So I lied! Or more specifically, the plaster is still drying so the next figure is still awaiting her turn in the spotlight. In the meantime, we’ll take a quicky look at this pillowcase, which I’ve had sitting around for a while. The lady depicted here is named Rinne Amamiya and she’s an original character drawn by Itsuka Miyatsuki. Her “series” is nominally titled Koisuru Junjou Shoujo, or something like “Pure Girl in Love,” though as far as I can tell that title is a completely made-up thing concocted just for this pillowcase. The original product page even gives a very short and sparse backstory for this character, in which she tentatively offers her love to her chosen one, which is presumably the owner of this pillowcase. How adorable. As franchises like the Vocaloid series and Kantai Collection show, you really don’t need more than a pretty picture to successfully peddle anime goods.
This dakimakura cover is manufactured by CranCrown Black, a maker of anime goods, including pillowcases and mousepads (in particular, the finest mousepad of all time). Like many non-Cospa dakimakura covers, this one is 160 centimeters long and 50 centimeters wide. It’s made of a soft and stretchy spandex material; it feels strong though it’s a little thin, and you can see how the reverse side of the illustrations are visible through the opposite side in the photographs.
The front side shows Rinne smiling happily back at the viewer. It’s a very cute character design – not particularly original, perhaps, but still very appealing. I guess it’s a little unusual in that the character is depicted with a sizeable bust; it seems like many anime characters with twintails are often drawn with smaller breasts.
The reverse side shows her effecting a naughtier look, with a darker color motif in her clothing and a more seductive expression on her face. One neat thing about this pillowcase is that it is reasonably explicit. I’ve found that many dakimakura covers from commercial companies tend to not be that explicit; either they’ll cover up the offending bits with strategically-placed hair or ribbons or scraps of clothing, or they’ll just blank it out, leaving the character looking like a Barbie doll. Even pillowcases depicting characters from eroge are often censored in this manner (though some are not; Lilith’s dakimakura covers, for example, can be hilariously pornographic).
I really like the illustrations on both sides of this pillowcase. Oddly, I couldn’t find much information on the artist; she (or he, I’m not sure about the gender of the artist) seems to not have updated her site in years. Amusingly, she does have a Japanese Wikipedia page but the eroge titles she has worked on are all at least several years old.
Aside from the appeal of the pictures, the best thing about this pillowcase is that it was easy to buy; Amiami and Hobby Search regularly stock CranCrown Black’s dakimakura covers. It’s a very nice change from not so long ago, where dakimakura covers were often a very obscure and niche product type. They are still a niche genre, I guess, but at least it’s easier to acquire them.
She doesn’t appear that pure to me. Sure clothes and appearance match the title, but she has a lewd look in her eyes on the frontside. The character design is very cute nevertheless, the hair is especially pretty as well as her face ^^..
The other side features more striking colors and show the naughty girls true intentions.
I like the confidence in her eyes. The illustrations are both drawn very well without perspective issues or strangely articulated limbs, if at all her fingers are pressed a little too deep in her flesh *ouch*. The body looks really nice with these details, the belly button is really sweet.
Yeah and her vagina looks cute XD Anyway it’s a quite appealing Dakimakura.
She does look a bit lusty! Which I guess is not an uncommon theme in anime these days. I think it’s kinda funny how I can’t really talk to my friends about anime without having to explain how sexualized it has become.
I really like the art, too; hopefully the artist does more pillowcases, as she (he?) hasn’t done much in the last few years. I couldn’t even find any recently-released doujinshi under the artist’s circle name.
The boobgrab pose in the front side is quite lewd by itself, yeah.
Speaking of “hilariously pornographic”, what do you think of Takumi Makura’s pillowcases? They’re also available in AmiAmi and I kinda like the super-explicitness of it. Especially this one which I purchased.
http://www.amiami.com/top/detail/detail?gcode=LTD-ETC-00304
I don’t own any of them but they look really nice. I kinda wish I had bought this one, as the reverse side is kinda hilarious. Actually, I haven’t bought a new dakimakura cover in some time now; I should check out what was released at Comiket last month and see if there’s anything I want.
Their art is pretty nice, overall. I like the direction they’ve been going with their covers, while still staying within the bounds to be carried by AmiAmi (Hobby Search was selling them for awhile, but has since stopped.) The only downside is that they use their own material, and it’s pretty poor quality wise. It’s still a 2WT-type of material, but there is a lot of variation as far as 2WT goes, and I’d rate the quality of material on the lower end of the spectrum.
I bought few dakimakura pillow covers from Mandarake Shibuya (which has excellent selection) and now I’m thinking about acquiring a pillow for them. The most pillows available from ebay are 150 x 50 in size while popular size (for frivolous ones, at least) seems to be 160 x 50? There is only few larger size pillows available right now from China and none from UK or Germany but plenty of 150cm ones. Confusing.
