The Otaku Report: Rules for Collecting

We're three and a half weeks into the government mandated school shut-down, and just found out that we've got another month after this.  I'm struggling.  I miss my kids, I miss my routine - I have nothing to do!  For some reason when I have all the time in the world I just don't feel like I need to do anything.  All the sewing and sketching and (ahem) cleaning that I'd want to do while I was at work on a normal day just doesn't feel that urgent.  Besides that, all public gatherings up to and including church have been cancelled - they've even called off one of Mongolia's two big celebrations, Tsagaan Sar.  So don't blame me for a bit of a puff piece, because I don't really have anything else to write about.  As you'll learn in my next post, I recently went through the looking-not-touching-glass (because, you know.  Quarantine.) on a magical shopping adventure.  But here's the thing: coming back to Mongolia may have brought me a return to disposable income, but I am WAAAY too happy funneling it into the figure industry.  The claustrophobic aisles leading between tightly packed shelves are an easy place to lose your way, and a girl needs guideposts to keep from getting lost in the mists of darkness.  These are mine.

Rule #1:  One character, one figure
This is my most important rule, and some people might disagree strongly with it.  It started as a rule of necessity - back when I was leaving Japan I asked myself if I needed BOTH the Roy Mustangs I had, and that made packing easier, if not the actual deciding.  Even if I wasn't nomadic, I think I'd stick with this one - the collections I've seen of endless Hatsune Mikus and Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blades are a little creepy.  Of course the otome perspective makes this a little easier to live by: rarely do we get more than one or two versions of the male characters we love (if that).  I’ve stuck pretty well with this rule, and currently only have two duplicates: my Eraserheads (there was no way I was giving up the Pop my little brother gave me when I got his prize figure.  Hell, do Pops even count???) and Levis, but I'm planning on selling his nendoroid when I get the chance.  Still, the temptation does come up from time to time, and I've had to make some tough decisions.

Kamado Tanjiro, Deluxe Version.  By Aniplex

Rule #2:  It's okay to splash out on male figures...
I don't want to talk to you about how much I spent ordering the yet-to-be-released deluxe version of Aniplex's Tanjirou figure.  Suffice it to say it didn't come cheap (and it hasn't gotten any cheaper, thank fuck).  However, I've seen male figures go for absolutely ridiculous sums of money in the aftermarket - the only reason I was able to find my Yato figure for less than $300 was because he has damage to one of his swords.  So I say that if you're buying new, go for it.  For used figures, I try to use my best judgement.  Sometimes figures get rereleased - GoodSmile does this a lot with their nendoroids - but that seems to depend a lot on how hot the anime is.  If it's been several years and there's no whisper of a new season, it might not happen.

Rule #3: ...But don't buy characters you don't know
If I've never read the manga, watched the anime, or played the game, do I really need a figure of that character?  That's another question I ask myself.  This meant that when I got back from Kyoto last fall and finally did watch Psychopass that I was kicking myself a little for not buying Ko-chan's nendoroid, but it's also helped me to resist buying Ootengu from Onmyoji and Kaworu from Evangelion because I can't be bothered to play/watch their franchises.  Both figures are really cool, but in the end they're just a pretty piece of plastic unless I'm invested in their characters.

Ootengu, China exclusive. By Hobby Max

Rule #4:  Don't pay more than $70 for a nendoroid.
Half of my collection is these little bastards.  I love them, they're hellacute.  But their original prices range around 4500-6000 yen.  For me, when the price climbs above $70, they just become too expensive.  This is one rule that I haven't been tempted to break, although I've owned nendos that were worth more - Hoozuki, who I ended up selling, can go for around $110, and Dazai even more than that, although since he got a rerelease I'm pretty sure his worth has plummeted...and that's why you don't want to sink too much into them.  As mentioned above, they do get rereleased pretty often, so their value can be fairly volatile.

Ranma Q-Posket, for old times' sake.  Bought, not won.

Rule #5:  Don't win your prizes - Buy them
I'm ashamed of how long this rule took me to figure out.  Prize figures are among the hardest goods to get out of UFO catchers.  Don't be surprised if after plugging the machine full of 100 yen coins you still don't have that damn Rimuru.  If you're in it for the thrill of victory and you actually want to waste a small fortune, well, by all means - dozo.  But if you're more interested in the figure, do yourself a favor and see if you can buy it instead.  If you're not in Akiba, just find your nearest Bookoff+ and see if they have it.  The one in Kawasaki was a great source for prizes, but even my small neighborhood Bookoff had a decent range of figures.

