Excitement about 10182 Cafe Corner has been building in Japan ever since it was announced that a new specialty store called Toys R Us Select will be carrying this set. As Japanese fans start to get their hands on what some are calling the best LEGO set ever, it has started showing up on blogs and displays.
mumu couldn’t wait to get his, so he just made a microscale version instead:
(Link. Via Klocki and MicroBricks.)
Oh, and mumu also makes “real” mecha:
(That’s XM-XC Crossbone Gundam X3.)
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Indeed, mumu himself seems surprised by the prospect of a panda mecha, stuttering in his blog post title.
Check out the driver:
Hilarious! (And no, this isn’t Panda-Z, says mumu.)
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It’s almost time for Tanabata in Japan. Tanabata (which literally means “Seven Evenings”) celebrates the meeting of two celestial lovers, Vega and Altair. In the old Japanese calendar, these two stars were separated by an impassible river, the Milky Way, for all but the days of this festival. To celebrate, Japanese people write wishes on narrow strips of brightly colored paper and tie them to bamboo.
Mumu’s wife celebrates Tanabata with bamboo full of hopes and dreams:
(I’m grateful to mumu and his wife for the recent batch of great creations I’ve been able to feature here on PPB. Keep up the good work!)
Over at I Love Cute LEGO! mumu has posted that he purchased the 2006 version of 9247 Community Workers (my previous post, which for some reason isn’t showing up on the main page or archives — weird).
Here’s the Brickshelf folder (when public), and click on over to mumu’s original post for deep-links in the meantime.
In addition to the two brown dogs, there are a couple note-worthy elements. Mumu’s close-up shots show a nice pin-stripe suit design and a tan, pocketed shirt design (different from the Star Wars version) I hadn’t seen before. I’m going to disagree with mumu about the all-smiley cast, though. I’m a fan of “face diversity,” and I’m also a bit disappointed that this set doesn’t have the rarish wavy black hair that was in the 2005 version. Overall though, a nice set of town minifigs.
Although Japan officially celebrates New Year’s Day on January 1st, until 1873 Japan followed the lunar calendar used by China, Korea, Vietnam, and many other Asian countries. The Japanese calendar is still full of many holidays that mark various important dates in the traditional lunar calendar.
One such holiday, Setsubun, is celebrated each year on February 3. In the past, Setsubun represented the last day of the winter months and the beginning of spring. Celebrating Setsubun involves the usual Shinto shrine visits, but you also toss toasted beans out your door and yell “Out with demons [oni]! In with happiness!” Pretty fun when everybody on your street is doing it!
To honor Setsubun, a couple of Japanese builders have posted really cool creations.
First up, mumu chases an oni away with handfuls of round 1×1 tan plates (I’m really diggin’ the giant oni head):
And PPB hero Izzo offers his take on the same scene:
(These builders’ awesome oni make my own no-face oni look pretty silly.)
I was honestly a bit disappointed that the New Year’s LEGO creations by Japanese builders didn’t include any mochi-pounding scenes. A really fun New Year’s tradition I remember is to make hand-made mochi (rice cakes). You put a special type of sticky rice in a wooden pestle and literally pound it with a giant wooden mallet. It’s pretty awesome.
Thankfully, mumu’s wife has built a cute little mochi-pounding scene, complete with the mochi-pounding rabbit from the Moon*:
*Where westerners see a face in the Moon, Japanese people see a rabbit pounding mochi.
In some families, the husband and wife build together. (Ahem! I said…) One such family is the mumu household. Mumu frequently posts creations by his wife, including several recent entries in the long-running shiritori word game.
Mumu’s wife’s most recent contribution is a group of three (four?) minifigs from the long-running Anime series Gegege no Kitarou. Sort of like the Japanese Scooby-Doo or an animated Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the series features a title character (Kitarou) who fights ghosts, monsters, and other nasties alongside his father, a disembodied human eye.
I like the tan hinge pieces as wooden sandals, the black turban as Kitarou’s hair, and the 1×1 white clip piece as tiny little feet on Medama Oyaji (“Pops the Eyeball”).
(I don’t actually know much about the show, since I wasn’t allowed to watch it growing up. Ghosts and monsters were just too close to the occult for my missionary parents.)
More shiritori entries comin’ right up!
