New Years is a huge holiday here in Japan. I don't know everything that the celebrate on this day but I do know it is a really big shopping day. Almost like black Friday. Some stores were closed for the holiday but most were open and busy. They had special Fukubukuro or Lucky bags for sale.
Fukubukuro are mystery bags or boxes for sale. They reminded me of grab bags except these are not last year's left over items. They are supposed to have good things in them and you can expect to get about twice as many items as you normally would for the price.
We went to the mall to check everything out. The ranged form about $5 to hundreds. I settled on a $10 bag from a sock store. I love the socks here and I thought I'd be pretty safe that way. The clothing stores usually had size labels on their bags. So most people buy from stores they like and hope for the best. I came away with 15 sock type items and was really happy with it. Several of them here tall over the knee socks, some tights, some footies. I think it was a great deal.
We saw this little set up and thought we would give it a try.
We paid $5 and had pretty much no idea what was going on. She directed Tucker to pull out a paper, the paper decided which size bag we got. We got the small one. And came away with assorted Peanuts character items. It was ok.
We thought these shoes were hilarious.
Some stores had deals where you can get as much as you can fit into a bag. Everyone was really going for filling their bags.
It seemed to be totally fine to have things stacked outside of your bag as well.
Then we saw a long line and thought maybe we should get in it? As we were milling around we were givin a ticket ushered by employees into the line. We weren't sure what to do so we tried asking what was going on. The employee tried looking up English on his phone to explain it to us. We weren't very clear but we decided to stay in line and give it a try.
After at least half an hour we got to the front of the line where we had to pay. I tried to pay 1,000 yen (about $10) but the lady kept holding up four, she even showd me on her calculator 5,000. So I had to pay about $50 and I still didn't know what was going on. Then we got to pick out a skewer type stick with a flag on the end. The kids brought it to the next employee who opened it. They then counted out the equivalent of a $50 gift card, to the mall, and gave it to us.
From what I gathered we were unlucky. If we were lucky our flag would have said something winning us a $600 gift card.
So we didn't loose out that much. It was a fun Japan shopping adventure.
