I’m back from Japan!

April 20, 2015 | 27

I am now back from Japan! I was so fortunate to be able to spend about two weeks in the beautiful Land of the Rising Sun. If you’ve been following me and my wife’s food and travel blog, Foodsteps we’ve been chronicling our journey and the delicious cuisine of Japan!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fit in a lot of LEGO-related activities into our packed itinerary – first and foremost, it was a vacation so I wanted to properly enjoy Japan instead of going out of my way to shop or chase down obscure LEGO novelty attractions.

I guess the most notable LEGO activity I got up to was visiting Click Brick, a LEGO Certified Store in Roppongi Hills – a very upscale part of Tokyo that’s popular amongst the expat community and filled with great restaurants. Since we don’t have Official or Certified Stores in Australia, getting to visit one is always a treat since they typically stock novelty LEGO items that you can’t typically find in regular stores.

The range of LEGO sets was decent, although there were a few glaring omissions such as Pirates and some larger sets, but it was no big deal since I wasn’t shopping for actual LEGO. The prices were a little expensive with the Australian dollar being particularly weak.

Interestingly, I found an extensive rack of official LEGO apparel! It’s typically quite hard to come across official LEGO shirts that aren’t tacky, and I was pleased with the selection that they had there and got myself two shirts.

Here are the two shirts that I got. My favourite is the baker with the LEGO croissant! Croissants are my favourite pastry.

Each shirt was ¥2,769.

Here are the smaller items I got – two LED Lite keychains, one featuring the retro Blue Classic Space minifigure and surprisingly Bunny Suit Guy! Bunny Suit Guy from Series 7 is my favourite minifigure of all time, so I was extremely surprised and delighted to find that they had LED Keychain versions of him.

I’ve never seen/heard of one before and I knew that I had to buy it immediately.

Here’s the comparison with the real minifigure. So adorably super-sized! The LED Keychains costed me ¥1,300 each, which I felt was a fair price to pay.

Me and my wife have a tradition of buying fridge magnets of places we’ve visited. The magnet I got from my recent trip to Legoland Malaysia now has a friend from Tokyo! The magnet was ¥648.

There was a LEGO Education Centre right next to Click Brick in Roppongi Hills which had afterschool programs. Outside of a small play area, it didn’t seem like it was open to the public, so I didn’t linger long.

Despite not going out of my way to look for LEGO in Japan, I did stumble upon this massive model of Kyoto Station in Kyoto Station itself. It was purely serendipitous, I was looking for a toilet and before coming across this behemoth replica of the station complex. The LEGO Model is 4.8 metres long and was made out of over 300,000 bricks. It was created by LEGO Japan to celebrate LEGO’s 50th anniversary in Japan and the Kyoto Station’s 15th anniversary.

It was petty detailed and most of all HUGE. I can’t exactly remember where it was located (Kyoto Station is huge) but I think it was on the B1 level (basement).

So yup, that’s about it of my (very brief) LEGO adventures in Japan.

Glad to be back home in Australia (although I do miss Japan dreadfully) and back to writing the blog. Stay tuned for regular programming to continue very soon, with a few reviews lined up for the coming days!

It’s great to be back and I can’t wait to get back into the swing of things!