Oh look! A UFO catcher with Pokemon dolls in it. Lost a few coins trying to
catch the Nyasu/Meowth doll, but it was too small to grip with the crane.
The comparably pudgy Pikachu was all I could manage. Then I tied it up in
an airtight plastic ice sack from my hotel and left it in a cardboard box
to rot, alone and unloved, for the next two years. Ha ha ha. Well, actually,
I didn't mean to be as evil as that. What I really wanted to do was sell the
thing on eBay.
Behold! An actual Japanese Pokemon doll! Unlike those lousy Chinese
knockoffs, this doll is authentic. You can tell that it's authentic, because
it's from Japan! You should give me lots of money!
Unfortunately, by the time I got around to putting the thing up for sale, the
market was so saturated with Pokemon junk that it was impossible to attract
individual attention. Oh well.
While I'm thinking about this place, would you like to hear a Stupid Foreigner
Story? Let me tell you a Stupid Foreigner Story. This arcade was in the
basment of the hotel where I was staying. It had many fun and shiny arcade
games that I wanted to play. Most of these games charged 100 yen (about a
dollar) per credit. Funny how traveling abroad makes you lose your economic
perspective. I played games until I ran out of coins. Then I went looking for
a change machine so I could get more coins. After finding a machine of
appropriate size and shape that I could stick a paper bill into, I fed it a
thousand yen, and got a chunk of change bigger than my fist.
"That can't be right."
Turns out they were tokens. Tokens for the three or four psuedo-gambling
machines littered around the arcade, none of which I wanted to play. And if
I happened to win at one of these machines, what would I have gotten? More
useless tokens! No, I couldn't cash them in. I learned all this within twenty
seconds, thanks to the sign posted on the machine, helpfully printed in English:
"This is a token machine! Not a change machine! No refunds!"
Over ten bucks gone, just like that. Arrgh!
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