In my continuing attempts to update everyone on what I did over the winter vacation, I give to you a little write up about January 2nd. This is the day after New Year’s. For the past 3 years I’ve gone to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. And this year was no different. However, we did go extra early for a special reason. A fukubukuro. What is a fukubukuro you may ask? Well let me explain.
A fukubukuro is a compound word. It is comprised of the word fuku and bukuro. Fuku means luck/fortune/happiness and bukuro means bag. So you could call it a luck bag, fortune bag, or a happiness bag. And I actually saw all those names to describe the bags. However, it isn’t really a fair description of the bag. I prefer to call it a grab bag. Not because you put your hand in and pull something out. I call it a grab bag because the people at the store grab a whole bunch of clothing or items that aren’t popular or aren’t being sold and throw it in the bag and they charge like 10000 yen for the bag (about $111). But on the one hand they can also throw some really awesome prizes in there. For example, a camera store I like prepared 300 grab bags. They made 3 bags with 50000 yen ($560) gift cards, 15 with 30000 yen ($335) gift cards and the rest of the 300 were 10000 yen ($111) gift cards. The price of the gift card was 10000 yen. So you at the least got 10000 yen worth of store credit. So you don’t lose any money. But you do have the chance of possibly getting more money than what you paid.
I for example wanted to go to the Museum gift store because they made 20 grab bags. Included in some of the bags were some photo books worth like 20000 yen ($223). Unfortunately the grab bag I picked didn’t have any good stuff in it. Cost for this particular grab bag was 3000 yen ($33). I got a set of Princess Diana postcards, a set of museum postcards, a french music cd, a t shirt, a book called “The Album,” a notebook, and some other stuff I can’t remember. I was a little disappointed, but upon closer inspection of the book, it seems like an interesting read and it seems as though the book was limited to 1000 prints. So I sort of have a rare book. Some stores make their grab bags like this where they have one main item and then a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t popular or isn’t selling.
Then Kana and I went to an outdoor store called Aigle. They were selling grab bags for 10000 yen. We got two. Inside both bags was a fleece pullover, a spring jacket, a long sleeve t shirt, and a little shoulder bag. The fleece pullover is easily at least 10000 yen. So I feel I definitely got my money’s worth on that. But then on top of that a jacket and t shirt? Sweet deal. Especially since I don’t really own any long sleeve t shirts. I usually just wear a t shirt and put something on top of it. Some stores do it like this where they put the same items into every single bag. That way if you don’t care about colors or anything, you can pick up some pretty good deals. Also these bags are usually divided up by sizes. So if you were to buy a “large” bag, only clothing in large would be in the bag. Also they only really do tops apparently. No pants or anything.
After this we went to Banana Republic which was having a sale. I bought a nice little sweatshirt jacket. This was a pretty nice jacket and Kana liked it so she wanted me to get it. What are you going to do?
After that we hit up a wine store in the area. Last year during New Year’s we went to this same wine store a purchased one of their grab bags last year. Last year we got a bag that had 3 wines. Last year’s bag cost 3000 yen ($33). In it were 3 wines from different parts of the world. This year we tried our luck with a 6 bottle wine bag that cost 5000 yen ($55). I would say that it was definitely worth it. Apparently the way this wine store was doing their bags was they were discounting wines and then putting them together. I think the 5000 yen bag was supposed to have wines that were 33% off. When we opened the box I looked at what we got and I was excited. We got a South African Riesling, 2 Argentinan wines, 2 Chilean wines, and an Italian wine. So far we’ve tried 3 of the wines. I’ll write my thoughts on them in a latter review. If I can remember them. It has been a while.
Then we went to the Museum to see the exhibits. There was an exhibit that was showing off “Eastern Eye/Western Eye.” It featured photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson (west) and Kimura Ihee (east). The exhibit had way more pictures of Ihee than Cartier-Bresson, which made me a little disappointed. But the exhibit was very interesting in the sense that they were both the same photographers. They took the same types of pictures. A Japanese version and a French version. They even eventually met later in life, becoming friends, and they took some pictures of each other. Very cool. The other exhibit was 6 Japanese photographers taking pictures on trips. Wasn’t very interesting. Although one of the photographers took a whole bunch of pictures when he went up Mt. Fuji. That was interesting to me.
After finishing up we went to the Ebisu Beer Station. The Ebisu Beer Station serves some German foods and some Japanese foods. And beer. I will be writing review of our lunch a little later. This was the first restaurant that I was able to use my voice recorder to take notes on the food. I’m interested in hearing what I had to say about the food again as I sit down to write my review.
After lunch we went home. Kana had meet up with some friends she hadn’t seen for a long time later that evening. So after she went home I got on the internet and did some checking around. A store called “Mountain Hardware” was also having a grab bag event. They had a 10000 yen bag worth about 30000 yen and they had a 20000 yen ($223) worth about 60000 yen bag ($671). I was intrigued and high tailed it over there. When I arrived I was happy to see they had some bags left but I was dismayed to see that only smalls were left. I asked the manager what was in the bag. Basically he said that the 20000 yen bag had a baselayer top, a middle layer piece of clothing (like a fleece jacket) and then a hard shell. So the 20000 yen bag was more designed for alpine climbing. The 10000 yen bag had a baselayer, a middle layer, and a soft shell. More for like camping and what not. Difference between hard shell and soft shell is that in rain you can wear either perfectly fine. When you are battling a frigid winter storm on the top of a mountain, you are going to want a hard shell. But I asked if the were having a sale and they were. So I bought two things I’ve been meaning to get for a long time. A pair of middle layer bottoms and a middle layer jacket. The manager apparently is into alpine climbing and said that these would be fine for what I wanted to do. So I got the clothes and the manager even gave me his card, saying that if I ever had any questions or needed help he could introduce me to some people.
So then I went back home and waited for Kana to come home. That was my day.
So grab bags are fun. And they can definitely be worth it if you don’t care about colors or designs. For example, I would have really liked that alpine weather grab bag from Mountain Hardware. But I got some other stuff on sale. This is another I wanted to mention. The day after New Year’s pretty much every store does grab bags and every store has crazy sales. It is exactly like the day after Christmas in America. Everyone goes out to grab after Christmas sales and return stuff. In Japan, there aren’t any presents to return but there are definitely sales going on. So if you find yourself in Japan during New Year’s you should definitely try your luck/fortune/happiness.