toyboxdx toy blog brog: is graceful art of daily expressing japanese toy  

Saturday August 14, the 2010 East Coast Chogokin Summit will commence in Watertown Mass … book your tickets, gas up your cars, and grease your bicycles. It is going to be a good time.

I had a dream the other night.

The phone rang. Picking up, I hear the excited voice of Mason, telling me that a seller out of South Boston, who found a dead stock shipment from Mattel, which never made it past the boatyard warehouse.

It appears Mattel/Bandai had made a GA50 Shogun Warrior set, which no one had known about, since the entire production run got lost in a paperwork trail and had for the past 33 years sat unopened and unknown… until now.

Like a date with Christina Hendricks, these are the moments you never wish to wake up from.

This is what happens when you have about 8,000 photos on your desktop and you forget there was a whole Morphey “roll” left hidden in a folder.

Looking through these makes me want it to happen all over again. One of the finest couple days with my toy brothers ever.

Photos shown in the order they were taken.

( All photos are property of TBDX)

Dr. Aizawa’s robot room in the early 70s, Nagoya toy Museum photo.

The late Dr. Aizawa Zirou (1903-1996), the first director of the Children’s Institute for Cultural Activities, friend of Sony founder Masaru Ibuka, and Osamu Tezuka.
Both he and Tezaka formed the Children’s Institute for Cultural Activities Foundation in 1927. They collectively strove to improve the lives of children via the catalyst of scientific toys.

This prompted Dr. Aizawa to create 800 humanoid robot toys!

Some of Dr. Aizawa’s own creations have been restored and displayed at various museums over the past few years, following their rediscovery after a long slumber in storage.

So a massive box arrives from Japan. I assume there has to be a dozen or so items in there. But then it occurs to me it is just one. One very important one. One I lost sleep over to ensure it arrived unscathed.

Welcome to my brain. A perfect dominion for obsessive “c10” disorder.

The girl, ammused, with iphone in hand, quietly documents my unpacking frenzy. Two pounds of bubble wrap later, Gekko is scanned and approved.

Check it out in its spontaneous oldskool low res glory.

Perhaps tonight I will sleep like a baby… well, until the next shipment anyway.

I blame/praise Fraser fo this.  Because we didn’t have enough food at the restaurant across the damn street from his place Fraser thought it would be a good idea to go get a package of bacon to fry up while watching Gaiking back at his place.  And he was damn right.  We decided on two kinds of bacon because, well, because awesome that’s why!  This of course ended with some good ass gourmet cheese to wash it down with (La Tur if you’re familiar) and fig spread to at least have something in our systems working towards the eventual exiting of said meat and cheese.

Then of course the nerdity, giddiness, and cell phone cameras came into play and what you get are the results below.

I miss seeing the posters on the way down in to the underbelly of hell that is Mandarake in Shibuya. All of them have either been stolen or simply taken down. The seizure strobe lights are still there however, and after a day of walking the humid streets of Tokyo, you best hold onto the wall going down.

Hades greets you in the form of a disinterested college cosplay girl. You put your bag in the 100 yen locker and a rush of adrenaline hits you as you hope against hope that today, they put out some hidden gems for below online auction pricing.

Sing song anime soundtracks filter through the aisles of hentai manga and sweaty teen boys who inhabit the space in rows like expectant puppies at the beck and call of their mother.

The counter to the right is snaking with a group of quiet Otaku waiting to pay for their treasures, and the first row of glass cases on the back wall greets you after passing the bins of anime cells and costume racks.

Sounds and smells take a back seat as you gaze at the vintage cases, filled with hand scribbled price cards and hastily cellophane wrapped boxes.

“Ikura desu ka?” becomes your best friend and mantra.

Cases open, the whif of aging carboard, the musk of Bullmark vinyl. You know it all too well, but like running into an old lover on the street, the memories are raw and crisp… a paper cut that never closes.

You have arrived. Be it your first time ( we will be gentle) or your latest in a series of journeys over the past decade… all react the same way. The cases, regardless of what lays in them, is the great equalizer.

Miles away, you finally feel at “home“.