Day Ten: Could You Please Stop the Rain?
Posted by Trejkaz Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:15:18 GMT
On day ten I had planned to go to Shinjuku to check out the observatory of the Metropolitan Government Building. But visibility was poor, and indeed it rained again.
I did manage to book the rest of the week’s tours, though. [Note: turned out that the weather wasn’t actually so bad on the days when I actually had to leave the metropolis. Lucky.]
What I did get done on this day was to go to Ginza and check out a few shops. The main purpose of this trip though was to check out Hakuhinkan Toy Park, another rather large toy store. Toy-wise I found yet more giant Totoros (again, sans price tag, meaning that they’re ludicrously expensive) but I’m still not tempted to buy one. The only other interesting toys were some plush mushrooms, which were really cute.
They did have an entire floor of games though, most of which were the traditional kinds of games instead of computer games. A whole cabinet of chess sets, a whole cabinet of Mahjong sets, and various other games. They didn’t seem to have hanafuda except for the lowest-end type, which I wasn’t interested in. They did have a huge collection of playing cards though, and yet again, a huge collection of tarot. What’s up with this trend of tarot cards appearing in game stores? It’s weirding me out.
Anyway the trip to Ginza was unproductive so I returned to Shibuya and checked out a few places which I hadn’t entered yet. The Yamaha store was large and interesting, but devoid of Tenori-on which is apparently not yet out even though various web sites originally suggested it would be out in September (saves me money, I suppose. Now I can be sure that I’ll fall under budget for the holiday.)
Returning to Animate I also found another Haruhi t-shirt (¥3,045) and a strap for my mobile phone (¥999).
I can’t remember what I had for dinner… it’s entirely possible I didn’t even eat any. If I did, it must have been convenience store food again. :-)
Did you know that in Europe tarot cards are still used for playing actual card games similar to spades and euchre! In fact, tarot decks were originally made for game playing and the fortune telling stuff came about much later. The players these days are using more modern decks that look somewhat like regular playing cards and the trumps have different pictures than the fortune telling decks. These modern tarots are NOT used for fortune telling and they are not scary looking, Go to Google and search “jeu de tarot” or “tarock” to see what it’s about!
Interesting.
The ones I found were definitely the fortune telling sort (the Rider-Waite deck featured in every store, usually with three different sizes of the same deck) although if the decks haven’t actually changed in layout then it would be possible to play the same games even with the fortune telling decks.
One wonders if the Japanese still know the rules for these games, if they’re selling tarot decks in game stores.
I have just discovered this picture from Mobius Games. You might find it interesting
This is not a Rider Waite deck. It looks like French style deck for game playing but the corners have English language letters.
http://www.mobius-games.co.jp/others/Tarot.htm