No, these aren’t just cleverly decorated toys–they’re fully readable volumes!

Following our latest craze of mini-sized Weekly Shonen Jump manga that you can actually read, we were delighted to find other Bandai capsule toy machines selling mini-sized Ribon manga (in celebration of the shojo magazine’s 70th anniversary) and mini-sized Ichigo Keywords books, a collaboration between Sanrio character goods and Japanese publisher Asahi Bunko, that positively set our kawaii senses on fire.

We pulled one toy of each series for 500 yen (US$3.40) each and set them down to admire after popping them out of their protective capsules. The covers were exquisitely made, with tiny details such as the publishers, illustrations, and logos all faithfully represented in miniscule size.

▼ Our Sanrio prize was the Hello Kitty x F.W. Nietzsche tie-in volume from a popular book series of Sanrio characters interpreting quotes by famous philosophers. Meanwhile, our Ribon prize was the first volume of Akazukin Chacha, which was first published in 1992.

The back covers and spines were also crafted with such detail that they could easily have sat on shelves at a local bookstore alongside regular books.

You might be wondering where the glossy outer covers were, but never fear, because they were included in the tiny leaflets that also came inside the capsules. We needed to cut them out and attach them to the volumes ourselves.

These covers were even more impressive, looking exactly like their regular-sized cousins right down to the smallest details.

That’s incredibly impressive considering each of the mini versions was only about 5.1 x 4 centimeters (2 x 1.6 inches). Here’s a Sylvanian Families (aka Calico Critters) baby toy for scale.

Just like with the previous mini-sized Shonen Jump manga capsule toys, these ones didn’t contain a full volume but rather excerpts. There were no page numbers listed, but a quick count revealed that the Hello Kitty one was 90 pages long and the Akazukin Chacha one was 96 pages long–three chapters’ worth of the original manga.

The print was naturally very, very small…but it was amazingly precise. It wasn’t sloppily printed by any means but was perfectly legible, though some readers may need to pull out a magnifying glass to make sense of things.

The largest print in the Hello Kitty book still needed about two rows of text to equal the length of one grain of rice.

On the other hand, the Akazukin Chacha print was so tiny that about six individual characters equaled one grain of rice!

They probably aren’t anything we’ll be trying to read on the train in the near future…but they’re incredibly cute and nostalgic keepsakes.

Capsule toys sure are having their day–even Air Japan has recently rolled out an on-plane gacha machine. We’re certainly going to continue emptying our pockets whenever we see one that strikes our fancy.

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