Random Picture #96

Clover, a patisserie/cake shop offers dragon-themed fukubukuro. This is the year of the dragon, in case the obvious wasn't hitting you on the head hard enough. That is not my hand or coat, incidentally. 

This picture is slightly late in coming along, but I figure that as long as it is January, I can sneak in some New Year's shots. My husband and I went to Tokyu department store in Shibuya, an extremely popular shopping district in Tokyo, to check out the holiday sales. While New Year's holiday sales aren't quite as crazy as Black Friday in the U.S., they are pretty busy and can be intense. There are sometimes feeding frenzies on bags of choice products. This year, for reasons unknown, we saw a gaggle of men swarming fukubukuro ("lucky bag"/grab bag) that contained underpants. 

Our main purpose was to scope out fukubukuro, which often offer goods exceeding the value of the price of the bag. We saw tons of clothing grab bags and then hit the basement for the food ones. About 95% of them showed you the contents of the bag and most represented adequate value provided that you wanted every single item in the bag, but we didn't find anything appealing this year. I did like how attractive many of the packaging designs were, and was particularly fond of the way dragons were worked into so many things (like this cake).