (pencil bag, scary teddy bear) that we decided to leave in the game chute for the next lucky player.

Some details:

This is Yawaraka-sensha (“Soft Tank” in English). He’s a little wimpy tank that is scared of getting hurt in war, so he’s always rolling away from the action. He and Gun Shy should really get together one of these days. You can see some animations of Yawaraka-sensha here.

This little seal is wearing a fish windsock on his tail. Don’t ask why.

And the prize for Most Weirdest goes to the Tarako Kewpie in a bubble keychain. Tarako is nasty fish eggs sauce that people put on their pasta, and the Kewpie Doll is its unwitting mascot. More impressive wierdness in the below video (warning: extremely long for a video of 9-year-olds dancing to a repetitive song).

We’re in Japan now. Yesterday was spent hunting down aquarium stores, visiting Junie Moon and debating if I’ll finally get a Blythe doll (conclusion: maybe) and shopping in Shibuya. While in Shibuya (the epicenter of youth and shopping and creepy nationalist demonstrations), we had to check out a couple of game centers. One of which inexplicably smelled like poop, but overall they get a B+.

To recap my obsession with crane games in Japan, I love them because their toys are actually really good, their toys reflect the current popular characters, and depending on the game center, the employees may open up the game and move the toys around so that they’re easier to win.

We were happy to see that Rirakkuma is still a favorite offering in these games of luck and skill.

These little Rirakkumas are each bearing chicks that have different birthdays printed on their stomachs.

And yesterday we were introduced to Kapibara-san, the new guinea pig character from Try Works, which is like San-x, except with a guinea pig character.

We were especially impressed by the animation on this slick TV monitor in a seemingly completely unsupervised and un-security-guarded center:

We tried our darndest (about 1,000 yen worth) to grab one of these little guys, but in the end, we had to give up and purchase the very same toy at the Loft department store for 800 yen.

Crane game: 1
Us: 0