Trypticon: Tag tokyo

Day Sixteen: Views High, Views Low

Trejkaz — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 15:08:00 +1000

It was Sunday, and I had a free day which wasn’t initially planned. The weather was good, so I knew that I had to visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and get some photos of the surrounding skyscrapers from up there. After that, I knew I would be going to a park, but I decided to make the decision of which park, dependent on which platform of the Yamanote Line I happened to find first. (LOL)

It’s a nice building, really, on the outside and at least on the inside of the observatory. And going on a Sunday was a really good idea because there was nothing else happening in the building other than the operation of the observatories. I imagine that at other times of the week, there must be much more going on in there.

I got several shots of skyscrapers which look like plastic models from that high up. For some reason things seem more surreal from up there, compared to the view from Tokyo Tower.

On returning to the station, it seems I had found the “soto-mawari” line (the outer circle, which runs clockwise) first, so good… I get to go to Ueno Park.

Ueno Park is full of museums, but actually I didn’t enter any of them because I wasn’t interested at the time. It was also a bad time of year for appreciating plants, but I did take photos of a few of the buildings in the area.

The food vendors are all very impressive. I ate some of the largest takoyaki I’ve ever seen (¥500 – cheap!) and watched the guy making them. He was a real pro… not like the ones you see at festivals back home. No offense to the guys cooking the stuff back home… I think the guy at Ueno may have actually been superhuman. :-)

Returned to the hotel with some time to kill, so I finished the rest of my laundry (ended up coming home with only about four dirty items of clothing) and then went exploring the local area. Otemachi has main offices for many major newspapers. Other than that, I located Otemachi Station (I would need to be there the next day so it was a good thing to know where to go in advance) and found another convenience store with relatively low beer prices.

Discovered that this newest and cheapest hotel actually had on-demand movies, unlike all the other more expensive ones. Watched a couple of older movies which I never got to see, and another random one which I didn’t expect would actually be good (but I can’t remember the name of right now.) If you pack in the movie watching in this fashion the price is similar to renting DVDs, since pay TV is a flat rate per day.

Day Fifteen: Another Hotel Transfer

Trejkaz — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 14:48:00 +1000

On waking up I was able to appreciate the Hotel Grand Palace, it’s quite a good place. Shame the only reason I got to see it was due to an emergency booking, and also a shame that I only got a couple of hours of waking time in the hotel.

I was up early, making calls to book for another hotel.

I wanted a place which was relatively close to the hotel I was already in (to reduce the taxi fare between the hotels) and which was relatively close to a train station (to reduce the cost of returning to the airport.) A cute girl at the front desk gave me a list of places from a tiny book of hotels with even tinier writing.

One of the hotels, Hotel Villa Fontaine (Otemachi), even had vacancies. Actually it seems they had several. Must have been a relatively unpopular hotel. I had to settle with a room on a smoking floor though.

This day once again followed the “check out by 11:00 and BTW you’re not allowed to check in until 14:00” pattern (a problem which I wish hotels would fix.) So I spent more time in the lobby of the hotel playing Jump Super Stars, a game which, without Japanese reading ability, is difficult to get the hang of. But I was getting the hang of it slowly.

As the room was a smoking room, the place smelled slightly wrong… but anyway, for only two nights, it wouldn’t be so bad. And I was able to just run the air conditioner on full fan to take my mind off it. This was the third hotel with free high speed Internet, which really makes the Shinagawa Prince Hotel look like a house of crap.

The local area of this new hotel was rather interesting in itself. It’s in Otemachi, but it’s actually closer to Kanda station. There is a shopping street at the west entrance to the station which is rather diverse, but sadly a lot of the shops were closed on the weekend. The food places were open though, as were the convenience stores. Sadly, the sake shop was not.

Soon enough it was Saturday night and I went out to a few random pubs bars in various areas just to check them out. Alcohol prices are either ridiculous (e.g. ¥900 for a pint of Guinness at Dubliners in Shinjuku) or at the complete other end of the spectrum with all-you-can-drink. Sadly, most of these types of places have a shit taste in music. Unless, that is, you happen to like hip-hop.

