I've been a plushie snob since before I started making them...in fact, it's part of the reason I picked up my needle in the first place. I'd seen plenty, both on the interwebs and later in person last year in Denden Town, but I remained convinced that nobody could make a plush as cute as mine. Until Hiroshima, where I changed my tune (well, slightly...read on, MacDuff). I had just visited the Animate and found myself in an arcade full of crane games, and without anything much better to do for the rest of the night, I decided to drop a few hundred yen, if I could find a prize worth fighting for.
Now, a thing you have to realize about me is that I suck at crane games. Really, truly suck. So when I came across a glass cabinet full of huge Hozuki plushies, my heart was filled with the utmost despair. Even though I was hoping to find something I wanted enough to play for, the irony was that if I did, I wouldn't be able to win it. The size wasn't even really the issue. I had failed to ever win a prize of any kind - even candy - by grabbing it in a claw, whether back home, where they truly are rigged, or here...I dragged Five into several game centers this spring to try. So I walked past the machine.
Down at the end of the row, though, I found Hozuki again, dangling by a pink nylon string. I'm sure I must have seen the Barber Cut game before, but it must never have been loaded with a prize I wanted. Now, though, here he was, dangling like Kandata from the spider's thread. It was destiny - with my understanding of space honed through years of teaching art, I could do it.
Now, here's a little myth-busting/confirming for you. To win the Barber Cut game, you have to line up a little pair of scissors with a string. Depending on who you ask, this is either the easiest game in Japanese UFO game centers, or the hardest. Since I found it, I've read that some places dull the blades, so that even once you're able to line it up, you still have to get several cuts. This seemed to be the case at the NAMCO in Hiroshima. When I finally lined those scissors up with the string on my seventh try, I knew I had it. Hozuki was as good as mine. But the string didn't break - it merely frayed. And that put me in a terrible position, because it was my last 100 yen, and apparently there are vultures out there who swoop in and steal others' prizes when they go off to get more change! Fortunately the girls who walked past my game didn't try anything, or I might have had an exciting blog to write you about prisons in Hiroshima. Instead, I came back with 10 more 100 yen coins, and before I got to the last one I was the proud owner of my own scary-cute* demon.
It is possible that I have been a little judgey when it comes to Pachinko addicts. Personally, I can't understand the appeal of spending all day in a loud, smelly room plunking money into a game designed to make you lose. Spending a little time, though, in a loud but not smelly room plunking money into a game from which you might walk away with some kawaii anime swag...that, apparently, I understand, because ever since coming back from vacation I've been wondering whether or not it was a fluke, and if there might be more games I can win.
I began in Akiba, which I'm definitely going to write about in depth one day. There are TONS of arcades in nerd central, and while some of them will give you a free try, most of them didn't have the string game...the few Barber Cuts I found looked sketchy, and there was nothing I wanted to win. The last one I came to, though, had some little Hozuki swing plush all stacked up in a huge pile in a traditional crane game, so I sank about 5 bucks trying to win one before admitting defeat. That's another thing about these games in Japan - you're paying a dollar each turn rather than a quarter. Pricey, compared to back home, but I'd rather spend $5 and win on the fifth try (or, you know $16...considering the size of my prize, this still wasn't bad) than $1.25 and walk away empty-handed and demoralized.
I lived to fight another day, and decided the following Friday after school to hit up the arcade I kept going past on my way up to Daiso in Kawasaki. I love Kawasaki. When I went to a festival there once upon a time, I walked past this shopping district and could feel its potential but I had bigger fish to fry back then. Now it's just one stop away from my nearest train station. It didn't take me long to find a crane game with those damn swing plush from Akiba, but this time there were three of them laid out individually, close to the edge. There is plenty of advice online about how to win at "UFO Catchers" and I'd read a little since my last attempt, but after 10 tries. Hozuki had moved so far to the back that the claw couldn't even reach him. Now, sane people would call it a loss and walk away at this point. I have never been one to pride myself on my sanity, though...I walked away, but only to find one of the attendants to ask for a "resettu." This is another thing you can do in Japan - if the prize is turning out to be too hard to get or like this dumbass, you manage to shift in too far in the opposite direction, the people working there can fix it so it's easier to win. He moved my little prize and I began again. This time, Hozuki ended up next to another one of the prizes, and in the process of working on mine, I ended up with both. I've started doing math like Five, and I think this means instead of wasting $20 to get a prize, I wasted $10 each on two prizes. It sounds much better that way.
