From April 3 through to April 18, Hakaba no Garou in Nakano held an Escaflowne Popup Shop.
While smaller than many of the other popup shops they’ve done in the past (occupying the lesser-utilized left-hand side of the store, it shared event billing with a manga popup shop that was being held at the same time), seeing anything new for Escaflowne is a rarity, so some of the SpeakerPodcast Crew made sure to check it out while they could and take a few pics.
(We would’ve never known about it if not for Adrian, but that’s a story for the next podcast!)

It’s hard to believe it’s been a decade since the first Oshare Macross popup shop was held back during the hype surrounding the theatrical release of Macross Frontier: The Wings of Farewell in 2011, but 10 years later here we are with Oshare Macross 10.
Held at Shinjuku Marui Annex (the original branch that the first Oshare Macross was held at no longer exists), Oshare Macross 10 was held from February 11 – 28 and unlike its predecessors had different issues deal with thanks to the current pandemic. In fact, of the 900 fans that lined up on opening day, approx. 150 didn’t even make it into the store.
The SpeakerPODcast Crew were, fortunately, among the lucky ones and will be covering the experience in our next podcast. In the meantime however, here are a few pics from inside the shop.

With practically all hobby and model shows here in Japan, both professional and amateur, having been cancelled for the last 12 months, we thought this might be a good chance to look back at two amateur hobbyist shows from late 2019 – Chiba Shibori and Plastic Model Rock Festival.
While we discussed both of these in podcasts at the time, I never got around to posting photo galleries of them and figured that now was as good a time as any to do so.
Both included a smattering of Macross-related offerings, with Chiba Shibori in particular including Wankoro‘s now infamous 1/4000 scale SDF-1 along with a highly detailed chunk of South Ataria Island.