Quote Originally Posted by cjefferys View Post
Now that would have been cool. So the Popy Jumbos were sold in Hong Kong back in the 70's too? I see Hong Kong based sellers with Jumbos on ebay sometimes, but I wasn't sure if they recently brought them back from Japan or if they were sold in HK back in the day.
The area where my late Grandmother lived back in the 70's and 80's is called Causaway Bay, and there were (are still?) about a dozen Japanese Department stores in that district.

They were filled with Jumbo Machinders, 5" Inch die Cast "Shogun Warriors", Microman/"Micronauts", Transformers, Godaikins and all manner of Robot/Mecha/Kaiju toys that I had never seen in North America.

Kid-Culture in Hong Kong was dominated by Japanese imports... from the translated Manga and small format color magazines on the news-stands, to the animated and live action stuff on TV, to the toys that you saw even in the hole in the wall mom and pops stores.

You saw Hello Kitty, Doraeman (sp?), Ultraman, and Godzilla all over the place more than the occasional sightings of Superman and Batman.

Which makes sense given the ideological divide between Hong Kong and China at that point in history, culturally it was mostly language they shared (and even then the lines were drawn down Cantonese and Mandarin dialects). Despite the language barrier and old grudges around WW2, Hong Kong and Japan were both at least consumer cultures, although it might also have had something to do the manufacturing and imports around the region. Hong Kong was an international hub to the orient and had a very international flavour (it was still a British Colony then).