This is where I should quit. I should definitely not be thinking to myself, "I wonder when prizes change, and what else might be offered." But that IS the next logical step. So I looked online and while I failed to find a comprehensive listing of upcoming prizes, by searching MyFigureCollection I found some of the prizes that came out when Hozuki No Reitetsu's first season came out, and the truth is, it's all over. I'm officially in training, because there will come a day when the only way to get the prize I want is to have mastery over the claw.
In the meantime, there's no chance of winning those old prizes...but I've read I might be able to pick some of them up secondhand. I'd briefly stopped into Nakano Broadway the day I went to the Koenji Awa Odori, but I'd been carelessly meandering in and out of Mandarakes at that time. When you're on the hunt though, it changes everything. Let's start with books. I'm a sucker for art books, and being an art teacher makes it a justifiable expenditure...I might even be able to claim that on my taxes, if I filed them (oh, wait - I did file my taxes! Like most things in life, actually doing it was less hassle than I imagined it to be in the...well, let's not think about how many years it had been). I found several Hozuki no Reitetsu books online, and had been trawling the shelves of Book Off looking for them (and picking up the manga volumes along the way, which, no, I can not actually read...yet...) but hadn't found them. The first Mandarake I stopped into on Saturday, a foreign employee asked me if there was anything she could help me find, so I pulled up the photo on my phone, told her the title, and in like 5 minutes I had the book I wanted in my hand. It was AWESOME.
There are three floors chock full of otaku goodness in Nakano Broadway. A lot of the stores are the tentacles of Mandarake, which means that you can ask at their information and they can search it for you and direct you to the right place. But if they don't have it, there's still a chance one of the other dealers does, and since you're in the same building, it's a lot less hassle to search them all than in Akiba. It was a good day of shopping and I managed a pretty decent haul, although I didn't find any plush. Maybe this is just as well, since the closer I get to finishing my own Hozuki, the more I'm reminded that nobody makes a plush as cute as mine.
*It amuses me to no end that this is koai-kawaii in Japanese. They are almost the same word.
Now, here's a little myth-busting/confirming for you. To win the Barber Cut game, you have to line up a little pair of scissors with a string. Depending on who you ask, this is either the easiest game in Japanese UFO game centers, or the hardest. Since I found it, I've read that some places dull the blades, so that even once you're able to line it up, you still have to get several cuts. This seemed to be the case at the NAMCO in Hiroshima. When I finally lined those scissors up with the string on my seventh try, I knew I had it. Hozuki was as good as mine. But the string didn't break - it merely frayed. And that put me in a terrible position, because it was my last 100 yen, and apparently there are vultures out there who swoop in and steal others' prizes when they go off to get more change! Fortunately the girls who walked past my game didn't try anything, or I might have had an exciting blog to write you about prisons in Hiroshima. Instead, I came back with 10 more 100 yen coins, and before I got to the last one I was the proud owner of my own scary-cute* demon.
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| Mine, all mine - mwahahahahah! |
I began in Akiba, which I'm definitely going to write about in depth one day. There are TONS of arcades in nerd central, and while some of them will give you a free try, most of them didn't have the string game...the few Barber Cuts I found looked sketchy, and there was nothing I wanted to win. The last one I came to, though, had some little Hozuki swing plush all stacked up in a huge pile in a traditional crane game, so I sank about 5 bucks trying to win one before admitting defeat. That's another thing about these games in Japan - you're paying a dollar each turn rather than a quarter. Pricey, compared to back home, but I'd rather spend $5 and win on the fifth try (or, you know $16...considering the size of my prize, this still wasn't bad) than $1.25 and walk away empty-handed and demoralized.
This is where I should quit. I should definitely not be thinking to myself, "I wonder when prizes change, and what else might be offered." But that IS the next logical step. So I looked online and while I failed to find a comprehensive listing of upcoming prizes, by searching MyFigureCollection I found some of the prizes that came out when Hozuki No Reitetsu's first season came out, and the truth is, it's all over. I'm officially in training, because there will come a day when the only way to get the prize I want is to have mastery over the claw.
There are three floors chock full of otaku goodness in Nakano Broadway. A lot of the stores are the tentacles of Mandarake, which means that you can ask at their information and they can search it for you and direct you to the right place. But if they don't have it, there's still a chance one of the other dealers does, and since you're in the same building, it's a lot less hassle to search them all than in Akiba. It was a good day of shopping and I managed a pretty decent haul, although I didn't find any plush. Maybe this is just as well, since the closer I get to finishing my own Hozuki, the more I'm reminded that nobody makes a plush as cute as mine.
*It amuses me to no end that this is koai-kawaii in Japanese. They are almost the same word.
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