A Unique Souvenir from a Unique Place

I'm not sure what you can consider unique, really, but this was an awesome find for me.

Over the New Year holidays, I mainly spent my free time wandering around various neighborhoods in Tokyo. One day, I came across a street festival of some kind with dozens of booths set up selling food and crafts. A few booths were flea-market style, with used things, and one particular booth had a bunch of bags.

I wasn't really looking for a new bag. I'm happy with my shoulder bag for my day-to-day comings and goings, and I have good backpacks and suitcases for travel. I even have some super-condensable nylon bags for shopping.

But when I walked past the booth and took a glance, the logo on this bag caught my eye. The bag itself is a nice heavy canvas which I'm sure can withstand a good bit of use. I'm not going shopping with it, though, because it serves as my first souvenir from an independent team in Japan.

The Golden Golds got their start in 2005, if you couldn't figure that out from the design on the bag. The team is still playing over 10 years later. Their biggest claim to fame is female player-manager Ayumi Kataoka, One of my hopes this year is to see some minor league (ni-gun) and independent league games, so if I'm lucky I'll see Ayumi heading up the Ibaraki nine this summer. (Wow, there's some old-style colloquialism for you.)

There are Golden Golds trading card sets, though I don't have one. I have sample cards in my type collection; autographs for most of the players can be found pretty cheap but I don't think I've come across a full set.