Dubious Quality

There's a museum, took, but it's very difficult to get tickets, and you have to do so months in advance. We took the path of least resistance and went to the shop. Two of of them, actually--one in Tokyo and one in Kyoto.

They were both surprisingly small, or maybe it wasn't surprising, because Studio Ghibli doesn't merchandise itself out the eyeballs like Disney does. They had a series of little papercraft projects, though, that looked very appealing. 

Thus begins the descent into madness. 

The box itself was square and small, about 2.5" on all sides. This should have been a warning about hand size, because I'm 6'0" and do not have small hands, but of course this red flag was entirely ignored.

About two weeks after we got back, I sat down to put it together.

These little kits aren't like Legos, because you can't really break Legos. No matter what kind of mistake you make, you can just take it apart and start over. 

Papercraft, though, is different. No mistakes allowed. 

The pieces were so small that I was staggered when I first looked at them. I didn't even know how I could cut them out, let alone make use of them. A few were specks, basically. 

It went poorly. 

At first, anyway. The most difficult section was at the top of the instructions (in Japanese, of course, and thank you Google Translate), and the instructions themselves had an internal logic that was quite baffling until you understood. 

That's probably a metaphor for countries, and people. 

After a relatively inconceivable length of time, I started making progress. I saw what dotted lines and other symbols meant in the instructions. I discovered I needed to use toothpicks to apply glue to the pieces requiring gluing, for more precision.

There was one piece I discarded, but it was an internal piece and couldn't be seen, and eventually, I finished it all. 

That's Satsuki in My Neighbor Totoro, and the caption in the store said it was called "Always Be Curious," which I found particularly meaningful. It looks simple, but each of those figures or structures involved 6-10 separate pieces, which all had to be connected or glued, and it was quite tricky overall.

I don't know how much detail you can see from the blog entry, but if you click on the picture, it enlarges into a higher resolution image with much more depth. 

Of course I want to do another one now.