For some bizarre and unknown reason, I'd never heard of the 'fukubukuro', mystery bags that are a popular tradition with Japanese retailers around the New Year, until this year! Out of curiosity my partner and I decided to go halves and get one from one of the most popular online stores of Japanese novelty goods, J-List.

We picked the 'Anime Toy 2' fukubukuro which, including shipping, set us back...

The mySaver is an add-on for Apple USB to dock connectors that aims to prevent the problem of cables fraying and breaking by protecting the ends of the cables. This is done by a combination of a metal plug cover and a colour-coded semi-transparent rubber cable cover. The mySaver can be bought either as a kit to fit to your existing cables or as pre-assembled onto an OEM-quality cable.

The differenc...

Imuka from Valkyria Chronicles 3 and Makise Kurisu from Steins;Gate are two of my most recent Nendoroid additions to my collection, so I thought I'd pit them against each other in a double review battle of brains versus brawn!

Both come in the standard Nendoroid packaging on which is printed plenty of information (in Japanese) and photos of the various poses the figures can adopt. Inside there is p...

If you're a fan of anything Japanese then a trip to Japan will be the most amazing experience you can do. Unfortunately it will also be one of the most expensive but here are some of my favourite tips for making your budget go as far as possible. Where links are specific to a certain country, I have indicated which country after the link.

The most important piece of advice

Plan your trip as much...

Adopting my Mini Dollfie Dream, Akane, has inevitability lead me to try my hand at sewing some clothes for her. I've made a few different pieces, to lesser and greater degrees of success, but one of my favourite is this kimono. The contrast of the cooler purple and warmer red colours of the fabric really help give it an autumnal atmosphere, with the gold pattern evoking an Asian style. I'm also pl...

This was my entry for the competition to design the 2012 Snow Miku Nendoroid that some of you may have heard about and possibly entered too. Although I hadn't put pen to tablet in a looong time, I'm a huge fan of Nendoroids and I just couldn't resist the opportunity to do this!

For those that weren't aware of the competition, the theme was to design an outfit that incorporated gems shaped like ...

During my time in Japan, I've been to some of the tallest places a tourist to Japan can be without flying through the air or climbing a mountain. As amazing as it sounds, it's actually not something that comes naturally to me. I'm afraid of heights. I get the terrible feeling of being pulled over the edge when confronted with a height and so going up all these tall things makes me somewhat queasy....

Over the weekend of the 22nd to 24th July, Hyper Japan 2011 took place in London. It's an event dedicated to Japanese culture and this is its second event since starting in October 2010. I've been lucky enough to go to both events and so I'd like to share my experience of Hyper Japan 2011 and how it compares to the 2010 event.

It was surprising how soon the organisers chose to hold the second Hyp...

I'd like to introduce Akane, my own Dollfie Dream - a natural progression for someone obsessed with collecting figures!

I was first exposed to doll culture through Danny Choo's blog. After then, I had seen them closer up at events in the UK and whilst shopping in Japan but at that time my interest had been at most of curiosity rather than wanting to own one. After meeting my partner and seeing th...

One of the many dilemmas a figure collector faces is how to best display their collection. I know this all too well and in a previous post showed how acrylic steps could be used to maximise the space in a display cabinet. This worked well but with my Petit Nendoroid scattered all over the place I still ended up thinking "How can I display even more figures in the same space?"

The solution came in t...