The day after the party, all of us were running on just a couple hours of sleep. But we had to head out to take care of a few last minute things before heading over to the store opening. After greeting our fans, some press and being engorged in bouquet after bouquet of flowers we ventured out and about into Tokyo.

Our first stop that afternoon was to Thrash Out for a Le Merde’s solo show, “Severed for Life” which featured and assortment of custom Kaiju, prints and paintings by the Seattle based artist. This case was chock full of amazing customs of this brand new figure by Gargamel, which is the bastard child of their Hedoran and Le Merde’s Hujili’s Ghost.

The small space was crammed with Kaiju and Le Merde fans eager to scoop up some of the custom figures along with a chance to meet the artist.

One of Thrash Out’s display cases featuring years of Zagoron colorways. There’s some serious bank in this case right here.

Takashi (on the right) AKA Terrible Whore AKA Rezeon Scum was in attendance. Takashi will be joining us back in NYC for an extended stay in a couple of weeks, and we can’t wait to have him back! Hopefully that means you’ll be seeing more Rezeon Scum graphics in upcoming collections? Who knows…The Terrible Whore is weirdo! However, I do know is that Spring-2 does feature a brand new tee design by him that I’m eagerly looking forward too.

More Le Merde customs figures, this time in resin though…these things are so effin’ trippy!

The man himself, Mike Kelly AKA Le Merde! He came all the way from his home in Seattle for this show and was a gracious host, signing figures and drawing sketches for all of his fans. After the show we had to head on back to the shop for a photoshoot where they crammed 10 of us into a window..we’ll have more on that later but as soon as that was done some of split for dinner while others ventured to Shibuya O-East to catch Baroness‘ first ever Tokyo show!

The guys were gracious enough to invite us to the show, and there’s no way I was going to miss a chance to see them play! I also was really curious to experience a concert in Tokyo as I had never been to one out here. As expected, metal show or not the fans were very polite…way into it, but still, very courteous.

The Guys played about 90% of the Blue Record and were absolutely amazing! The club itself had some terrific sound, so this was a real treat to experience one of last year’s best albums in such a pristine environment.

Allen pounding away…

Peter shredding away!

Seriously, this was one killer show! The guys were in town for their first ever Japanese tour supporting Isis. We unfortunately had to bail right when Isis was starting up. Dinner plans and just overall exhaustion from this whirlwind trip were starting to take a toll on us.

Again, all of these photos were taken by John Prolly, who has more over on his Flickr stream. Stay tuned to the as we’ll have more shots from the trip in the coming week!

- My Pal the Crook