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.

We once again have Sonny Angel up on sausalitoferry.com. We had removed it from the site, as we had sold through the inventory and believed that we would not be able to get more.

We were mistaken. We have them back.

Sonny Angel is a series on mini figures from a Japanese company based loosely on the American designed Kewpie doll. We have stock of the Sonny Angel Fruit Series,  Sonny Angel Marine Series,  Sonny Angel Vegetable Series and Sonny Angel Animal Series 1.5, 2 and 3.

When we receive the Sonny Angel mini figures, they are blind boxed. Blind boxed means that all the dolls come in indentical sealed boxes and when you purchase one, you have no idea which one you will get.

You can avoid the blind boxing on sausalitoferry.com. We have opened the blind boxes and list the Sonny Angels by style.

Pictured are Sonny Angel Animal Series 3.

Iwako Japan is running a special on their website. Spend $30 USD and they will send you a set of these Monkey Japanese erasers at no extra charge. Iwako Japan has only 300 sets to give away and will not run a another batch.

We do not have this set of unique colors for sale at sausalitoferry.com as Iwako is not making this set of special color monkeys available to us retailers.  We bought a box of 10 Drink and Snack Food Blister Set, or on sausalitoferry.com, Omokeshi Theme Sets. Thus making the $30 minimum purchase we got our rare set of Japanese eraser monkeys.The Drink and Snack Food Omokeshi set will go into our website inventory.

Here at sausalitoferry.com we seem to have a thing for the very small things. For example, we offer the World's Smallest Rubber Duck at only a 1/4 of an inch long. We have a collection of the World's Smallest Zombies. As for our vast selection of Japanese erasers, well, they are all pretty much the same size, so they do not really qualify for the World's Smallest category.

Usurping some of the spotlight from the Japanese erasers, we present you with the World's Smallest Animal Erasers. Each of the six animals are about 3/4 of and inch long. They come in a plastic tree container. Pictured is the green, but they also come in blue and pink, if the green foliage is not to your liking.

We usually are very careful about making sure you receive the exact eraser that is pictured, but with the World's Smallest Animal Erasers, each tree container in our inventory has a different assortment of colors of the animal erasers. If you order, you will probably receive a different color selection than is pictured on sausalitoferry.com.

In our brick and mortar store we sell a couple versions of finger football. Both sets come with a "football" that resembles much more a guitar pick than a football. The guitar pick footballs are never quite satisfying to kick with your middle finger.

We tried a Iwako football eraser in our finger football game the other day. With the look and feel of a miniature football, finger football takes on a whole new meaning. And a lot more fun

We have long been famous (we wish) for our selection of the some of the world's smallest toys. They are displayed in bulk in bins on the front counter of Sausalito Ferry Co and are often the first thing that attracts unsuspecting customers.

When these unsuspecting customers transition to full fledged customers with their purchase of a handful of the World's Smallest Ladybugs, or World's Smallest Ducks or World's Smallest Frogs, we only had zip lock bags to put their purchase in.

We will soon have some of the World's Smallest Glass Bottles and Vials to put our assortment of World's Smallest Toys in.

Since sausalitoferry.com is about all things erasers, we should of thought about the possibility of Angry Bird erasers. The idea never crossed out minds.  So we were surprised and delighted to see them when they did appear.

These Angry Bird erasers are eminently chuckable. They measure a little more than a inch in various directions and fits nicely between the thumb and the first two fingers that allow precise aiming. The solid Angry Bird eraser has enough heft to easily bean a co-worker five cubicles over.

In the brick and mortar, Sausalito Ferry Co, we hear customers often say, "What is the point of this", or "What do you use this for".  When we are on the search for goodies for our store, this in one of the criteria we use to judge levels of ridiculousness. Practical is not one of our strengths. At least at retail.

Over the last couple of years we have seen some pretty arbitrary trends that materialize out of the popular culture firmament such as mustaches, zombies, hedgehogs and of course, all things bacon.

For the bacon meme we first saw t shirts, "either you like bacon or you are wrong". Soon followed all sorts of scented bacon inedibles. Scented car fresheners, bacon scented stickers, bacon scented erasers. (The bacon scented erasers were square shaped and white in color. Really odd).

Edibles came next. First, strawberry flavored?!! gummy bacon. Then our suppliers found their flavoring cojones. Bacon flavored candy, bacon flavored bubble gum,bacon flavored toothpicks,bacon flavored dental floss, bacon flavored toothpaste and wait for it, bacon flavored decorating frosting.

We are not sure how well bacon flavored frosting would go on a cake, unless the whole cake was made of bacon. A real bacon stud would eat the bacon frosting straight from the tube.

We bought these macaroon Iwako Japanese erasers from a ebay seller based in Japan. The colors of the macaroon Japanese erasers are colors we had never seen before either from Iwako Japan or from the US distributor of Japanese erasers.

When we opened the package, the macaroon Japanese erasers were lose and not in the Iwako package that the Japanese erasers normally come in.

We queried Iwako about these rare colors and they told us they are a series of unique colors they make as year end gifts for Japanese distributors of Iwako Japanese erasers. Next year they will send a series of rare colors of some other Japanese eraser to the US based distributors.

We have not know zombies to be big on leisure time activities. In our series of The World's Smallest Zombies, there seems to be a couple exceptions to this rule. The World's Smallest Cheer Leading Zombie, World's Smallest Rock Singer Zombie and the World's Smallest Surfing Zombie.

The World's Smallest Surfing Zombie has not had a good day at the beach. A good part of his surf board and right arm have been chomped. A shark has a firm grip on his left arm. Zombies don't surf. Or least for very long.

We could not help thinking of the cheer leaders in Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit video when looking at the world's smallest zombie cheer leader. True that the Nirvana cheer leaders use pom poms rather than heads, but most of the people in the video do look undead.