We all know that Japan is the birthplace of our beloved transforming robots of all shapes and sizes. And if you've spent any time in Japan you'll know that the best place to shop for them is Nipponbashi, or "Den Den Town", a small shopping district in Osaka that is somehow, gloriously, made up almost entirely of anime, video game, and toy shops. Why they decided to put them all in one place is a mystery to me, but it means that if you're a Japanese pop-culture geek, this is probably where you're going to go when you die. Or it may be where you want to go
to die, depending on how you want to work it. But if toy stores are your thing, by far the greatest of them all is a shop called "
Hero Gangu Kenkyuujin" (Hero toy laboratory). I won't bother with the address--I can't write it, and you wouldn't be able to read it--but you can't miss it; just look for a two story toy shop midway down the main strip of Nipponbashi, on one end of one of those yellow-painted human habitrails that span the street.
Recently, Herogangu permitted me to set up my little portable photo studio in their store and photograph as many of their vintage Transformer toys as I could stand. And that's really saying something--by my estimate, at any one time their store contains approximately 20% of all the Transformers that were ever made. They have piles of boxed G1 stuff just sitting on the shelves. Carded G2 toys from Brazil and Europe just hanging on the pegs next to Cybertron Legends. We already had photos for a lot of their stock in the database, so I focused on the toys that were missing photos, and even discovered one or two that weren't in the database at all.
So I want to thank Herogangu for putting up with me and my hijinx for a full day, and recommend them to those of you planning on making the pilgrimage to Japan someday. Just don't blame me for any scrapes you get on your jaw as it falls to the floor. And please, tell them I sent you!
As for the photos, here's what my first visit produced:
http://www.shmax.com/recent_photos?r=0&psub=599[flash=425,344:3nd5jpir]http://www.youtube.com/v/q66exZADUbU&hl=ja&fs=1&rel=0[/flash:3nd5jpir]
