Aloha! & The Return of Tsukihoshi

Two topics of discussion today. While this blog may bore everyone to tears, I will continue recklessly without remorse because, well... ultimately this is our family blog.

Shopping in Japan, once one gets acquainted with the "ins and outs" of it, can be dangerously fun. I especially enjoy shopping for children's shoes here. There are so many options. Almost all of them are designed to (for obvious cultural reasons) slip on and off a young child's feet easily. Plus, folks start walking long distances at a very young age, so they have to have supportive shoes. During the summer, Japanese shoe companies come out with just about every style of "aqua shoe" imaginable.

Many Japanese companies, while making their debut in the western world, like to use their Japanese names or use kanji characters as their company logo. For example, check out Uniqlo flagship logo for the US.

Tsukihoshi used the same idea. Only for me, this was a little more difficult to figure out and I had to recruit my husband to ask our good friend Hide to translate. While surfing the Zappos web page, I stumbled upon the Tsukihoshi brand of shoes. How intriguing that Japanese shoe company was now selling children's shoes to Americans and the likes of Angelina Jolie were buying them for their kidlets. However at $53, I wasn't about to venture that far into the depths of my pocket book for a pair of shoes for my 3 year old, so I went on a mission.

First I tried emailing the Tsukihoshi US sales rep and asking where I could find a pair of Tsukihoshi shoes here in Japan. Although he returned my email promptly, he wasn't much help. Come to find out that Tsukihoshi translates into "Moonstar". Well, Moonstar brand of shoes is a huge manufacturer and seller of footwear. Basically, they use an English name here (Moonstar) and a Japanese name in the states (Tsukihoshi).

That is where my search ended for a while until I came upon Carrot brand of shoes which I finally figured out is sold by Moonstar and is basically the same kind of shoe that I originally spotted on the Zappos site. At my local department store, I spotted a pair of Carrot shoes that were the aqua type shoes, complete with antibacterial foot insole. Sweet! All for the much cheaper price of 2600 yen (about $21.00 under the current exchange rate), which is less than half of what I would have paid had I ordered them online from an American site.

There you have it. My little shopping adventure comes full circle with a happy ending.

I suppose I should bring this blog entry "full circle" as well. The reason I bought yet another pair of shoes for Josh is because we are taking a last minute vacation to Oahu and he'll need them on our hike up Diamond Head. This will be Mike's first visit to Hawaii and along with taking in all the sites we are really looking forward to trying to get in some surf time. We'll be gone for a few days so, wish us happy trails!