Cute stationery

Last week we enjoyed a day out at the Japanese department store where we had some delish ramen and browsed the bookstore which was filled with lots of fun stuff for people who like stationery. Everything in a Japanese stationery store is cute! It was our first time there - they had lots of origami paper, cute cute cute little stationery items, lots of nice pens, notebooks/composition books that are ruled/lined for writing in Japanese, trinkets, cool Japanese magazines. Many of the Japanese magazines came with swag - here, all I ever see packaged with magazines are CDs or DVDs. They had cool tote bags, purse/bags and more in the women's fashion and beauty mags. The kids magazines came with various toys - kind of like our Happy Meals do, but with better stuff.

I've never picked up a graphic novel, but they had tons of them there - big thick books full of anime/manga. There was a group of non-Asian (read: white) teens there admiring the manga titles - apparently they were longtime fans. Being that the novels were in Japanese, I had to ask them if they were able to read Japanese. The anwer...was no. Apparently you can get the gist of the story simply by looking at the pictures...no reading necessary! :) I thought that was amusing.

I bought a super cute Japanese Hello Kitty diary (agenda/planner) which I'll take a pic of and share. I also got a couple of folders (for lack of a better word) that have cute graphics on them...oh! and a cute pencil case that I gave to my daughter.

Asian shop full of claw games

Being Asian, we like to go eat dumplings or dim sum every now and then and go shopping at the Asian grocery stores. We tried out a new-to-us dumpling restaurant a couple days ago and went shopping to see what cute things we could find. We went into the store right next door the restaurant we were at and besides lots of so-cute Hello Kitty things, lots of cute stationery things and other Asian things, a good third of the shop was wall-to-wall arcade claw games - all the same outside but the toys on the inside were super cute. The picture above only shows a few of the games, but there were about 20 or so of these 'games' with the claw that comes down and you have to grab the prize. I thought it was pretty cool! Below is a collage of some of the toys inside the games. There was a picture posted on the Hello Kitty game - some guy spent $28 (in quarters!) to win one.