Our Taiwan blog is incomplete without a discussion of Gachapons. You know those little vending machines you see at grocery stores and bowling alleys that sell tiny little toys in plastic capsules? In Taiwan they are called Gachopons and although invented in Japan they reach a whole different level of obsession in Taiwan. They sell all sorts of weird little figurines and generally come in series of 5 or 6. People collect them and try to get the whole series. When I say obsessed I mean it. Like beanie babies in the 1990's crazy obsessed. Sometimes you'll see 4 or 8 machines outside a store but more often you'll see a whole store in a mall filled with several hundred different machines with crowds of people buying from them.
We and the Millers fell in love with several series and became convinced we had to complete them before we left Taiwan. Margaret loved the Statues of Liberty in weird inappropriate poses. Jake loved the household snipers. Nick even found a series depicting minature gachapon machines, very meta. We all had to have the complete Kancho series. What is a kancho? I really can't explain so here you go.
Kancho-Wikipedia or
Kancho is Messed Up. Rori even made friends with one of the guys who empties the machines and he allowed us to root through them looking for the pieces we were missing instead of spending hundred of NTD hoping to get lucky and find the pink Kancho bear.
 |
| The Statue of Liberty series |
 |
| Sleeping cats on household appliances series |
 |
| Household Snipers series |
 |
| The complete Kancho series proudly still on display in our house |
The last weekend in Kaohsiung I saw an ad for something we had to go see. A whole pop up museum devoted to life sized displays of some of the most famous Gachopon series; fruitzombies, lantern jawed animals, Statue of Liberty in weird poses, Fat soldiers, and dessert(not desert) Moai. So our last activity in Kaohsiung before hitting the road again was a visit to Gacha Planet
 |
| Lantern jawed animal world |
 |
| This might be a Statue of liberty Kancho |
 |
| Fruit Zombie |
No comments:
Post a Comment