The last installment of my souvenir travels ended up with the rather broad category of the Western Japan edition, but this is because there is a scarcity of truly recommendable souvenirs. There are many excavation sites and museums, so what could be the reason? "Osaka Museum of Natural History," "Kyoto City Youth Science Center," and the old and new "Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History" (the predecessor of the current "Museum of Life and Earth" was surprisingly located on the second floor of Kitakyushu Station!) — at least when I visited, the only purchases available were guidebooks.
Well, before going to Western Japan, I'll make a quick detour to Nagoya, for which I didn't have space to write about last time. The "Nagoya City Science Museum," where I went to see several dinosaur-related special exhibitions, was a disappointment. What I'll show you this time is something I found at the "Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium," which had just opened in 1992. The skeleton on the ashtray in Photo 1 is of the Permian reptile Labidosaurus! Why on earth?! And even the species name is engraved. Photo 2 is a bit hard to see, but it's a paperweight of the placoderm Bothriolepis. On the back, there's a label with what seems to be the manufacturer's name, and for some reason it says "Ueno Jusansho"... it's a mystery. Most aquarium souvenir shops have dinosaur goods, and most of them are the usual toys, but sometimes you can find interesting things, so you can't let your guard down.

Photo 1

Photo 2

The Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan at Tempozan is famous for its whale sharks and manta rays, and I always make a point of visiting when I go to Osaka just to see them. The 7cm metal skeleton in Photo 3 is something I got when I enthusiastically went there (though it was on a business trip) in 1990, the year the Kaiyukan opened. At that time, there was a small dinosaur boom, and even the aquarium's shop had dinosaurs from Kaiyodo and the like, but I found this one at an imported goods store in the adjacent shopping mall. There were many other things, and I, who was much more eager for dinosaur goods than I am now, unhesitatingly splurged. 　

Photo 3

　 Next up are goods from the currently popular Tamba-ryu (Tamba Dragon). Various things seem to be in development, but there isn't anything particularly outstanding yet. Here's a page introducing goods from about a year ago. There are a lot of food items.
Since then, items like these and glasses and teacups have also appeared.
What I have are the gold and silver "collar pins" (Photo 4) sold by the city's tourism association. They have a good antique feel. I purchased them by calling directly. Goods from such transitional periods are likely to be weeded out and refined eventually, so I'm thinking of going on a trip to buy up goods now while I can.

Photo 5 is an item from the "Sea and Islands Exposition" held in Hiroshima in 1989. Its meaning and how to play with it are unclear... it's a puzzle. Inside the venue, there was an exhibition hall that gathered dinosaurs from Zigong, China, which were still rare at the time. The souvenirs, including the seashell dinosaurs introduced in Secret Treasure Vol. 14, and other Chinese-made goods were quite a find, but...

Photo 4

Photo 5

The "Mifune Dinosaur Museum" in Kumamoto is a small town museum about an hour by bus from Kumamoto City, but numerous valuable dinosaur fossils have been unearthed from the nearby Mifune Group. I was deeply moved by its library. In addition to encyclopedias, it also collected novels featuring dinosaurs, and what's more, there were sticky notes on the pages where dinosaurs appeared—a masterly touch that stirs the heart of any enthusiast. The souvenir is a handmade wooden "Mifune-ryu" (Photo 6) made by local people with disabilities.

Photo 6

The last item is also from Kumamoto Prefecture. It's from the "Cretaceous Museum" in Goshoura, an isolated island in Amakusa, which I visited on a Dinosaur Club trip. Here, you can find the largest theropod tooth in Japan and footprints preserved in coastal rocks. The island was so remote that you had to take a boat even to get to the quarry of the excavation site, but it was a fulfilling trip where we relaxed, ate delicious fish, and searched for fossils. However, the souvenir magnet (Photo 7) was... a bit disappointing.

Photo 7