Dissatisfied, I returned to the hotel room with a cheap take-away dinner and spent the rest of the night watching television. There was still nothing good on, though.

At least tomorrow would be a full day.

Day Fourteen: Checking Out

Trejkaz — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 14:24:00 +1000

Ah, day fourteen… the end of the trip.

Or was it?

Hotel check-out was at 11:00am, and the flight was to be at 21:10pm. The latest bus heading to Narita airport left at 17:00 so I still had about 8 hours of time to kill, 7 once you account for lunch. But instead of killing time going places with a fully loaded backpack, I opted for finding quieter places to sit and play games (Nintendo DS FTW.)

The weather on this day was truly horrific. It was impossible to put up the umbrella because of the wind. I witnessed numerous people’s umbrellas turning inside out, which always strikes me as a brilliant comedy routine. Later in the day it happened to me as well, but for some reason it didn’t seem as funny. :-)

The dash from shelter to the bus (around 5 metres) was more than enough to get completely soaked through (you can’t carry an umbrella in such situations because it won’t go through the bus door.) Luckily the backpack held out, nothing got wet except the very top edge of my passport.

On arriving at the airport, it was immediately apparent that something wasn’t right. The whole departures lobby was FULL of people. There were very few people queueing up; the airline wasn’t letting them in. On sitting around for a couple of hours waiting for news on our flight, it turned out that it was cancelled. The plane which was supposed to land (and then become our plane) had been redirected to Haneda due to the awful weather conditions.

And as is probably normal, when an entire plane full of people have their flight delayed, you get an entire plane full of people immediately trying to book the first available flight out. So when it came to my turn, the first two following nights had already been booked out and I had to make do with the third. That wasn’t the problem.

The first problem was that there was no hotel near the airport with any vacancies, because about half the flights had been cancelled that night and everyone had booked them out. So I had to travel all the way back to Tokyo again. The second problem was that there was no hotel (or at least no hotel on the system used at the airport) which had three consecutive days’ vacancies. So they booked one night at the Hotel Grand Palace, and I said I would book the other two nights myself (I really needed to sleep in the meantime.)

Ahead of me was the long trip on the bus back to Tokyo. Never underestimate the amount of time it takes. Was dropped off at Tokyo station, and then had the task of hailing a cab. It was still raining, I had two suitcases with me and of course when you have two suitcases you have no spare hand with which to hold an umbrella.

I did find a slightly sheltered place to drop my bags though.

What was amusing was a sex worker randomly approaching me during this time and asking if I wanted to come into her shop. She was using English, but had a Korean accent. It’s not like I had time anyway. Nor cash (I had spent the last of that on a drink at the airport.)

I did find a cab and it was the most elite cab ever. The driver spoke fluent English (I found this out after I had given him the destination in Japanese, and actually done a good job of it for a change.) The car had a GPS display half the size of my laptop screen, and it had extremely high detail on it, showing the boundaries of individual properties instead of just roads. So he had no trouble at all, unlike other cabbies during my time there.

By the time I finally got a chance to sleep it was about 01:00 the next day, and I didn’t even get a good night’s sleep.

Day Thirteen: Final Shopping Run, and Kabuki Theatre

Trejkaz — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 14:08:00 +1000

(Finally, some time for more catch-up.)

Day thirteen was my last full day in Tokyo. As there were a number of things people had requested me to find that I hadn’t found yet, I decided to devote the middle of the day to one last shopping spree, as the evening was already covered by a booking to go see a play at the Kabuki theatre.

As the shops I was looking to visit all opened at staggered hours, there was the opportunity to get to each place during the first hour or so of opening time, taking the train between each location in time for the next one to open. This plan would work unless I got hung up on some store or another.

I ran down to Tokyu Hands right before its opening time of 10:00. I had the feeling that they had hanafuda decks because I recalled that they did have a game section with a large collection of other traditional type games. Turns out that they did have the Nintendo brand decks, and what was really lucky is that they had the highest quality sort. I bought four decks, two red and two black. (¥2,100 per deck) I’ll keep one red and one black for myself. :-)

I also bought some other cheesy stuff there which is probably best left unmentioned. No, I didn’t buy a model of a glass of beer, although it was really tempting to do so. And no, I didn’t buy a fake afro either.

