Monday, Nov 5th, 2007 at 9:42 am
Categories:
Japan;
Toys;
Shopping
Posted by
Administrator
“A capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend.”
Japan is clearly a nation that worships shopping, a nation that has taken the retail experience to its bosom and raised in its honour a frenzy of poured concrete and burnished chrome, a hypermarket for saints. You can wander into a Japanese department store and lose an entire day, without even scraping the surface of the mall it’s embedded in. My personal nemesis is Yodabashi Camera: a department store that has a clothing and houseware department embedded in it where most such shops would feature an electronics boutique department. Half of the sixth floor of its Yokohama branch is given over to capsule toy vending machines, where for 200 yen (about 80 pence) you can turn the knob and acquire a tennis ball sized bundle of mysterious plasticky goodness with a model kit of some complexity within. My favourite … is a capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend. Even the toys teach recursion …
- Charles Stross: link.
Via Boing Boing.
