57

 

Today is my 57th birthday. It's been one of the most challenging years of my life and I mean that in a number of ways. Family-wise, my 57th year on this planet was stressful and emotional unlike any other year, particularly the last five months. I've cried more than I have in years and it's all about my parents. I'm not going to expand on that at all in this blog but suffice it to say while everyone I care the most about is thankfully still alive and sticking together, it has not been easy. I have often written thankful words on this day of the year in the last dozen years and today is no different. I am healthy and alive and able to do the things that make me feel alive. I am extremely fortunate.

That includes being able to travel and explore our planet.

Calendar year 2024 was a bit of a tough travel year. Easier than other stuff that was to come after the new year in '25 but still ultimately not as satisfying as some past years. It featured two week-plus-long trips (that's too few, by the way) and a lot of work travel. The time after my birthday was extra tough: just one vacation to the country where I was born (England) and a ton of not traveling and not exploring. Except for work. And then not so much the exploring even though I tried.

So in 2025, I've taken steps to buck that one year travel trend. I am, after all, in control a bit of some of this stuff. We've already completed a week each in Belize (with a day trip to Guatemala) and Tokyo. Central America and Japan are two of my favorite parts of the world so I'm thrilled to have been able to visit each in the first half of this year. Give me time in the jungle or Japanese culture and food every day for a week or more and I'll be a happy man. Just as long as I can retreat to a comfy hotel at the end of the jungle days, that is.

On those two trips, I knocked one of my all time must visit spots off my list (Guatemala's Tikal), found some of my favorite birds (toucans) and immersed myself in one of the world's most anticipated events of each year in the blooming of the sakura or cherry blossoms in the Japanese spring. Last year it was lunar new year in southeast Asia; this year it was sakura-watching. These are not easy spots to get to and I know not everyone can do these things on demand like we have done in the last 18 months. Again, I am extremely lucky.

Decorated stone statues near the Tokyo Tower in Tokyo, the biggest city I visited this year.

Traditionally on this date's post, I check in on the goals that I set for myself as a part of this blog. But last year, I abandoned that routine, with a determination to go where I felt like it without conforming to some sort of master plan. This year, I remain true to that idea. I am still refusing to establish goals. My personal travel list is just so long and I don't see a need to prioritize my travel in five year chunks any more. I am confident that there are amazing, mind-blowing sights to see out there and I am sure I can find some to take in every year.

So what does the next year hold, travel-wise? Well, honestly it's a little murky, but the balance of 2025 looks like nothing inside the United States (weekend trips don't count) which would make 2025 only the second year that I've been writing this blog that I didn't travel somewhere in my home country that made it into the pages of this blog (2019 was the other year with trips to New Zealand, Peru and Ireland / Northern Ireland that year). Not going to lie here, we are deliberately focused outside of our borders. 

We do have two trips booked and (mostly) planned already to the Canadian Rockies and South Africa which should keep us very well occupied for the remainder of 2025 but 2026 is a blank canvas. There are no flights or hotels booked at all beyond this year we are in right now. That's extremely unusual for us and it's both exciting and daunting at the same time. Don't get me wrong, we have some ideas. Just no commitments yet. Don't worry, we'll fill up 2026 very soon, I'm sure of it. If nothing else, we need to get to Europe. I feel confident we will.

For the first five birthday posts on this blog (this is number 13), I was at home somewhere in Arlington, Virginia and the cover picture of this post featured me having a drink somewhere near to where I lived. In the seven subsequent posts, I was mostly on the road, showing up in pics taken in the New York City, Utah, Scotland and the Napa Valley (twice). Today, I am once again at home. But Canada beckons. I am super excited to fly to Calgary in the next month and start exploring the six national parks we have on our list out there. This world is a wonderful place. I can't wait to see what the next year brings for me. I know it's going to be awesome exploring some new places.

The harbor (or harbour) at Mousehole (pronounced mow-zul). Possibly the smallest town I visited this year.

Gashapon

This is my last Japan post from our 2025 Tokyo trip. Here's hoping it won't be another seven years before we make it back over there. But then again, there are so many places to go...

Let's start this post in a place that is decidedly not Japan.

I first set foot in the United States in July of 1979. I was an 11 year old kid born and raised in England who was suddenly taken from the only country I had ever lived in and moved an ocean away. Lest this sound like some sort of kidnapping, let me assure you this move was entirely consensual. My parents asked the opinion of both me and my sister and I (at least) was all in from the get go.

