Gloomy Bear

I love that cute pink but evil bear. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with him, if not you should do a quick google search to see my latest love. (Actually, I kind of liked him before coming to Japan…but since being here, I find that I like him even more…maybe that is what happen when you work with kids all the time…you start imagining their stuffed toys beating them up.) Anyhow, since I was in Osaka over the weekend I had to make a stop at the Gloomy Bear shop in Amerikamura …. Lo and behold, there was a guy dressed up as Gloomy bear standing outside of the store, beating people up for photos. It was fabulous! After my friends and I all took turns getting strangled by Gloomy, we went inside for a bit of shopping. (as if taking pictures with a mascot that is willing to beat you up, isn’t cool enough…there was more!!) Inside, we met the artist of Gloomy bear…Chax Colony…and let’s face it, on a coolness level (okay this is my twisted coolness barometer) meeting Chax is almost as cool as meeting Paul Frank. So my girlfriend S (who is like the world’s biggest fan) and I are like, lets get an autograph…ah yes, here is where the Japanese get ya… Getting an autograph would not be a problem “if” we were willing to buy the 5th anniversary, limited edition 100 postcard book thing….I was like, um…we don’t really need 100 postcards…especially not $50 worth of postcards. And the salesclerk was like, well…this is a super limited opportunity…only 50 people are getting signatures from Chax, and there are only 6 spots still open, and you have to buy the post cards. So S and I said, fine…we will split it but we want 2 separate signatures…the salesclerk was not very keen on this, but since we were “special” customers (i.e. foreigners) she was willing to make an exception. So as the two of us rip open our “special edition” collector’s item book of postcards, searching for the perfect postcard to get signed…we encounter the next small snafu….it seems that Chax will only sign the special edition box…on the plastic….”excuse me? Why? Would? We? Want? That????” (plus we had already tossed aside the plastic covering.) … so finally the salesclerk agrees to let us, “special customers” get 2 (not 1) postcards (not the plastic covering of the box) signed….and you know, the guy was pretty cool…you could tell, he was pretty over the “starstruck” bitch salesclerk, because he really didn’t have any sort of issues signing our postcards…he even drew us little gloomy bears, under the autographs. And even though, S and I got suckered into buying way too many postcards of an evil pink bear…we both left feeling pretty good about ourselves.