Dragon Quest Merch

A POST DRAWS NEAR! COMMAND?

What’s this a real post!! I bet everybody thought I forgot about this poor blog (I did a little bit). Truth is it’s all due to laziness (and not having much to write about)! So out of building feelings of guiltiness and neglect, comes a post.

Anyways here’s some of the various Dragon Quest merchandise I bought over the past while. Most of it was for the 25th anniversary. Some of it I actually got at the DQ museum that was in Tokyo last year. First is a special slime for the 25th anniversary.

What’s different about it? Well it’s wearing a bow-tie first of all. Also on the back it has a special patch.

I also picked up this cool slime glass.

I use it everyday to drink juice in the morning. There’s a couple more slimes on the back too.

These special booklets were only for people who went to the 25th anniversary museum.

Inside is some simple quests for you to do while you looked at the exhibit. If you did everything correctly you got a special pin as shown below.

Here’s a slime handkerchief I got. I thought it was really cute.

One thing I tend to do when I go somewhere in Japan is buy a special handkerchief for that place. They always sell them everywhere, and they’re also really handy and useful. A souvenir that you can actually put to use.

I got this book at the local Yodobashi Camera electronics store.

It’s almost what you would call a Dragon Quest history book. It’s filled with tons of info about the series.

I just wish it was in English…

All the artwork is cool though.

Here’s some playing cards.

They have a really cool slime design on the back of them.

Also some the cards have some cool pictures on them.

Finally here’s an Eco-bag. It looks like a Famicom (NES) box when it’s all folded up.

When it’s open you can see the hero symbol on the front of the bag.

So that’s my round of all my goodies. Lately I’ve been acquiring some good Jojo stuff due to its anniversary this year so expect a future post on that.

Hadaka

This Saturday I finally got a chance to see the Hadaka festival in Kakuda. The last few years it was during the week and I always just missed it. Hadaka by the way means “naked”. Now they aren’t actually naked, but they are wearing basically just underwear. Keep in mind that the temperature was around zero degrees!  Plus they had to be out in the cold for a couple hours. It’s kinda crazy!! Check out some photos below.

Tokyo Tower

Here’s a photo I took of the Tokyo Tower from the top of the Mori Art Centre in Roppongi. I was there to see the Dragon Quest 25th anniversary museum (which is coming in a future post). This was a nice side benefit of going there.

Disney Sea

This weekend I finally did something worth writing about. This past weekend was the first weekend I’ve had off since the big earthquake. This gave me the chance to go to Tokyo and visit Disney Sea. Disney Sea is similar to Disneyland, but it’s more geared towards adults. That means the rides are more exciting, and the food is better (I thought). Plus you can drink alcohol there!

The atmosphere of the park is interesting, ranging from European to cape cod to even jungle like. You can see a little bit of what it’s like below.

My favourite rides of the ones that we rode were “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, and “Tower of Terror” (which you can see below).

The reason I liked “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” so much was the surprise ending of the ride. It started off as a slow ride watching some animatronics, and then it turned into an incredibly fast thrill ride. It was even more exciting than Space Mountain. Anyways here is some more pictures I took at the park.

Fuji

When we went to Thailand I managed to get a glimpse of Mt. Fuji from the air. It was pretty cool!

Again!?

Well we had another sizable earthquake they other day. Our area had started making steady progress repairing the damage of the first big earthquake, but a lot of that was thrown away. Once again the trains have stopped running (they only actually ran not even one day of semi-full service). The power went out the night of the earthquake for many hours, and we have lost all of our running water for the past few days. So basically I’m filthy again, and have to line up for drinking water yet again. I’m really starting to question Japan’s effectiveness in these situations. Updates and answers are few and far between. The usual answer is that it is unknown when services will return. I don’t really think it’s an acceptable answer really. Don’t believe the news when you see those photos that the Japanese media has been pushing of the highway being fixed in a few days, because most of everything else has remained broken. I also think that a country that has frequent earthquakes shouldn’t rely on trains for all of their public transport. A reasonably strong earthquake damages the whole system and it goes down for days or even weeks at a time. Not such a good idea really. I remember three years ago we had a strong earthquake (not bad at all though compared to recently), and the trains ran slow for just over two months. Maybe adding some other transport to supplement the trains would be smart. Actually the whole infrastructure in Japan probably needs rethinking. The recent earthquakes are proof of that.

Oh, by the way our broken wall finally fell down after the large earthquake the other day.

More From Watari

My wife and the in-laws took another drive to Watari today. I just stayed home, so I gave my camera to the wife and told her to take some photos. It’s pretty crazy the destruction.

Starry Starry Night

Right after the earthquake we had no power for quite a few days. It was really boring at night. We had nothing to do but listen to the radio, which was super boring. I decided to take advantage of the darkness available due to not a single light working in town, and try taking some photos of the stars. The picture below was the most striking one that I took. It’s a bit blurry, but I still like it.

It’s simple incredible how many stars you can see when there’s no lights to block them out. Pretty amazing!

Watari

My in-laws took a drive over to Watari the other day. It’s one of the places that was hit by the tsunami last Friday. The town lies just twenty minutes or so from Kakuda on the other side of the mountain. They took some pictures, which aren’t great, but they still show some of the tsunami damage in the area.

Damage

I’m finally back on the internet again after almost a week. Things are starting to get semi-normal. We have power, internet, and telephone (land line and cell). We still don’t have water yet (so I’m probably pretty stinky now), and most of the stores are still closed, so getting food can be a bit difficult sometimes. We still have enough to eat though. We also can’t get any gasoline, and the trains are not even close to running any time soon. It’s not so bad though, considering how some people are having a much worse time right now.

Anyways here’s some photos of the damage around my neighborhood. It’s nowhere near as bad as some of the stuff you’ve probably seen on TV. In fact it’s kind of trivial compared to the tsunami damage.The first three are at our house. The earthquake almost toppled the wall behind our house.

It’s actually very lucky that it fell away from the house. Below is a stone ornament thing in our garden. The earthquake just shattered it to pieces.

During the earthquake I was standing near it, and didn’t even notice it falling down (or the wall for that matter). Everything was shaking so much and for so long, I thought it was never going to end. I could barely even stand up. I had to hold onto a post, but I still had problems keeping my feet on the ground. It was easily the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.

Below is several photos of my immediate neighborhood.

Most of the worst damage was to older buildings. Below a temple gate fell right over.

Some of the streets just cracked right open. When I was driving the other day I saw a crack in the road almost half a foot wide. Also I saw a section where the road sank over a foot! These are smaller ones just down the street from my house.

Since the earthquake we’ve experienced almost constant aftershocks.  Some quite substantial too. In fact some of the aftershocks have been stronger than earthquakes we’ve had before. Thankfully it’s starting to settle down to one or two every couple of hours. So that’s the current up date as it stands so far.

Oh by the way I forgot to mention that the inside of our house was completely trashed. Stuff was everywhere, and a lot of it was broken. One thing that surprised me was one of our heavy shelves actually had moved a foot and a half sideways! Also our fridge toppled over and hit a shelf . I found it sitting diagonal with the doors wide open and the food all over the ground.