Day Four: Shop, Shop, Shop!
Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:05:26 GMT
The plan for the fourth day of the tour was to visit Shibuya, Harajuku, Ikebukuro and Akihabara, and shop until we drop. However, it was pissing down with rain the entire day. This caused a number of setbacks which weren’t a major issue for me but caused some problems for other people on the tour since they have to leave at a certain time whereas I’m extended my stay for an entire week afterwards.
First stop, Shibuya. A place I honestly didn’t expect to find anything I wanted. Boy was I wrong.
We walked down to Mandarake to look for second-hand books. Whoops, the store’s closed until 12:00 or so (at this point it is around 10:00) so we can’t go there. Bit of an oversight by the tour group, but nothing major. Mandarake are an entire chain of bookstores and we will have plenty of opportunities to go to them in other locations.
So then we go to Animate, and damn… this store completely owns my wallet. My “Haruhidar” was going off at least once every five minutes and it took all my strength to maintain my sanity in this place.
We’ll start with the two Haruhi desk mats I bought, each with different pictures on them (¥735 each). There were also several smaller ones but I didn’t touch those since the number of different prints was large and I might have bought all of them if I bought one. I will be living in Shibuya for the second week, so if I really get the urge the store is only a short walk from the hotel.
Next, there was the SOS-dan key holder (¥892) which will replace the keyring I currently use, and the business card holder (¥840) which is good because I have an awfully large number of business cards and previously had no holder for them at all.
I also picked up the white on black silhouette Suzumiya Haruhi t-shirt (¥3,045) to add to my growing stack of Haruhi t-shirts.
That was all I bought… I did see some other things which were really tempting. There were several Kujibiki Unbalance figurines but they ran for around ¥4,000 each. I’m not even a figurine collector but there was an inexplicable draw to these ones. They also had an awfully large quantity of xxxHOLiC stuff, but I didn’t buy anything of the sort.
We did walk around and look at other places but didn’t find anything really interesting, although we did snicker at Condomania. I’ll have to check that place out later.
Next stop was Harajuku… nice location, but a fairly small area. We went to Oriental Bazaar, which was huge and full of awesome expensive stuff. Many people probably blew their souvenir budget in this single location, because they had practically anything you would ever buy as a souvenir for a trip to Japan.
A group of us ate at Jangara Ramen, which is quite well known. Price… forgotten. No receipt, and I’m writing this too long after the visit. Got a window seat, good for watching people walk past (it’s Harajuku, remember? Watching the people counts as entertainment in its own right.) The people sitting facing the cooks apparently had a lot of fun, the cooks were talking with them while preparing the food, which is pretty cool. I also had a crepe (strawberry and cream cheese), bought down on Takeshita-dori (perhaps the most cliche location we could have chosen to buy one) but didn’t get any time to properly shop so I’ll have to return later. There was a toy store which looked pretty decent, and also a bookstore. And funnily enough, another Condomania. These things are surprisingly common.
The rain was causing serious problems as I already mentioned. It was really starting to hit hard at this point and the roads were quite crowded. So the trip to Ikebukuro didn’t happen.
We went straight to Akihabara (this makes it my second visit there.) Looked around lots of stores, found a lot more perverted stuff.
The variety of porn available in Japan is simply amazing for a country which produces more or less all of its own stuff, purely for its own consumption. We found pretty much everything. We found the expected schoolgirl videos. We found videos involving dogs. We found posters of girls covered in frogs (freaky…) We also found a whole set of videos featuring 10 year olds. Don’t get angry just yet, they didn’t screw them – that’s reserved for the animated stuff. I have a photo of one of the DVD covers to prove this one… it blew my mind.
There was a huge variety of SM and fetish stuff too. Did you know there was a fetish for those white masks the Japanese wear when they have a cold? One particular video series focused on this had 18 volumes. I had no idea.
I also walked into several shelves full of perverted Haruhi doujin comics. Most of them seem to feature Yuki! But it’s raining, so sorry… I can’t buy them yet, they might get wet on the trip back to the bus. I’ll be back.
Another thing I found was a Totoro bigger than the one I bought. This one ran to around ¥12,500 (it seemed about 1.5 times bigger than mine, and costs 2.5 times more.)
But no, nothing was bought here. We returned to the hotel after getting soaking wet in Akihabara (umbrellas are mere decoration when the weather gets like that.)
A small group of us ate at the Japanese restaurant in the hotel which really seemed more like an izakaya due to the range of alcohol options. That bottle of sake really made me tired, and that was the end of that day.