There are several problems when it comes to buying a body pillow/dakimakura.
First, is that standard body pillows are usually too small. Here in the US, the largest pillow I’ve been able to find is 140cm, as far as local department/big box stores go. That’s a lot smaller than you want, and the pillows are pretty poor quality (but cheap.)
Second, when you start getting to the actual hobby stuff, is that bootleggers have a tremendous stranglehold on the hobby (as far as English hobbyists go, though there are a lot of bootleg sites in Japanese, too.) For whatever reason, bootleggers almost exclusively print at 150x50cm. That was the industry standard for the hobby, 5-6 years ago, but now, only a few companies (like Cospa, Chara-Ani, and Movic) still print at 150x50cm. The vast majority of circle/doujin covers, as well as slightly more niche company covers (Lilith, CranCrown, Takumi Makura, etc) print at 160x50cm.
So the bootleggers, who usually sell cheap pillows ($20-50, with or without shipping included), only sell pillows that are 150x50cm, since that’s the only size they print their stolen work in.
If you want a 160x50cm pillow, which most legitimate covers will be sized at, then you really only have two viable options, depending on your location. The first would be to find a custom pillow maker in your area, and see if they’ll make you a pillow at the size you request. In the US, we have Royal Pillow, and they produce somewhat mediocre pillows, but they’ll do custom sizes and the price is right (about $20 per pillow.)
The other option is to buy a legitimate “dakimakura” (keeping in mind that the term specifically refers to the pillow itself) from Japan. They range in price from 5000-10000 yen, and shipping will add a significant amount to that purchase (between 4-6k, from my experience.) So at the very least, you’d probably be looking at about $100 shipped for the pillow itself. I have some experience with Japanese dakimakura bodies, and I personally recommend the A&J line. Unfortunately, their premium pillows aren’t available on sites that ship internationally (like AmiAmi), so you’d have to use a proxy service, which would add some additional cost.
My personal recommendation would be the DHR6000, which is a 160×50 pillow that goes for about 9.5k. I’ve purchased a few Cospa bodies in the past and the DHR6000 while I was in Japan, and it absolutely blows any other pillow I’ve ever used out of the water. That and it’s specifically designed for dakimakura covers, so it usually works really well with them.
Thanks for in depth reply. I decided to get a pillow from China which was decidedly 160 x 50, for about US$60 total with shipping to Europe. Will be seen how satisfied I’ll be with it. Perhaps I should have bought one when I was in Japan but I was already overloaded with purchases.
I see I made a mistake in my post when I claimed Shibuya Mandarake had good selection of pillow covers. It didn’t. It was the Akihabara one and after visiting Nakano, Shibuya and Akihabara Mandarake’s I can seriously recommend Akihabara which was superior of the three in every count, IMHO.
Ah, well, hopefully it works out for you. I’d still highly recommend looking into the A&J lineup if you’re ever in the market for a new pillow.
From my recollection, Shibuya was one of the worst stores for covers; they had a few, but nothing that was really new and/or rare. Akihibara was okay, with a decent selection of current event covers and some older stuff. I thought Nakano was pretty good as a whole, especially since they carried some fairly rare covers from a few of my favorite circles. The best store though, in my opinion, would have to be GrandChaos in Osaka. They were definitely a dakimakura cover oriented store; they had 1-2 of the long display cases like Akihabara has, and 2-3 smaller ones throughout the store and carried some really rare covers.
Of course, every visit can be different, so one store might be better than the other on any given day. Believe it or not, I was really impressed with Utsunomiya. It really surprised me, considering they don’t tend to have much online, it seems. The store as a whole is really nice (it’s only 1-2 massive floors, sharing a building with Volks, Animate, and a few other shops) and the aisles are about twice as wide as any other shop. I had no problem navigating it, even with a load of stuff in each arm. Their dakimakura display is really nice, about the size of the one in Akihabara, but everything is spread out in a logical fashion. The main problem I had with the Tokyo stores was that they stacked covers on top of the other, sometimes about 5 or so deep. So to see everything, you had to call someone over, have them open the glass case, and trust you enough to look. It wasn’t really a problem with GrandChaos, since they had enough room to display most of their covers in their multiple cases, but Utsunomiya only had one large case against the back wall. So instead of stacking the covers directly on top of each other, they had them overlap by maybe 50% of the cover. It was enough so that you could usually make out what every single cover was.
I think Shashin covered it all, but yeah, any pillowcase that is 150 cm long is probably either an officially-licensed Cospa pillowcase or a bootleg. Another indication that a dakimakura cover is fake is that it will be made of something called peachskin fabric; I have no idea what that is but most doujin-made pillowcases are made of a stretchy fabric like roica or tricot.