PingMag interviews capsule toy company Yujin. I was amazed to find out they come up with 25 new product ideas a month!

Starting today (April 21) and running until May 6, Laforet in Harajuku is hosting the “KIKS TYO x YONE x AKI HOSHINO Sneaker Lover Pop-up Shop.” The shop will have exclusive collaborations with Champion, New Balance, and G-SHOCK, and will also be selling the limited edition tee (Hoshino photographed by Yone) seen below. Also, the first 300 people to buy over 10 000 yen merchandise (probably too late now) will get a KIKS TYO x MEDICOM TOY X AKI HOSHINO Kubrick.

I’m a big fan of the TV series LOST — it’s the one show I watch religiously, every Friday night with my wife, as soon as a new episode is out — and here’s a surprising merch tie-in, Kubrick figures of the main characters from the show. Now, as much as I love Kubricks and their generic one-size-fits-all shape, I do have one question: which one is Kate?

Lisa has a post up about these toys/figures called Carnimals. I just think they look cool, but there’s actually a wacky backstory to them — they live for 100 light years!

I really like NHK’s mascot Domo-kun, and so does Mimibots it seems, according to this JoshSpear.com post.

Tokyo-based fans of Kidrobot rejoice! Rumour has it that they are set to open a retail space in our fair city, joining current stores in NYC, LA, and San Francisco.

Nice figures from Kaori Takahashi’s “Koenji Animal Street” collection, which are currently being exhibited at Gallerie Juillet in Koenji until August 14. Via Paul Baron.

Added these two Brockmann figures by Groovisions to my collection the other day. They are part of the Brockmann Extreme series. I picked them up at the Shin-Marunouchi Building, at one of the select shops on the 5th floor.

Added these 2 figures to my Spider-Man gacha-pon collection. I was just missing these 2, so now I have all 6 (except for the secret one — it’s Spider-Man 2099, but they’re selling it for too much). I got them at one of the stores at Nakano Broadway.

I picked up this figure, gacha-gacha style, at Beams T a couple of week ago. There’s a collection of them, designed by The Wonderful! Design Works, in a few different colors (black, blue, and gray). They were produced for Yujin’s Time Capsule series.

If you buy a bottle of Dakara these days, you get this tiny little figure with it. The pig is seen in recent TV commercials. There are magnets at the base of the pig and the bottle, so when you approach the bottle to the pig you can make it spin (as it does, prancing around, in the TV commercials).

PingMag interviews Alex Kubalsky, a toy designer for Takara, who works on the Transformers line of toys.

Brian has a post over at Cool Hunting on the very cool sci-fi-inspired wooden toys by craftsman Takeji Nakagawa (or Take-G).

I’m usually not particularly attracted to super-hero related merchandise, but I couldn’t resist picking up a few of these Spider-Man gacha-gacha figures. I picked up these ones — Carnage, regular Spider-Man, and Venom — a week ago, and the other day I added the Scarlet Spider-Man. You can see the entire series — seven in all — here. They’re from Yujin’s TIME CAPSULE (”Art Capsule Toy Project”) series.