In America we have the famous after Christmas sales. In Japan, as the biggest holiday of the year is New Year’s Day they have after New Year’s sales or Hatsu-uri, literally "first sale". But on top of that, one of the big traditions during this time is the tradition of Fukubukuro pronounced foo-koo-boo-koo-row. Fuku means surprise, bukuro means bag. In English we would call them "gab bags"
Here is someone walking around with the most basic fukubukuro
I’m just guessing but I believe it’s a way for the stores to clear out unwanted inventory.
Now, you would expect fukubukuro or grab bags of things like toys
Here are bags of toys. $18 each
You might even be able to conceive of fukubukuro of accessories
accessories, the $18 bags and the $45 bags
But what about the $8 fukubukuro at the sock store?
or what about $90 fukubukuro at the jewelry store?
Even that I guess is conceivable but lets keep going shall we?
Here are Rolling Stones merchandise fukubukuro at the Virgin Megastore. $60 each.
Passing through the supermarket I saw…
grocery fukubukuro only $18 each!
And to top if off I think the one that was personally the strangest to me was:
The $90 suit fukubukuro.
I yes, I saw people buying them!
A friend of mine went down to a game store in Akihabara and bought a Saturn fukuruburo and a Dreamcast fukubukuro. Each was only $8 and each had over 25 games in them. I guess you’d consider that a score except that as a collector he already had all the games.
All the same cautions apply to fukubukuro that apply to American grab bags. Meaning that generally the stuff inside is not something you would have spent the money on had you seen it. Hence my another friend’s preferred reading of fukubukuro. Just add a few spaces and you get:
fuk u bukuro
I’ll leave you to figure out how to pronounce that one 
I thought “fuku” meant “lucky”…as in the 7 gods of good fortune.
You are correct. I guess I had a brain fart while I was writing the article
My friend went to Sofmap and lined up for 4 hours especially for their fukubukuro – for 10,000 yen (50 quid) he got an Xbox, now *that’s* not bad!
Not bad for who? It’s great for your friend
but it’s pretty sad for XBox when the stores are basically throwing them away.
With the number of units of software sold on XBox in Japan I don’t really understand why a single store in all of Japan still carries them unless MS is sending them checks. It’s got to be less then 2 or 3 pieces of XBox software per store per week.
Actually Xbox sales have picked up if you look at the ratio in the latest famitsu. The total sales are now up at 2.5% of the total market, doesn’t sound much but the gamecube’s only at 8% but it has *much* better software at the moment. The highest percentage? Gameboy Advance and PS2 are pretty much even at the top at around 40% a piece.
The thing is, Xbox used to be at roughly 0% until a few months ago so maybe things have picked up a tiny bit.
Xbox Live looks a bit of fun too – there are quite a few people in the office interested in that.
Xbox is a rip off though. Not all xbox games are “live” capable and they make you pay an exorbidant amount for what amounts to a match service. Not to mention the fact that the earpiece thing that comes with live is very uncomfortable and not built very well. The only game that is worth playing on live is Ghost Recon.
I don’t think any gamesystem is worth it but I wish I had bought a playstation 2 instead of an xbox because it has more games and you don’t have to buy a seperate kit to play dvds like you have to with the xbox.
This is the first year I went and participated in Fukubukuro and was very shocked when I stood in line for 2 hours in the rain and wind to find out the so called grab bags were $295.00. Wow, I really didnt expect to spend more than $100.00. By the way I went to Burberry at Ala Moana Shopping Center in Hawaii. I got a canvas tote bag, a scarf that I have no use for, a small hair scrunchie, a jeans mens looking hat and a mens looking dark blue toiletrie bag. I am a bit dissapointed. Today is my birthday and I was hoping to be lucky and get something I would really like and be happy with. I would’nt take chances. That was the first and last for me. I would much rather walk into a store and buy something I really wanted! Good luck!