Other: South Bay Plunder

At some point, the bulk of the Japanese expatriate population in Los Angeles moved from Little Tokyo in the downtown Civic Center area to Torrance, which is down in the South Bay area (roughly between LAX and Long Beach). It's a crap drive from where I live (every place that involves dealing with LA drivers is a crap drive from where I live) even though it's only about 30 miles, and is about a 2-hour trip by public transportation, but I recently heard that Daiso had opened their first Southern California location there, so I finally got off my ass last week and drove down.

The Daiso is a good size. I've only been to two others, the one in Seattle, which is not very large, and the one in Mountain View, which is cavernous. This one was sized in between, but packed with the same variety of 100-yen store awesomeness. I'm hoping it does well so that perhaps they'll open up more locations around LA County, including ones north of the 10.

Some of the crafty stuff I got at Torrance Daiso:


I also discovered that a store I'd heard of a couple years ago, but never made it to before, was only a block away from Daiso. The Store of Unbearable Cuteness, aka Tamaya, is a licensed distributor of San-X goodies, including Rilakkuma merch, so I finally made a trip, and could not, of course, leave empty-handed:



I also drove to Mitsuwa Marketplace, which is a couple miles away. The Sanseido bookstore only had a few knitting books this time, none appealing, but I got some treats from the grocery area.