300 yen in subway stops away from my house is a big secondhand shop chain called "hard-off" (as well as "off-house, garage-off...") which we just went to for the first time yesterday. it has a crap-ton of super freaking cheap stuff, and a few more expensive things. you can for example get 100-yen gameboy games, a 1,000-yen 3DS, 800-yen kimono, 500-yen tabi shoes (ninja/festival shoes). the more expensive stuff is things like 8,000-yen kimono belts, 12,000-yen "new 3DS LL" which just came out, ipads and so on.

we got a few gameboy games, 2 yukata, 1 kimono, 1 kimono jacket, a ceramic bowl with a plastic lid that very hopefully can hold soup (for my lunch) without spilling, my wife got a few shirts. i've been looking all over for shirts that have japanese on them and there's none anywhere, unless you're looking at anime fandom shirts (and most of those are for crappy modern series with pictures of badly-drawn anime girls), and there weren't any at this shop either. looked for irons, blenders and a few other things but didn't see any. they didn't have so much men's stuff in general either.

then we went to a big Daiso (100-yen shop), and they had more traditional stuff there than in the other ones we've been in so far. there was also 2-3 traditional japanese restaurants on the same street, and entering the grocery store ALL the pre-made meals and everything were really traditional (and there were hardly any sweets), so i guess the people there like traditional stuff. anyway if you ever go to japan and want souvenirs, or want a "japanese house", definitely just go to hard-off and house-off because there's a ton of stuff like real, good-quality traditional cups and plates that cost only like 800 yen.

all in all we spent about $100 USD there including the subway costs, the 100 yen shop and buying groceries. i think we have just about enough money to pay the bills this month but no matter what we do next month we'll need to borrow money if my student loan still isn't sorted out (they've now completely misread that the school only registered me as an exchange student in autumn and not also in spring, otherwise everything SHOULD be fine) so i figured why not...