Books Title for Japan
Sonic the Hedgehog Books from Japan 2
Just like everywhere else, Japan had numerous guide books for the various Sonic games over the years. Did they also have story books, puzzle books, or anything else? Maybe. If anything like that is found it will appear here too. Japanese books are less common & harder to get a hold of. There are several theories behind why this is (Japan disposed of guides once the game was very old, if the author name is written in Japanese you can't type it into anything to search for it, books are heavy and mailing them is expensive, they're not appealing unless you can read Japanese outside of Japan so there was never much demand...the theories just go on and on)
Japan Books 1 * Sonic Gear Main *
Magazines Paper Covers Book Bags This is another image from the (now defunct) Hikari Site. That website was a collection catalog of a person in Japan. The site closed down years ago for unknown reasons, but every once in a while one of its small photos will pop up on the internet. Because the place is closed and the person isn't found, such photos appear here on Gear (credited to the original Hikari person) as a way to preserve their work on something that will never go away.
In this case, they photo some paper goods, including a copy of Sega Maga, with an early SA1 styled Sonic for the cover. The 2nd thing is either a guide, a magazine, or some kind of large booklet. None of the text can be read. The 3rd thing is a carefully folded quality plastic bag with Segasonic branding. It is made of thicker quality plastic, folds flat, is large, and has an oval cut-thru handle. That bag is also in the SonicGear collection. (That's how I know what it is)
The gray/white square there is also in the SonicGear collection: it has the 'don't waste your precious time' quote, and it is some kind of paper sleeve for magazines or books. (This one I do have but...well...still don't quite know what it is, whoops) The last is obviously a nice handles paper bag. It has pale Sonic art on it as line-art, and blue Sega logos.
Did you notice the small rectangle package by the bag handles? This COULD be the Sonic napkin, where it is a plain white paper napkin but the plastic outer packaging has Sonic line art on it. However due to the small size of the original photo it is probably impossible to tell.