Got out of there by 10:15, got to the train station by 10:25 and made it to Akihabara before 11:00 when most of the shops open there. Ran straight to the nearest game store to pick up a copy of Gundam Battle Royale for PSP which XF had asked for (I don’t own a PSP, you see… my Sony boycott is still holding.) Probably paid slightly more than I had to (¥4,300 or so) but time was limited.

Once that was out of the way I was on a mission to try and find a decent cat headband, but I failed it. What I did find in Cospa Akihabara though was another of the white on black Haruhi silhouette t-shirt which Conrad had asked me to get him. (¥2,900) I also found another t-shirt I’d never seen before (¥2,900) which I picked up for myself (I own four Haruhi t-shirts now, if you include the one I custom made.) I hadn’t expected to find such a large collection of t-shirts in what was presumably supposed to be a costume store.

Still unable to find any decent merchandise related to Welcome to the NHK!, nor Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. About time to give up on those.

For some reason I spent more time than necessary in Akihabara (honestly I have no idea where the time goes) so it was 11:45 or so when I finally got back to the station. Caught the train straight back to Shibuya, returning to the hotel to drop off the loot and then heading out to Cospa Shibuya.

Cospa Shibuya is a much more impressive costume shop than Cospa Akihabara. Not what you would expect at all. They had a lot of props and full costume sets for various characters. They also had various animal headbands (kemonomimi, if you must use that term ;-p) but I’m too picky so I didn’t buy anything. They seem to do custom jobs, so that might be one way to go about it… but I’m not desperate.

Eventually returned to the hotel some time around 14:00 and rested my feet.

Left again at around 16:30 for a bit of a mini-tour. It couldn’t really be called a tour because it didn’t involve seeing many places… I only handled it as a tour so that I didn’t need to think about transport and organising dinner (put it down to laziness again.)

We had dinner at a restaurant on the pier, the name of which I have forgotten. The food was good, but not fantastic. The umeshu they served with the food was fantastic, though. :-)

After dinner we moved onto Kabukiza to watch the night’s performance. Due to the screw-up on the previous week I’d been unable to catch a performance without paying extra for better seats, so I was looking forward to it.

Somehow we missed the start of the performance by a bit… we were making good time, too. Anyway, it was an amusing show. I managed to understand half of it, but what made it even easier was the earpiece I had in running an English guide, which didn’t actually translate everything but gave more information about what was going on than we were able to see. Very handy.

After the show, returned to the hotel by train, too buggered to do anything else for the night, so I just spent the rest of the night relaxing.

Day Ten: Could You Please Stop the Rain?

Trejkaz — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:14:00 +1000

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. :-)

Days Eight and Nine: Weekend Cut Short by Tiredness and Rain

Trejkaz — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 22:30:00 +1000

I originally had more plans for the weekend, but it turned out being much more quiet than I’d originally planned.

Went shopping at Tokyu Hands. Impulse bought a bottle rocket launcher kit (¥5,250) including some spare connectors in case I lose one set. I’ve never seen this sort of thing in Australia, although I do hear they exist in the US. This particular kit is Japanese made though, and rather sweet looking when the rocket itself is well built. Should be fun anyway, good way to kill some time that doesn’t involve sitting around doing bugger all, although I guess at the end of the day it’s still a fairly geeky project.

I also found a sweet blue LED clock (shows the date and time on a scrolling blue LED display) for ¥14,000 but decided against it for cost and space requirements. It would be nice… I’m still considering it. I can’t find it on Google anyway.

I was actually looking for laser stuff, but didn’t find a single thing. Did find a lot of interesting random crap though. You can buy the models of food and beer which are displayed out the front of restaurants. The beer looks pretty realistic except that it the bubbles obviously don’t move. :-)

I also finally managed to check out Mandarake here, and their Shibuya branch is rather impressive. They had all sorts of tempting stuff but nothing that I felt the need to buy on the spot.

