In which I finally find time for some Corn love.
Hooray! I finally get a chance to talk about these items I had remaining from the recent and amazing Shirokuma’s Nice and Warm Corn Soup collection from Sumikko Gurashi (see here for the plushies). I’ve got three types of items today, the first of which is one of those adorable San-x memo pads.
There are six water-soluble pages included at the front of the memo pad (it wasn’t until I started writing this that I bothered to read the upper right of the cover above, which filled me in on that). Below on the left you can see one of these pages as it appears normally (the texture might have eventually tipped me off; though it’s subtle, it’s a little thicker and feels a bit like rice blotting paper), and on the right you can see it disintegrating in a bowl so that certain parts of it remain and others disappear entirely.
It’s….fun, I guess. I don’t really understand the point to it, and I’d kind of rather use them as paper, but I’ll chalk this up to the spirit of adventure.
This memo pad is a little less than six inches high and a little more than four inches wide, and inside there are four main designs with twenty-five pages included of each. Below are two of those (I don’t know why, but manga jokes where some character is staring with the ji~ sound effect always crack me up, and that’s what the little Corn is doing on the below right as Shirokuma makes the soup. And up above, notice that a Tapioca is totaly staring at the supposed “Corn” next to them….there’s no ji~, but the meaning’s still the same.
The title (the part in romaji on the upper left) is the same as the note above, but from top to bottom the rest reads:
- Penguin says “nice to meet you,” and the Corn say corn nichi wa, and I die of love yet again.
- Tapioca notices a certain resemblance. (Niteru ne = We look alike)
- Corn helping with soup (it says otetsudai = “helping out”)
- This basically says “drink up,” but more literally it says takusan nonde ne = drink a lot. In Japanese, you drink soup, and medicine, too.
- Tonkatsu, Ebi Furai no Shippo, and a Tapioca bond with the Corn over being leftovers (nokorimono nakama is something like the leftovers team).
Here’s the story of how all this came to be (the title says Sumikko Gurashi Shirokuma’s Nice and Warm Corn Soup):
(1) Shirokuma, who hates the cold, is very bad at getting up on cold winter mornings.
(2) They decided to make some nice and warm soup full of corn to warm themselves up with. (In the bubble they’re saying hoka hoka, nice and warm.)
(3) As Shirokuma was making the soup….Corn left behind from various places gathered around him.
(4) They called the rest of the Sumikko and had nice and warm corn soup with everybody.
I’ve never seen a San-x memo pad that wasn’t worth it; for less than $3.25, this is beyond worth it. And it’s still available as of this writing at amiami!
Our next item is this sheet of puffy stickers. Most of the stuff on here is translated elsewhere, but I think there are a few that might still need it…
- About halfway down (right above the plates where the various Corns came from), there are sound effects (mugyu) of Neko, Tonkatsu, and Shirokuma. Next to them, Tokage and Penguin? are saying how delicious Shirokuma’s specialty is.
- Below that, we have the places each Corn came from (left to right): pizza, miso ramen, steak, salad, and corn soup.
- In the next-to-last row, on the right, those are just the sound effects (toko toko) for the little Corns trotting along.
These are still available at amiami too, for a little more than $2.50. Honestly, I love stickers about as much now as I did when I was eight years old.
But I think if there’s anything I’d vote for here as the overall true best value per dollar, it would have to be these two Pata-pata memo sets. Pata pata is a sound effect with a meaning like flapping or fluttering, which these pages can do if you don’t keep everything folded up just right. For the low price of about $3.50 each, you get a collection of little memo papers all folded up in a compact size (about 3.5 inches high and 2.75 inches wide). Below is the cover, front on the left and back on the right:
Keep opening to see more Sumikko on the inside:
Below left is the rundown of where all the various Corns came from, and on the right (below Penguin meeting them and another adorable corn nichi wa, as above), there are some facts. Under the can, it says the Corns were left behind on a plate from a can of corn soup, and on the right it has them toddling up hoping to be eaten and, below that, speculating on how much Corn looks like Tapioca.
Here are the six cute paper designs:
This would have already been worth every cent — but then it goes that extra mile by including erasers too! Each pata-pata memo comes with six little Corn erasers about half an inch high. They’re darling, though of course I can’t comment on how they’d be as actual erasers since I’d rather cut off my own foot than use them like that….
I got the other version of the pata-pata memo too, as you can see below.
Keep unfolding this one for another recap of how Shirokuma met these cute little Corn friends:
More cuteness on the inside as we undo the final fold:
And again, we have six designs for our little memo papers, some we’ve seen before and some we haven’t:
This one comes with six little Corn erasers too.
If I could change anything about these, it would be to make the papers adhesive, like post-its, as opposed to just sheets to pull out and use. On the other hand, stickiness can always be achieved via stickers, and as cute as those above are, it’s always worthwhile to have an excuse to buy more. (Both of the pata-pata memo, by the way, are still in stock in amiami.)
Sumikko Gurashi has a lot of good stuff coming out in the near future, and a lot of things I’m excited to get. One is this amazing plush from the Mysterious Rabbit Fairy Garden collection coming in next month’s amiami order. (I had a huge amount of restraint with that collection; I don’t love it quite as much as I love Corn and such, but I do love it a lot, and I’ve wanted Sumikko bunnies since Shirokuma’s ears got pulled on to look so bunny-like in the Sumikko movie. Plus, you know, I’m a moon bunny ^ – ^). And then there are these Sumikko Animal Park items —oof, it’s hard to know what to get from that one — need to get preorders squared away. Whatever I end up getting, I’ll talk about it here in what will hopefully be a reasonably timely manner, and maybe even faster in the future! ….Maybe.
hello somebunny 