Japan Day 5 - Hokkaido and Sapporo (part 1)

Flew from Tokyo to Hokkaido today, for one of the main events for our Japan trip - the Sapporo Snow Festival.

Ramen for lunch at the Sapporo ramen village at the number one voted ramen for the week.

E's ramen bowl

The Sapporo Snow Festival

  

 

The snow festival at night

 

Snowboard competition at the Snow Festival

 

An area for smoking constructed entire of ice blocks with cigerette packets and ashtrays embedded in the ice (right photo)

 

Next: Hokkaido/Sapporo part 2 - in which we visit Mandarake Sapporo!

Japan Day 4 - Nakano redux and Disneyland

Today was Disneyland day.We did wake up a little late, so decided to go to Nakano first and then Disneyland and stay till it closes at 8pm.

Breakfast at Mr Doughnut.

Here we are at Nakano Broadway

The ultra cool vintage books section of Mandarake Nakano.

Browsing... and did manage to find some good stuff (see below).

Finalising my G1 purchases... (again, see below)

Before I reveal today's hauls... some shots of Disneyland, which is every bit as enjoyable as Disney Sea (contrary to popular belief).

Dinner at my No.1 rated ramen - 九洲拉麵

Today's Acquisitions

• C-47: Grapple MIB, unused
• C-83: Sandstorm MIB, unused, complete paperworks, unapplied sticker sheet
• eHobby recoloured Ravage and Rumble MISB
• unused vintage Headmasters 'box art' poker cards (not really sure what this is, but it certainly is a very interesting piece of G1 history).

Japan Day 3 - Tsukiji, Ginza and Odaiba (no Transformers today, but beautiful day nonetheless)

As I said in the title, no Transformers today, but I am documenting this because it was an extremely fun and beautiful day nonetheless - I went with E to see many of the things she wanted to see, so happy.

We started the day with the Tsukiji Fish Markets, which I gotta say, is a lot more pleasant and more to my tastes than the Sydney Fish Markets (yucks). At fish market? Gotta have sashimi and sushi, yes?

Divine platter of Meguro, Chutoro and Otoro sashimi

Assorted sushi platter

We walked to Ginza from Tsukiji since it was pretty near. I mucked up reading the map, so E had to take the lead. For some reason, my map reading was off during this trip. heh. The Abercrombie and Finch shop at Ginza was amazing, very impressive, but did not buy anything from there. We wanted to go this place called the Mos Burger Cafe which was very highly recommended for its Matcha Latte and set off to find it from the Toy Park Building (which I recalled as unimpressive as well, but we did manage to buy a Alien Key chain there which is very nice).

This time, it was the map that was not exactly correct. We ended up walking 30 minutes and round the entire Ginza area to end up at the Mos Cafe which was just 1 minute away from the Toy Park Building!

Matcha Latte was great though...

... and so was the Teriyaki Chicken Burger and Fish Burger... yum!

After the erm, interim, dinner, we went to Odaiba where the Rainbow Bridge (famed from Japanese drama serials) was. It connects Tokyo to the 'island' of Odaiba (not sure if that is accurate). We spent sometime taking night shots with the our cool Nikon D90 camera! Woohoo!

The 'Rainbow Bridge'. Photo by E, without using a tripod!

Photo by me, also without tripod

The Sega Joypolis

Time for dinner!

... which is at Lion Bar (a place I had wanted to visit from our previous Tokyo trip)... 6 cheese pizza...

Japan Day 2 - Ikebukuro and Akihabara

From a flyer we obtained from Nakano yesterday, we discovered that there is a Mandarake at Ikekuburo! Never been there before. Plus one of E's friends recommended a very good place that serves eel in that area. Well, it's time to check this place out!

We found the Mandarake without much difficulty. I walked in. E quickly remarked, "Why are there only girls in here. Strange looking girls as well."

"Oh, damn", I thought. I must have walked into one of the special branches of Mandarake. I quickly exited the store to find out that this branch contains "Boy Love" material only and its sort of like a hentai place, but specially catered for girls! No Transformers to be found here!

We went to this ramen place called 無敵家. It was very, very good. E now rates this place as her no.1 in Japan.

After lunch, we headed to Mandarake in Akihabara, definitely one of the much go toy places in Tokyo.

Here, I managed to snap some shots of the interior. I gotta say that its a lot less spectacular than a year ago and did-not-have-anything I was interested in.

General shot of the Transformers display cabinets.

The top of the cabinets where they usually display the giftsets and expensive stuff. Nothing terribly impressive really - very tattered Defensor, Bruticus and King Poseidon giftsets and a Overlord that is way overpriced.

Some series 1 to series 3 stuff. There seems to be Kups, Jazzes and Prowls in abundance over there.

Again, nothing to call home about. Notice that they placed a reissue Hot Rod with the vintages. A little odd if you ask me.

This is perhaps one of the more interesting shelves - some MOSC European stuff, G2 Cliffjumper and Beachomber, ActionMasters, etc. I was initially very interested in the Frenzy & Laserbeak set, but on closer inspection, I was appalled to find that it is a Zhong Jin KO!!! Imagine that, Mandarake mistaking a KO for the real thing and selling it as a real item! WTF. This is so wrong. Can't speak Japanese, so obviously can't tell them about it in a way they would understand.

A shelve of TFC Reissues. These appear to be the entire series, which is quite impressive.

Encore and later reissues. This is the point where E asked, "Why is Mandarake selling reissues. Does not seem right". Yeah, I thought that's odd as well. I mean selling some limited edition, lucky draw or eHobby reissues is one thing, but to sell run of the mill reissues from lines as recent as Encore next to vintages just does not sit right with me and appears contrary to the business case of a store which professes to specialise in vintage toys. I am seriously disappointed with the Akihabara Mandarake at this point.

A shelve of Alternity and Binaltechs with Alternators mixed in. Alternators Prowl? Seriously? What a cheap-quality version to have with the Binaltechs (especially since there is a Binaltech Prowl). Having Alternators Ravage, Rumble and Rollbar I can understand since these were never released in the Binaltech line.

This is about as good as the pre-Transformers shelve went - Diaclone Inferno and U.N.C.L.E. version Megatron. Meh.

While the toy section was hopelessly disappointing, the books section of Mandarake did yield some treasures, which I will show later below.

Went to Liberty Store #7 after Mandarake and it was equally dismally disappointing. It had one, yes one, G1 item - a tattered MIB Scourge. Meh and Meh.

At least we saw an interesting cafe on the way back to Shibuya. I told E as we left Akihabara, "we don't have to revisit this place again during the rest of our trip. Utterly disappointing".

We next headed to Shibuya in search of, hopefully, some Transformers joy. Shibuya was also dried up of TFs. Man, what is happening? I did however, manage to get a number of pretty novel items from here.

Acquisitions for the day
From Mandarake Akihabara:

• Transformers pocket book #53 (featuring series 1 to series 3 Transformers)
• Transformers pocket book #57 (featuring Masterforce)
• Transformers Victory: The Movie animated comic (exteme top left)
• Transformers Victory character book (extreme bottom left)

From Mandarake Shibuya:

• C-327: Victory Leo promotional flyer
• C-360: Sky Garry promotional flyer
• vintage Transformers "Original T-Shirt" released by Takara

C-327: Victory Leo and C-360: Sky Garry promotional flyer

I bought this more for the box than for the t-shirt. Such a great box! It was MISB but E wanted to see the t-shirt, so she opened it and made me wear the t-shirt. 

It's a Decepticon t-shirt, how heroic!