It started innocently enough. as always. I drove up Route 9 into Poughkeepsie, NY, because my mom needed to buy some work pants. As she shopped, I wandered around the Galleria, and I came across a store I’d never seen before – C-T Japanese Gifts. Being a huge fan of Japanese strangeness – the odd and inappropriate toys, the unusual snackfoods, the unfamiliar social customs and attitudes – I ventured inside.

I watched some anime in college, and enjoyed most of what I saw. Unfortunately, the largely unshowered social scene associated with it drove me away, half-blind and convinced that I should never speak of it again. Still, some lingering attraction to the culture always draws me back. There’s just something about giant robots and huge fighting reptiles that I can’t get out of my system.

Among the squid snacks and Naruto figurines, I came cross a whole aisle of gashapon and capsule toys. The selection of mini-figures included everything from Super Mario toys that made sounds, to busty and barely-clad vixens, strange aliens and characters from a hundred cartoons I’d never heard of. All of these, in true capsule toy style, were blind-boxed – meaning that you don’t know which toy you get until you opened the package. There’s usually a display of six or seven different figures on the back of the box, and usually an unpictured (and rare) mystery figure or two, but there’s really no telling what you’ll score. And I needed to find out.

I grabbed a few boxes, not knowing what anything was (since everything was printed in Japanese), but featuring very attractive pictures. What i bought ended up being a mystery figure from Golgo 13 and another figure from the Gamera series of films. I ended up getting the best of both worlds.

Now, I’m not sure exactly what this Golgo figure is depicting, but I can’t imagine that it’s anything but curiously perverse. A lone man, smoking a cigarette in his underwear and barely obscured by a curtain, proudly on display for all the world to see. Further research on the character of ‘Golgo’ reveals him to be something of an ‘amoral James Bond’-type assassin, so such a window display wouldn’t be too far out of character. He’s had a whole bunch of comics, some cartoons, some live action movies and three video games based on his exploits. In some cases, I prefer ignorance to the actual events, and I’ll let people just wonder quietly about me when they see this underpants-ed man staring at me from my workbench. I’ll just tell them, “I like it when he watches. And clearly, he does too.”

The second figure I got was that of a flying Gamera, and as if the smiling toy gods of Japan were personally smiling upon me that day, he’s fighting a giant Squid. Further exploration of this reveals that Gamera is actually fighting a monster named Viras (or Bairasu, in the original pronunciation) from the fourth Gamera film, 1968’s ‘Destroy All Planets’. The scene depicted here is a mirror of the actual movie poster used for the film. Gamera himself has an interesting and varied history, originally conceived as a parallel to Godzilla in an attempt to capitalize off of the kaiju craze in Japan, and re-written every few years to have a slightly different history and origin. Subsequent figures in this series also depict various Gamera-related monsters and movie posters.

By all means, it’s not the extend of the possible wierdness, but it was this weekend’s wierdness, and that’s enough for me.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.