Saturday night was spent in. I actually checked out several other stores in the area for random stuff, and there were a lot of steps. My legs were killing me…

Sunday morning I went on a mission to Jimbocho to find a specialist game shop called Okuno Karuta (nearer Suidobashi) station which focuses on traditional Japanese games. They had many neat card games. I was actually looking for hanafuda but the sort I was after weren’t to be found. I’m dead certain they’re still around though. I still have a few toy stores which I want to check out for other reasons so it can’t hurt to look around in those too.

What was interesting about Okuno Karuta though was its extensive collection of tarot decks. Really odd, considering that the store is supposed to be focusing on games. Know many interesting games you can play with a tarot deck? :-)

And then at around midday Sunday it started to rain, so doing anything else became a problem.

Food was mostly bought from convenience stores these past two days, partially to save money, but also out of laziness. But you’d be surprised how many noodles a ~¥250 cup of noodles contains – easily 3-4 times the number of noodles of a normal cup. Cheap and effective (I only just managed to eat it all.)

I also found the best rice crackers I’ve ever eaten – they taste like curry. At this rate, why use restaurants? They might only taste slightly better than this, Japanese cup ramen is surprisingly good compared to its western clones and I keep finding better snack food to eat. ;-)

I had planned to go to Ueno today. Perhaps I can still squeeze in a visit there for some other day.

Day Seven: Transfer to Shibuya

Trejkaz — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:39:00 +1000

On day seven, most of the americans returned home, while some stayed in the hotel. However, I had opted to stay in a different hotel which had a somewhat better reputation.

Slept in, checked out (only had to pay for one day of Pay TV in the hotel even though I used it on three days… presumably an error on their part.) Took a cab (~¥3,500) to Shibuya Excel Hotel Tokyu. The excessive cab fare is because the cabs all have doilies on the seats so you pay a doily tax.

Checked my baggage, but check-in time is 14:00 and I got there around 11:00. Walked around for an hour or so but the backpack is packed full so it isn’t a comfortable way to waste time. I’m currently sitting on a bench outside Starbucks in the Mark City Building writing this part of the weblog post. There is no wireless hotspot here, or at least, none that I’ll be able to get into. I see the SSID “0033” again which is the same as the one in the hotel which didn’t even work. And indeed, on trying to connect, it has an error again. Every single hotspot in this city is broken, I swear. They are all run by NTT, the Japanese equivalent of Telstra. This goes a long way toward explaining the problem.

To add insult to injury, the laptop battery was running out so I had to stop writing the entry. So I found some other way to pass a couple of hours, mainly sitting around watching people walk by.

The new hotel kicks some serious butt:

It has 9 megabit (presumably it’s 10 megabit, but the speed test said 9 so I’ll go with that) Internet access, which is free (included in the price of the room, I checked.)
It has enough power outlets to actually plug in everything I need to recharge!
It’s practically directly on top of Shibuya station (the hotel lobby is floor 5, the station is floor 1.)
It has glass elevators! Well, two out of the four elevators are glass. I have taken a video out of one of them, but it isn’t the ideal one. If I ever get in the elevator in the corner directly facing the infamous intersection, then I’ll take videos of it going up and down. :-)
It already has vending machines on every floor, and the vending machine prices are the same as the convenience stores instead of elevated to hotel prices.

The only complaint I have is that my view of the crossing could be better. It looks like the rooms closer to the crossing are the more expensive rooms (they are bigger on the floor map.) Figures.

I’ve already downloaded and watched episode 11 of Welcome to the NHK! and downloaded but not yet watched episode 12 (that can come some time when I truly have nothing to do, like early hours of the morning or really late hours at night.) The show is getting better and better still.

I spent much of the afternoon catching up on posting blog entries as you already know. I also mapped out a few places to go later at night but most of the places I wanted to go were closed to gaijin. ;-)

Eventually went to bed at around 02:30 the next morning. Next day might be shopping again, but I’ll have to do something at night since it’s Saturday. How about ageHa?

