Toys Yoshida (Asahikawa, Japan)

During my trip to Hokkaido last month, I visited a couple toy stores. The first was Toys Yoshida located is the city of Asahikawa, and as you can probably conclude from the photos, it was a rainy day. After browsing both this store and a Toys "R" Us later, my assumption is that kids in Japan prefer die-cast cars, trains, robots, dinosaurs, LEGO, model kits, and jigsaw puzzles. What I didn't see much of was Star Wars superheroes, and Barbie, though Japan does have its own fashion doll called Licca, which was first released by Takara in 1967. The small anthropomorphic animal figures called Sylvanian Families also appear popular. According to Wikipedia, those launched in Japan in 1985 and are known in the U.S. as Calico Critters. 

Window on the side of the store.

The most surprising thing I saw in this store is realistic toy guns. Japan is known for having strict gun laws, yet while the U.S. moved away from realistic toy guns some time ago and require something like an orange tip on toy weapons, Japan has the most real looking toy guns I've ever seen. Normally I avoid posting images of guns and don't post screenshots from M-rated games, but I'm going to include a photo since I'm talking about them. They are only toys after all, though you might not have realized that if I wasn't telling you so  Of course, the store has gacha machines too, which are at the front entrance rather than inside the store. There were at least a few dozen of those.