I’m waiting on a couple of new Nyanko now. One of them is quite a recent release, the giant Nyanko Panda! (It is 2ft tall!) And the other might actually be the last of the store-bought limited edition sets I was missing: Nyanko Takoyaki 6-Pack! I probably spent way too much money on it and I don’t even particularly like to eat takoyaki, but the set was too cute and too rare not to buy while I had the opportunity. It rarely shows up for sale even on Yahoo!Japan auctions.

A third one came up for sale, but this one had obviously been extremely loved. The seller described it as being in a rather pitiful state, covered in furballs (fabric pills.) And I knew it was going to be mine. I have a strange soft spot in my heart for injured Nyanko. I ‘adopt’ them and bring them home with the intention of fixing them up and letting them live with all my other plushies.  My husband thinks it’s really cute and he calls it ’Nyanko Rescue.’

This is only my third rescue, since there really aren’t that many injured Nyanko out there in the world.  My first two were bought from a shop in Japan. I found two keychain-sized crepe plushies, each one missing an eye. They were dusty, their tags were ragged, and they had clearly been there for years. I’ve had them for quite a while now but I still haven’t decided if I want to try to give them each a new eye (its just a little black bead), or if I want to make them little eye-patchs.

I’ve been greatly inspired by the fact I have been able to get a hold of a Nyanko Mountain plushie! I didn’t even think this plushie had even made it into production, so you can imagine how excited I am to have found one! It is a very elusive web-exclusive limited edition plushie. I had missed the original pre-order for it and kept an eye on the website for further release information about it, only for all mention of it to completely disappear! That was over a year ago (maybe two years??) and up until a few days ago, I hadn’t seen a single sign that they had even produced this plushie in all. I had really wanted this plushie, so I’m very happy to have finally found it.

To explain a bit: When San-X does one of these web-exclusive limited plushies, they do it on a pre-order basis. There is a minimum number of orders they need to have before they will produce the plushie. If they don’t reach that number, it is canceled and the plushie is never made. After the ordering period is closed, they tend to update with information about it, whether it was a successful pre-order, what the production schedule will be like, etc. And a few months down the road, they will often have a small quantity available for sale. This wasn’t the case with Nyanko Mountain. The way I remember it, all information about it was removed from the website after the pre-order closed, it never showed up in the shop again, and up until a few days ago I had never seen one for sale at auction. Thats why I had assumed it never went into production. It is also a somewhat unusual plushie, so I didn’t know if maybe they were actually just having difficulty making it? Ah well, doesn’t matter now! =^.^=