Mika and Yuu, by Mens Hdge.

Rule #6:  (almost) Never Order In
I've only learned this rule this fall.  Once I had disposable income again I didn’t care if shipping was expensive, especially since that Kogami Shinya DX nendoroid I passed on in Kyoto was only 3500 yen online.  But I've come to realize that any deals you might be getting are countered by that shipping cost, so I no longer let myself order old figures for delivery.  This also helps to ensure the joy of the hunt for the next time I'm in Japan.  There is an exception to this one:  rare figures.  I wholeheartedly believe if you can get a great deal on the Owari no Seraph boys you should 10 million percent go for it.

Straight Outta Wuhan

Unless you've been living under a rock, you may have heard that we're having a pandemic this year, the coronavirus now known as Covid-19.  This has been an interesting experience for me.  In past years, I've somehow missed the exciting new flavors of panic, having been in the wrong place each time - and that was just fine with me.  However, when I first read about the new plague in China before I came back from winter vacation, I did find myself thinking, "Oh.  China.  That's, like, next door, eh?"

Funnily enough, my flight back on January 17 went through Beijing.  At the time, that didn't seem as risky as it does now.  I didn't wear a mask, and simply went about life as usual - eating at Pizza Hut (the only good restaurant in the international terminal) and trying to kill time while waiting for my flight.  I was irritated when I got back to Mongolia because they made us wait on the plane for health inspectors to come collect the health declaration, but although I've never been in the epicenter of an outbreak before, I've traveled in the time of everything from mad cow to swine flu, so I really didn't think much about it.

Now dinner comes with a moist towelette AND hand sanitizer...

It was about a week later that I realized this was going to be a biohazard of a completely different color.  After dinner with Engrish and Blondie, I got into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the school.  Immediately he started trying to tell me something, but I wasn't exactly sure what.  The next morning one of my colleagues enlightened me: the government had ordered schools to close UNTIL MARCH 3.  In school terms, that's approximately forever.  I didn't believe it - I had to message Engrish and ask her about it in order to consider that this was happening.  And that was three weeks ago.  Now fortunately for us and our students, we live in the digital era, and this means that learning can still take place.  Sort of.  It's kind of hard to teach art online - I've had to do a lot with art journaling and reviewing fundamentals, but I'm hoping that when they get started for real that their work will benefit from what we're discussing.  But apart from that, the quarantine order has basically made it impossible for me to establish any sort of routine in my life.  We teachers go into work three hours a day, and while the first week I thought, "Hey, I could get used to this!" I quickly got bored.  I should probably be using that time to do all sorts of wild and crazy things, but...well...I'm just not feeling it.  I think I need the stress from the 5.5 hours of work I don't have to do each day to feel motivated to do things like work on my art, or do my homework.

There is one wild and crazy thing that I've done, though, enabled by the short work days.  A certain event takes place twice a year in Chiba, which for some inexplicable reason I missed every time during the two years I lived in Japan.  Now on a normal weekend there's no way you could make it to Japan and back, but I managed to convince the school to let me off my leash in exchange for working a couple of long days, and off I went.  Three weeks had made a helluva lot of difference in travel.  Pretty much everyone wore a mask on the plane, and even in the airport.  I also noticed a LOT of hand sanitizer dispensers.  They might have been there before and I only noticed them because the fact that Incheon was still running flights to China sketched me out a little, but still.  The flight back to Mongolia was only about 1/3 full, and in addition to having our health declarations collected before we left the flight, the inspectors came on the plane in full hazmat suits and scanned our foreheads to check for fever.

It was kind of crazy.  In two weeks we are supposed to be back at school on a normal schedule.  Since Mongolia has yet to report a single confirmed case of Covid-19, it seems reasonable to think this isn't just a pipe dream, that we'll actually be teaching again.  However, in the last week the government officially cancelled Tsagaan Sar, one of Mongolia's two big holidays - no wrestling matches, no big formal celebrations - so who knows how it will actually play out.  Although it annoys the heck out of me, I kind of get where the government is coming from - Mongolia doesn't exactly have the medical facilities to deal with the Big Nasty.  Still, I'll definitely have a celebratory coke when things get back to normal.

