Day Three: Anime Mania
Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:00:03 GMT
I’m a bit behind on my blogging. Lack of decent net access aside, I am sitting here writing this entry on day six of the trip.
So anyway… day three of the tour! This was a set day, where we were to visit Studio Ghibli and the GONZO animation studio.
We took the train to Kichijouji. This turns out to be a rather nice location, and the walk from Kichijouji station to the Ghibli Museum was all either park, or what I’m going to call “typical looking” Japanese back alleys. If you watch any amount of anime you know the sort I’m talking about… they appear everywhere. I took some photos of the power lines because I was getting some Lain vibes from some of them. But during this walk through what looked like back alleys, we somehow ran into both a McDonalds and a Starbucks. The mix of commercial and residential here is extremely bizarre.
I also ran across yet another undisturbed spider directly on a walking path. At this point I was starting to wonder if all these spiders are endangered species. Or perhaps they just spin their webs much faster than the spiders back home.
The Ghibli Museum was exceptional, as one would expect. And also as one might expect, no photography was allowed inside, so we only got to capture the coolness in a few locations which were outside. Inside, they had a huge plush Nekobus, with two dozen screaming Japanese kids playing inside it. Ingenious. There were various other rooms in the museum with various other weird things, but the giant Nekobus really made it. And we couldn’t even photograph it… so sad. Maybe someone on the Internet was more sneaky and has a picture of it. Go and search for one.
Of course they had a shop – I bought a fairly big Totoro plushie (¥6,050), and a small Nekobus (¥1,200). At the time I thought my Totoro was pretty kick-ass, but now I have put it in perspective. More on that later.
We then walked from the museum to a train station which was actually closer to the museum… looks like the first part of the day was specifically designed so that we could see those streets earlier. During this walk we somehow lost two of the group. Nobody saw them stop, and I’m fairly sure a head count was taken at the museum. I’m sure the tour staff are going to be yelled at when they return to the US.
We took that train to Nakano, and visited the Nakano Broadway shopping centre, which is full of “stuff.” Really, this shopping centre had an amazing amount of what I will describe as otaku junk. Capsule machines lined every piece of free wall space. There were entire shops full of capsule machines. There were shops selling the figures from inside the capsule machines, for people who would rather cut the bullshit and just buy the item (some of them went for ¥12,000 even though the actual machines only went up to around ¥300 – super rare stuff.)
I bought a t-shirt which was hilarious at the time because it had a huge nazi emblem on the back (¥1,580). I honestly don’t think I would be able to wear it in public… so maybe it will become a gift for someone who is able. Didn’t buy anything else here as such, although I did hit a couple of capsule machines to burn off some ¥100 coins. Seriously, these things are like a curse if you don’t use the vending machines, they pile up really fast.
After Nakano we took the train to Shinjuku to visit GONZO. At ground floor (which is 1F in this country, not like back home) we run into the two members of the tour who we lost earlier. Evidently they looked up the location of the studio and found their own way there somehow.
As for the studio tour, unfortunately the timing was bad. The new season of anime starts next month (i.e. next week) so practically the entire studio were hard at work on whatever is about to come out on TV. To add to that, some more of the staff were working on a new project which is classified top secret. So the only thing we really got out of this part of the tour was a question and answer session and previews for some new shows which are about to hit.
But… it was only GONZO anyway. It wasn’t like we were touring Kyoto Animation (this isn’t even a troll, I’m dead serious. If this tour company announce touring Kyoto Animation I’ll start saving instantly and ensure my spot on that tour, as long as they don’t schedule the tour for one week before a new TV season.)
After that, we returned by train to the hotel and the main tour for the day was over.
But you know, we just couldn’t leave it at that… so we decided to go to a cosplay restaurant (in fact, this was an “optional extra”, and still guided by the tour company, in case you were wondering.)
Took the train to Kanda, and on exiting Kanda station we ran across an amusing sight. Well… every cosplay business has staff members in costume who give out fliers and guide people to their establishment. So we weren’t too surprised to see the two cosplay girls there. But the big guy in a huge yellow Pikachu costume? That was just too much. We were pissing ourselves laughing… many photos were taken although only one or two of my own will come out properly. The official photographer for the tour had her video camera on the guy as he was guiding us there, it was funny stuff.
The actual restaurant was a Korean BBQ type, but where the costumed staff did the work of cooking the food for us. However there weren’t enough staff to continuously cook food so we ended up piling it on ourselves in order to get more food delivered (as it was all you can eat, but on a one hour time limit.)
Oh yes… saw some of the staff out of costume, and a couple of them were quite attractive without the costume… to the point where you wonder why they had to work in such a place (it was an awful restaurant in every other way. I wonder if all cosplay places are like that.)
Returned to the hotel, watched TV and went to bed. Interestingly, Doctor Who was on NHK, and the TV gave me the option of Japanese or English voice-over so I could toggle between the two. It was amusing to hear the characters talk in Japanese, as I assume it is for Japanese people when they hear most of the American anime dubs. The Japanese voice they got for Rose actually sounds just right. All the others… not so good.
Even with the studio letdown, it was a good day all up. The Nakano Broadway trip was actually not in the original plans, it was an improvisation due to GONZO delaying our visit by an hour due to a “special meeting”. And we never would have found a place like that if the tour guide hadn’t shown us the way to it.