International Comic City (Beijing, Day 5)
I found it! They were inside the Off Price fashion mall, and took up a small corner of it. But that corner was big enough for them to cram lots of goods and figures.
Enter through the west side of the mall you will see this holy section in front of you. ^^
If you plan to go there you will have to bring your Chinese shopping phrases with you because the vendors unfortunately do not speak any English.
Oppai mousepads!
They sold lots of cosplays there as well.
Lots of manga on the shelves. The even included a small space inside for you to read. Unfortunately, all of the manga are in Chinese. T_T
Nice to see a Chinese figure magazine. ^^
The packets in the cardboard boxes are fake DVDs. ^^
Moar keychains
Stack of replica Death Notes.
The only thing Jigoku Shoujo related item i could find.
This guy was watching Fantastic 4.
Some buttons that seem poorly printed. :P
Some keychains.
This person sells model kits.
Although what strikes me odd is how many BRS Blade Version figures they have...
A lot of these figures are not fake. You can tell by how much they are asking for it. When I asked about the Vocaloid race queen set they said it was 300 RMB (about $47 USD) and a Patchouli PVC figure was 600 RMB ($88 USD), pretty much the same price as back home, but at least there is no shipping. ^^
You can always ask to inspect the merchandise, and these people are more or less honest in what they are selling you (well, maybe not in the price :P). I was looking at a Black Rock Shooter PVC which was priced at 160 RMB ($23!!!). I asked if it was from Japan and he said it was not. He said it was something but my crappy Chinese could not understand what he is saying but I think he did say it was a copy. He later explained that if it was from Japan it would have been much more expensive, which is true. I bought the figure anyways.
Some little trinkets and stuffs.
Some figures on display.
A lot of these are actually authentic. Looking at the GSC Vocaloid Nendoroids, they look accurately painted...
Some pillows and plushies.
The pillows are NOT authentic. However I don't know if it's right to call small merchandise like these authentic or not.
Touhou figures!
Mousepads. I would assume these are "fake", and I wouldn't be surprised if they took some images off the internets to print them on (and it looks like they did), but they're pretty cool nonetheless.
More goodz.
One gripe I have when asking about the figures is they will use Chinese names of the character, and so I would have no idea of who they are referring to.
Mostly the Japanese names of figures are phonetically translated into Chinese characters, but these guys like to shorten it into the traditional 3 character Chinese name (1st character last name following 2 character first name). If the original name had Kanji or English words it would be directly translated using Chinese pronunciation and then the name would sound so obscure that I would have though they made a new character.
Close inspection of the Vocaloid petite nendoroids show that they are 99% chance not fake.
And so this is my loot for today. A cheap BRS statue, two mousepads and a keychain. Later I went to the e-mall and got a notebook cooler pad (which sucked, the fan was spinning so slowly >.<). I will inspect the BRS statue in detail in a later post.
I was surprised on how much recent goods the place got their hands on. Whether fake or not, it was nice to see there are some otaku like us in mainland China. I will have to come back later to pick up more loot! ^^
These people were laughing their ass off watching the Ronald McDonald Ran Ran Ru. ^^
This was the place I went to two days ago. Didn't get anything though. Prices are around the same as Japan though. One inidividual blind box of the Vocaloid Nendo Puchis was 40 CNY = around 530 JPY, only 30 yen over the price in Japan. The figures I can say are about 90% genuine. Even though there are no sticker seals, the figmas and Nendos/Nendo Puchis are authentic. There is the plastic around the figure for figmas but the boxes are kinda dirty though... If they are bootleg, you can almost tell it immediately. Generally, I've seen more Nendoroid bootlegs, but there are figma ones so watch out.
Pictures are kinda blurry, but i can understand if they didn't want you taking pics...might lose business if selling fakes >.> but i can tell that a lot of those figures are authentic, BRS is another story though.
Well, you can try flipping over a figure's box, esp by Max Factory and GSC and see whether there's a hologram sticker behind it (reads H Japan), bottom right, and usually they have a round sticker with the word "good smile quality" in front at the side of a box. All my GSC figs have those markings and stickers on them, though not every authentic figure has hologram stickers.
BTW Those are really blurr images... >.< was tryin hard to focus and see what they have...
Most of the figures and nendos look authentic though...
Sorry about the blur... I just noticed that my camera has crap-for-brains focus in low light.
Me want more oppai!! xD
I'm pretty iffy about figures that are for sale but are removed from their boxes. A lot of local stores have such gasha figures displayed like that and they are most of the time fake. From the photos though, they look authentic to me. I'm pretty surprised that they have the WonFes Nendo Mio and Yui though. Are the ones ordered from the GSC website released yet?
Still, one thing you should remember when buying figures from actual stores... they're *never* lower than the retail price from Japan, unless they're second-hand, damaged, fake or the seller is being weird (which is not very likely). Sometimes even second-hand but rare figures are even more expensive than their retail price.
I'm glad you found an anime shop in that city, do you happen to know the address of the place? it would help out a lot later on if I happen to visit ^_^ I can't go in the summer coz the plane ticket is crazy right now D: ..but maybe winter i can go =｡◕‿‿◕｡=
Ugly Hetalia bootlegs D:
Seriously, they're so badly made I don't know why people bother buying them.