Being moved from the United Kingdom to America as a child in the late 1970s involved a good amount of complete culture shock. I know, I know, today there are a lot of similarities between the two places when it comes to things kids care about. But back then? Not so much. American candy bars were inferior. Comic books in the U.S. told a story that lasted months rather than a single page. The crisp selection in the States was miserable. And I'd never even been to a McDonald's. Fast food? What's THAT!?!? OK...so fast food was an upgrade.

Then there were trips to the grocery store. On the way out, there were these machines near the exit doors. What were these? Gumball machines? Didn't have those in England. How awesome are these, especially ones that dispense toys in little plastic capsules rather than gum? Put in a quarter and rotate that handle and some stickers or a miniature (American) football helmet or some sort of other toy comes out? I'm sold! This is definitely an upgrade to my 11 year old life.

Gashapon store near Sensō-ji Temple.

While I certainly didn't know it at the time, vending machines like the ones I found in American supermarkets in the late '70s have been around since the late 1800s. They have been used to sell gum and postcards and tobacco and soft drinks and all sorts of other products. Eventually at some point between the late 19th century and the 1960s, these things branched out and morphed into automated purveyors of small plastic toys for kids to take their chance at dropping a coin into a slot, turning a crank handle and finding something to play with. I fell in love on sight, even if I couldn't really afford to put too much money into these things.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one in the world not from the United States who was fascinated with these things. In the 1960s, they were introduced to Japan. And like some things when the Japanese get a hold of them, being in Japan elevated these little toy-containing plastic capsules with into what can only be described as an artform combined with a bit of a national obsession. They called them gashapon, apparently named after the sound that the crank handle makes (gasha) combined with the "pon" sound (whatever that is...) when the capsule drops into the dispenser place. It's an onomatopoeia. Remember 6th grade English? If not, Google it!

Gashapon machines in Japan are not confined to grocery stores. They can be found just about everywhere. What does everywhere mean? Try stores crammed into any sort of available space. Try in train stations. Try on street corners. Or jammed between buildings off of streets. Pretty much anywhere appears to be fair game for gashapon machines. 

We dabbled in these things a bit in Akihabara in 2017 and then again in Singapore last year. With our second full trip to Japan, we had to go find some of these things in a serious way. We were on a mission.

Train station gashapon.

Maybe a terminology check is in order before I continue. I should mention that there are a variety of different spellings and pronunciations of gashapon. Google "gatchapon", "gachapon" or "gasha gasha" and you'll find they all mean the same thing. I'm sticking with gashapon. 

So why do I want a whole series of little pieces of plastic out of gashapon machines? Well, I don't necessarily, but I have a niece who is 12 years old who's a little enamored of these things and Japan's culture in general. With this quest, I decided to combine my desire to do something completely and uniquely Japanese with an ability to make someone other than me happy as the end result.

Her request? One Piece. Demon Slayer. Dandadan. Anime / manga series that she watches. We found a ton of One Piece stuff last year in Singapore so we figured we'd be pretty much good there. The rest? Well...we'd just have to see. 

Clearly, by the cover picture of this post, we found some One Piece stuff.

Three. Thousand. Gashapon.

I will say that on this trip, we spent a surprising amount of time looking around gashapon stores, if that's even the correct term. We bought from machines on the street. We bought from machines in an open air place that can only reasonable be described as an L-shaped dead end corridor. And we shopped but didn't actually buy at a gashapon-packed (and I DO mean PACKED) room near Tokyo's famous Sensō-ji Temple. 

But we figured if we were really serious about this whole gashapon quest, we needed to visit somewhere that had more of these things than any other place on the planet. Fortunately for us, that place exists in Tokyo. It's in the Sunshine City Mall. Want to go shopping for gashapon? Go visit a place that has 3,000 of them in one very tight corner of a shopping mall. Think there's a typo there? Let me spell it out more clearly: Three. Thousand.

So let me say that I don't get some of this. Did we buy some things for my niece? You bet we did. Did we buy some things for ourselves? Oh yes, I fell for one of the miniature historic temple / shrine torii and we went in hard (meaning like the equivalent of all of $10...) on Sanrio's "Ate Too Much" toys. But I have to tell you, I don't get some of it. And yes, I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for some of this stuff.

