For Easter, Sonny Angel is doing a Chocolate series. Bitter Chocolate, Extra Bitter Chocolate and White Chocolate Sonny Rabbits. One the bottom row, Elephant Milk Chocolate Sonny Angel, Cock White Chocolate Sonny Angel and Koala Strawberry Chocolate Sonny Angel.
Each of the figures come a golden egg in a package tied off with a brown ribbon.
Hopefully, we will see them before April 8, but with Japanese product, ship dates are never certain. We do not need to tell you about the Christmas Domos that arrived in June of the next year.

It turns out that the new Kawaii animal erasers could have 168 different color versions.

The math works like this.  Four different Kawaii animal erasers. The pig eraser, rabbit eraser, squirrel eraser and the cat eraser.

Seven different Kawaii animal eraser colors. Red, brown, yellow, white, pink, green and grey.

Six different Kawaii animal belly eraser colors. Red, pink, white, green, yellow and brown.

Multiply all these together and you come up with 168 color possibilities.

As of this writing, we have 79 of the 168 Kawaii eraser versions up on sausalitoferry.com. We will be adding more as we get more inventory.

Perhaps a little late to arrive, or maybe not, we finally have John Hersey's follow up to his Dia De Los Gigantes t shirt, the Dia De Los 49ers t shirt.

One would think that making a Hello Kitty pencil with a eraser on the top would be pretty straight forward. Looks can be deceiving.

Let's start at the beginning. Sanrio is the owner of Hello Kitty. Of all the quadzillion things Hello Kitty, Sanrio only makes a handful Hello Kitty items themselves. Other companies make the rest. They are given permission by Sanrio to make these Hello Kitty goodies and then sell them to us retailers.

Sanrio has it's own specialty line of what is pretty much the classic Hello Kitty line of merchandise. It sells this line all over the world, but for the most part it is only found in the Sanrio stores and speciality stores. It is not found in the big box or mass market stores, but those store have their own version of Hello Kitty, but it is pretty generic. (Generic means boring).

At our sister store, Games People Play, we carry the classic Sanrio. We first picked it up in 1973, and Games People Play may be the oldest continuing retailer of Sanrio and Hello Kitty in the United States.

Back to the Hello Kitty Pencils on the left.  Sanrio decides that it wants, as part of it's speciality line, some Hello Kitty pencils with erasers. Being very familiar with most of the quality pencil manufacturers, they decide on BeGoody.

You may know BeGoody from the pencils with erasers from sausalitoferry.com. Sanrio says to BeGoody we want this sort of artwork on the body of the pencil and we want on some of the pencils Hello Kitty erasers and on the other pencils, let's use the apple eraser which is part of the Hello Kitty KT line. (KT stands for "kitty terrestrial". Don't ask).

BeGoody then goes to Dream Zensinsyoji, the other maker of Japanese erasers which you also may be familiar with from sausalitoferry.com. Dream Zensinsyoji makes the erasers, sends them to BeGoody which then assembles the complete Hello Kitty pencil and sends them to Sanrio, We, Games People Play, buy them not from Sanrio, but from a company known as Nakajima, the US distributor of Sanrio in the US.

Nakajima also makes most of the Hello Kitty plush for Sanrio.

If you are still reading this by now, we are sure you have a headache. Go cuddle your stuffed Hello Kitty.

Cheer him up by surrounding him with his five monkey Japanese eraser friends.

From Iwako, we will see Series Two Monkey Japanese erasers in March. These animal Japanese erasers are done in soft pastel colors that makes them look way too yummy.

As you probably know, there are two companies within Japan that make the Japanese erasers. Iwako, the larger of the two, and Dream Zensinsyoji. We have not seen a new release from Dream Zensinsyoji in quite a while.

Up until now.

Sometime in the next couple of months sausalitoferry.com will have Killer Whale Japanese erasers from Dream Zensinsyoji. They will come in four colors. We particularly like the tongue detail.

Dream Zensinsyoji is not as careful about their color matching from production lot to production lot as Iwako is.  We are curious to see what the color variations the Killer Whale Japanese erasers will take on down the road.

Considering the depth of the eraser collection on the website it is surprising that only now we have a Domo eraser. The character Domo has found his fame as the logo of the Japanese TV network NHK in a series of cartoons done for NHK. He aquired his name from the greeting that the TV announcer made introducing the show, "Domo konnchiwa!". This translates to roughly "Well, hello there!"

We could never imagine a US TV network have a logo like Domo. The open red mouth with the shark teeth is much to aggressive for a corporate logo here in the US of A.

We introduce a new line of erasers from Kawaii Erasers based in San Francisco. Four styles will be available. Rabbits, pigs, cats and chipmunks.

Unlike Japanese erasers from Iwako and Dream Zensinsyoji, not all the animals in the first series come in the same colors. For example, there is a brown rabbit, but not a brown pig.

The Kawaii Erasers are coming to us four erasers to a blister card. (A blister card is when the product is mounted on a card behind a clear plastic covering).  Iwako offers the blister cards in the Japanese Eraser Omokeshi Theme Sets. We are not sure if the colors of the Kawaii animal erasers will be assorted randomly or will be consistent through all the blister cards. We may make the erasers available both individually and on the blister cards, though we will not know that until we get our first shipment in early January.

The size of the Kawaii erasers is about the same as the Japanese erasers.

Receiving a new order of Japanese erasers from Dream Zensinsyoji can be always full of surprises. Just like Christmas morning.

The Dolphin Pair from Dream Zensinsyoji have always had red or yellow flowers on the mother dolphin Japanese erasers.

Until yesterday.

When we opened the 60 piece master box, the yellow flower had changed to orange flower. For most people who buy Japanese erasers, this has the significance of 1% versus 2% fat milk.

Except for the hard core collectors. It is for them that we pay attention carefully to all the color variations we see from both Dream Zensinsyoji and Iwako. Dream Zensinsyoji changes up colors frequently, Iwako, only once in a while.

We suspect that the orange flower dolphin pair will replace the yellow flower dolphin pair, but for now we have stock of all three colors.

We were cruising through our supermarket the other day and came across a kabocha squash. We know this squash, we thought.

As obscure as the kabocha might seem, sausalitoferry.com has a kabocha Japanese eraser. The kabocha eraser is one of the earlier erasers that Iwako made.

We frankly can not remember the last time somebody included the kabocha Japanese eraser in a order. But the Iwako and Dream Zensinsyoji Japanese eraser collection that we have up on sausalitoferry.com includes many uncommon and odd erasers.

There is one other eraser that we have on the site that includes the kabocha. The Korean tofu erasers has a kobocha pictured on one of the tubs.