The Water's Fine

So let me hit you with an Absolute Truth: I am lazy as fuck.  Returning to Mongolia was a strategic move that I needed to make in order to have both the time and money to finish grad school...but it came with the added benefit of enabling my laziness.  I live at school.  I can afford to take taxis again.  I can order in food again, because I can afford both to eat out and to order delivery.  When the weather was still what counts as "nice" here, I made at least a token attempt to fight my laziness, but those days are gone, along with any sort of sensation in my thighs if I walk outside more than 5 minutes.

That said, I'm self-aware enough that I know these are not sustainable life choices.  Coming home from school each day to order Songo and watch anime in the dark for several hours...

...speaking of which, yeah, instead of my usual photography you're getting (mostly) anime swimming gifs today instead.  You're welcome...

...before falling asleep way too early is pretty much guaranteed to wreck both my body and my mind.  So as my November payday crept closer, I resolved that I would join a nearby health club that had a pool.  The pool is important because we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of my feet being shit, and even though I spend less time on them on any given day here than I did at any point in Japan, they can still be a bitch.

via GIPHY

Back to being lazy as fuck, one of the ways in which Mongolia beats Japan most days is that things are relatively simple.  For example, rather than a long winded bureaucratical nightmare if you need a phone in Mongolia, you just drop in on Mobicom with your passport and you can walk away with a SIM card.  However, I knew from previous experience that joining a gym - or at least, one with a pool - involved a doctor's clearance...less for my own sake than for the fact that I might bring something communicable into the water.  However, this damn doctor's clearance was what kept me from joining a pool in the five years I was here before, because it required a pap smear, and on general principle I refused to do it.  Since you can't get an STD from a swimming pool, I failed to see how the state of my vagina was any of their business. 

Well, I still object, but since I haven't had a proper checkup since I lived in Shanghai I wrote it off as killing two birds with one stone, and went and got it done.  And then waited around for two weeks for payday so that I could afford the membership fee.  And then promptly got sick, so it was almost three weeks before I finally got into the pool.  I’ve never really thought of swimming as hard work, so it said a lot to me that in my first lap I could already tell that my muscles, such as they are, were getting beat up.  I kind of thought I was going to be swimming for like an hour every day, but after that first excruciating lap, I knew I’d struggle to finish 30 minutes.  The upshot to this is that I slept like the dead those first two nights.

via GIPHY

There are other challenges beyond the shape I’m in (ie, round).  A big one is the fact that I live by Songo delivery, and I often skip lunch.  It was tough waiting til I got home to eat, and involved a balancing act of ordering in advance and hoping that the driver shows up when they’re supposed to.  If they get there too early, I’m not home yet.  If they arrive late, I’m so hungry that I actually want to bite the driver, I’m that angry as well as that hungry.  I've been better about cooking since winter break, though, especially since the quarantine...which is a topic for another blog.  A logistical nightmare of a different stripe is getting home with wet hair.  Before I started actually going this was my biggest fear; that on the 5 minute walk home my hair would freeze and break off (I may need to get it cut, but not like that!).  This has been a ridiculously warm winter, so I've gotten away with just bundling it up, which is good because I didn't particularly want to torture my hair with a blow dryer, only to turn around and shower as soon as I get home.

via GIPHY

However, after my first night swimming I had to upgrade my biggest fear.  About halfway through my swim two middle school boys got in.  They were speaking English, and though I was trying to pretend they didn’t exist, I made eye contact long enough that I’m pretty sure I recognized one of them as an eighth grader from my school.  I was kind of prepared for the fact that I’d run into students there at some point, but when I got out of the pool fifteen minutes later I realized someone had left the doors of the women’s locker room open.  I obviously closed them, but I’ve been terrified ever since that some dumbass will leave them open when I’m changing.  I don’t know who would be more traumatized, but considering how awkward it was when a female former student came in while I was getting dressed, I’m going to say everyone.

via GIPHY

So my (more or less) nightly swim's not perfect.  But the water is warm and with my earplugs in I can't hear the shrieks of the little monsters whose parents send them there without any supervision.  As I glide through the water, I do feel a little more peaceful, like my worries are floating away in my wake.  Walking back to the apartment, the moon greets me in a light, night sky, limning the hills in white and transporting me to a different place.  And I have to admit that this has at least been one new experience for me in Mongolia.