2 General toy questions

[APU]

(1) What is the "real" off the shelf price of the 1/48ths and 1/60s, like if you went into a toy store, not a hobby store.

(2) Why is it that the Yamatos are not ment for the US market but the entire box is in English? Can you guys even read the boxes? Its kinda like if Hasbro made their toys in Japanese print boxes. I never understood that.

[scand]

HLJ has a standard valk @ 14,800Y wich approximates to 139 U.S Dollars.

For the 1/60's HLJ lists them @ 7,800Y wich = approximately 73.00

Those are standard not fastpack.

[scand]

you can also check out Toys'R'Us Japan

[LePoseur]

Not quite sure what the difference you assign to "Toy" and "Hobby" stores, but if you walked into any generic toy store in Japan I doubt you'd even find a 1/48. The yammies are, by design, aimed at a much older age than most toy stores in Japan cater to. That being said, Toys R' Us is about the only major toy store I have seen them at, but then again, the size of TRU allows it to carry many high ticket items that other toy stores don't touch. TRU also can afford to price their 1/48's at 9999 yen which is well below the MSRP of 14800. Still, even the local hobby stores in Tokyo don't bother to sell a 1/48 at the MSRP (usually always falling 10% or more below it).

It kind of works like CD's back home (or at least how CD's use to work before I moved to Japan) The MSRP was like 16.99 or so, but Musicland would sell them for 13.99 and Best Buy would charge ya 11.99 for a "normal" CD, so you'd never really see one for full MSRP except perhaps at that CD store in the mall that no one bought CD's at. (Not to say that the Mall shop was trying to rip you off, maybe Just that each store sells at it's own optimum price point.) But I'm not going to get into a economics lecture.

Here's a link for TRU if you don't want to search yourself TRU's Yammie page

BTW, 3499 for a Yammie stand? "Ah, no thank you."

PS: I think it's in English because "English is Cool!" as evidenced by the huge amount of English used on every other "cool" comsumer product in Japan. Yet if you asked someone to read it to you, most people would be hard pressed to give you anything you could understand.

Edited April 9, 2004 by LePoseur

[Eternal_D]

9900 yen when i was in japan for a 1/48 at TRU

didn't look at the 1/60 prices but you gotta figure it's not MSRP.

it's in english because most countries in asia require you to learn english as a second language, so at the very least, the can at least make it out. but all the important stuff is in japanese...ie customer service info.