J.J. here, former TMK mailbag contributor, longtime hanger-on.

So I moved to Japan a few months ago yadda yadda yadda you didn't ask for my life story.

Anyway, as a hardcore Mario fan I've obviously been keeping my eyes peeled for anything uniquely Mariotastic that this nation, whose loins birthed Mario in the first place, might be offering.

There is a lot of Mario stuff for sale, but much of it is mainstream and not terribly impressive. Little "capsule" style vending machines are very popular at toy stores here, and lots of them sell Mario key chains of various sorts, as well as Mario-themed DS screen cleaners, or Mario magnets, or other little cheap trinkets of that sort. You also often come across things like Mario pencil bags, Mario pencils, or Mario notebooks for school. Fancier toys are a bit rarer, but one does occasionally see a decent stuffed Yoshi, or Wario, or maybe a small Luigi action figure, or a weird board game. But compared to some of the other video game / cartoon franchises out there, Mario is comparatively unpopular when it comes the sort of intense, thousands-of-toys-of-every-character merchandising that Japan is known for.

Personally, I've been most vigorous in collecting Japanese player's guides. The official ones, produced by Nintendo. Here's my collection thus far:



Japanese player's guides are a tad different than ones in the states. Mainly they're a smaller and thicker. While ours back home tend to be magazine-sized, Japanese ones are about the size of a pocketbook. In terms of content, they're more or less the same. Maps and stuff. The newer ones tend to have rather sterile layouts, but the older ones sometimes have a bit more life, like this Super Mario World one, which contains a few silly little comics.



Yesterday at the used book store I finally stumbled upon something much cooler, however: Mario children's books! They're these thick, cardboard books produced for what I assume are very young kids. Each one has about 10 pages, telling a simple story interspliced with lots of games and mazes and things. There are apparently several different series' of these things, each based on a different game. What I like most about them is the art. While American-made Mario storybooks tend to have weird, Americanized illustrations, the drawings in these books are very authentic-looking, in the style of the art you'd see in instruction manuals and stuff like that. As someone who's always taken a great deal of inspiration from Mario art, these things are quite a find indeed.



For more images, check out my Flickr gallery here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/43399380@N00/sets/72157614695613003/.