I can understand the Sanrio stuff and the One Piece figures and the Miffy stuff. I actually think the One Piece figures are super well executed and detailed; the couple of things that we picked up last year in Singapore (and shown below) are just exquisite. I can even understand (and I can't believe I'm writing this...) the miniature Honda Civic wheel rims key rings. It's a custom car street racing thing, right? Like Fast and Furious? Maybe?

Look...I'm 56 years old. I'm allowed to be a little out of touch.

Last year's One Piece haul from Singapore.

So honestly, and accepting the Japanese have a fascination with like all things miniature and particularly food-related things, I struggle with at least a couple of the machines in the 3,000 machine gashapon store. I can't blow-by-blow this stuff but let me use two things as an example of my confusion.

First (and I know this has nothing to do with food but I'll get to that part), there was a machine that sold miniature folding stools. Like step stools that are in their real-life, full-size versions like eight inches high and let you get all of eight inches above the floor level by taking one step up onto them. And yes, when they are not needed they fold into like a two inch vertical piece of plastic. Folding stools. We have a couple of these at home and they serve their purpose just fine when we need to reach that highest shelf in a closet. 

Why does anyone need this in miniature form? Why? What do you do with this? And assuming part of the fun here is to collect the whole set...why on Earth do you need six different miniature folding stools?

Same question really but different machine: the miniature Johnsonville brats machine. Like brats like bratwurst. The sausages that people put on their grills in summer and feel like they are eating something really amazing from Wisconsin. Why do you need a packet of six tiny sausages? Is there some Japanese collector culture where people accumulate a collection of packaged groceries of a specific scale? These also, by the way, come in different flavors. Is the expectation the someone out there keeps putting yen into these machines until he or she owns all five flavors of tiny Johnsonville brats? 

Really? Can anyone help me out here?

By the way, I can totally believe there's a Japanese collector culture centered around miniature food of a specific scale. Absolutely no doubt about that.

Who needs six (or one, even) tiny folding stools?

Maybe the intricacies of gashapon culture are not to be explored and known by a middle-aged gaijin. After all, we were sent to Tokyo with some marching orders. We needed to track down these anime / manga souvenirs. And the Sunshine City Mall was our best hope.

There's no map, by the way. I don't mean to the Mall. Google Maps got us there just fine. But once you get inside the store, there's no map. There's no index or grid that shows what is where. You are just faced with 3,000 identical looking machines in row after row as far as you can see punctuated by displays showing (and I'm guessing a bit here...) some of most popular gashapon toys in their full set form. You know...so you can want it.

So after walking around for a bit we did what we would in any other place...we asked for help. OK, I didn't ask for help since I'm a dude. WE asked for help. In English of course. In Japan. It wasn't the easiest conversation but honestly considering we would have stood no chance of having this exchange in Japanese, it was pretty effective. There was some looking at a sort of a map of the store, some reference to "boys' machines" and a direction to go towards the back of the store.

What did we do in the back of the store? Asked again. 

Dandadan? Nothing. 

Demon Slayer? One machine. One is better than none. 

We found One Piece just fine on our own. No shortage of One Piece machines. Heck, they have an entire One Piece store in the Mall. One Piece is somewhat popular in Japan.

Gashapon store display showing sets of gashapon toys. Miffy in the lower right. One Piece is top shelf.

Three new One Piece machines. One Demon Slayer machine. Yen in. One from each machine. Guaranteed no duplicates. We were traveling light. And how many of these things can you really collect anyway? Especially after we almost emptied the Sanrio Ate Too Much machine later in the week. And admittedly, that was for us. 

Was it worth traipsing halfway across Tokyo to go to a gashapon machine store? Absolutely. No doubt about it. I feel more connected to a Japanese obsession now. Was it everything I intended it to be? Probably not. I had visions of us coming home with unique souvenirs that spoke to us and encapsulated our entire 2025 trip symbolically. Aiming a little high there. But we did have fun and we accomplished our mission. I won't be doing this again (meaning heading to Sunshine City Mall for this) but I'm always going to sneak a peek at what we might be able to get by turning that gashapon machine wheel just like I used to do when pushing the grocery cart our of the store in 1979 Connecticut. 

That fascination will never grow old. It's just a lot more fascinating in Japan than what I can find at my local Safeway.

Japan posts over. Now I need to get on the road again.

Most of our 2025 haul: 3x One Piece; 1x Demon Slayer (top). Miniature torii (bottom).