Gasha-Gasha!

Gasha-Gasha is Japanese for "Capsule Toy Machine". You may remember them sitting out the front of supermarkets and milkbars, where you'd put 20 cents in and get a bouncy ball, cheap plastic dinosaur or hideous looking finger puppet. Well Japan knows how to do Capsule Toy Machines right. The price ranges per toy ranges between 100 to 400 yen ($1.50-$6.00 AUD) and this mostly indicates the quality of the toy your getting. That said even at cheap end of the scale these toys go far beyond anything I used to pester my mum for whenever she did the groceries. Every anime, video-game, movie and random Japanese character has at least one type of machine dedicated to pumping out random toys associated with their likeness. Anything from keyrings, to collectible figurines, soft-toys and badges, just so long as it can fit in a plastic capsule.

With such an amazing variety and awesome quality its easy to see why capsule toys are so popular over here. From your local 7-Eleven having five or six machines out the front to the big department stores which often have entire banks of a hundred or more, the damn things are almost everywhere! There's even a thriving second hand market for them. Walk through Den-Den Town in Osaka and you'll find entire stores dedicated to buying and selling particularly rare or uncommon capsule toys. Allowing you to trade in any duplicates and complete the entire set, be prepared to pay a extra though depending on the popularity and rarity of the toy.

Below are some photo's of capsule toy related stuff I've taken over the past few weeks in Japan.




This is Mr. Hoff, no relation to David Hasselhoff, but he does do a good job of rockin' a green bowler hat while playing a key-tar. We picked this toy up in America-Mura (think kinda like China-town back home... but American-ish), and from what we can tell it's part of an Capsule Toy Art Project. Yeah thats right in Japan capsule toys are considered art, think about that...
Additionally Mr. Hoff also comes in blue and may be seen sporting an acoustic guitar or microphone.




"Do you not see this, IN LAW!"
This is awesome! Though I'm not really sure what's its all about let alone what the toy actually is. I used to like to imagine it was a cop show about a father who goes around arresting people who try to marry into his family, but recently we think it may be related to a popular Japanese TV show set in medieval Japan. We've been watching it weekly since we arrived, but I'll let Soph fill you in on the details in another post. In the mean time... "Doooooooooooooooon!"




As you can see this capsule toy machine features some of the rejected bad guys from the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, there's "Crotch-thrusting-Lizard-Man", "Sinister-Dude-in-a-red-robe", and "Klu Klux Klan Guy"... wait, what?




Finally we come to Sophie's current stash of toys with most the staples of Japanese capsule toys machines featuring here. There's some sort of guinea-pig-thing, a frog in a dress, a child mobster, Mr Hoff again, a sailor moon reject, a ninja dog dressed as a tea leaf, an annoying character from an anime, a cat girl, a Japanese weather charm, a martial-arts expert schoolboy, a baby dressed as Hello-Kitty, a padlock shaped like a bear and some purple mo-hawk dude. Key-rings shaped like donuts and Gundam figures coming soon...