Day Six: Free Day: Shop, Shop, Shop Dash!

Trejkaz — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:29:00 +1000

Day six was the free day for the set tour, and even though there were many other options open to me, I decided to go and look for stuff to buy again.

The day went well, details are within. Actually, I’m writing this entry on the evening of day six as I’m catching up on my backlog. But you probably won’t have seen it until a day or two later, because I first need to (a) find some Internet access that doesn’t suck in a country which is allegedly well-connected, and (b) get all the previous entries checked and put up first.

I found the wifi hotspot in the hotel, but my laptop can’t connect to it so it’s as good as broken. Why can’t they just give us an ethernet jack and be done with it? I’d rather pay ¥500 per day for that than the same amount for wifi that doesn’t even connect.

…and as for what happened today…

First, off to Harajuku to properly check out a couple of places which we didn’t get time to see the other day. I got to experience rush hour trains… the pushers were doing their job of pushing people into the cars of the train. I somehow managed to get standing spot in a corner which was stable enough to play DS.

Unfortunately I arrived at 09:00, an hour before anything opens, so I had to waste time, and the only cafe which I found which was open was Starbucks… too bad. After wasting the best part of an hour drinking a coffee very slowly, I went back out to the shops.

I looked through Kiddy Land trying to find suitable plushies but didn’t find anything really good except a supreme Totoro, much bigger than the last one I’d found which was already bigger than the one I actually bought. I could only guess at the price of this biggest Totoro, as it didn’t have a price tag attached (which means it was supremely expensive… perhaps ¥50,000.)

I also checked out Book-Off for a moment but the amount of kanji was already starting to freak me out after only five minutes so I evacuated. It may have had more than books, DVDs and music, but at that point I wasn’t ready to try and find out.

Next, to Shinjuku, where I went to check out the Odakyu department store. After buying nothing at the department store I wandered around for a bit, and found more seedy DVD shops. Actually, the density of seedy shops was increasing quite steeply so I pulled out the GPS and found that I’d made it about half way from the station to the red light district. Time was starting to run out again so I forced myself to make it back to the station and besides, the day was still early (around 11:00 at this point.)

Then to Ikebukuro, which was skipped on the tour the other day due to a lack of time. I checked out the Tobu department store there too, as it is practically grafted onto the station. It looked more or less exactly like the other department store earlier in the day, and I started to wonder if all department stores look the same.

Interestingly though, Japanese department stores don’t put perfumes and cosmetics on the entry level, so it’s quite possible to make it to where you want to go without being assaulted by smelly samples. Also, and this probably goes without saying, but department stores sell alcohol. There was quite a bit of cheap sake available, although I didn’t pick any up at either location because I knew how much I would be walking around for the rest of the day.

The final step on the shopping run was Akihabara (this makes it my third visit there.) Originally I thought I would use this time to buy up doujin comics, but actually it turned out quite differently because I had remembered some other things I wanted to buy.

I spent some time looking through the various electronics shops for a portable media player which could play DIVX, and which had a video output on it. I must have searched at least eight different stores before finally giving up on that one. I found a few units which did handle DIVX, but not one of them had video out capability as well. I will just have to use a more expensive option from back home… I really thought Japan would have had these sorts of things.

Then I ran around looking for games to cross off my list. Apparently, my taste in games is quite similar to the norm, because it took some time to find what I was after. In one of the larger stores I bought a brand new copy of Jump Super Stars (¥4,180), which is still considered a current release even though it came out a very long time ago. I then discovered that both of the other games I was after were no longer current releases, so I would have to start searching second hand stores. I did search several larger second hand game stores, but had no luck. I was heading back to the station when I ran into some of the other people from our tour. We talked for a bit, and then some of them went into Club Sega while I went off to search again (why, I have no idea.) Turned out to be a good idea – on a side street I never would have seen, I found a tiny store which had both of the other titles I was after, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (¥3,980) and Electroplankton (¥3,980). Electroplankton came with cheesy headphones, too. Good to see that second hand game stores are just as big a scam over here as they are back home, price-wise… but it wasn’t like I was able to buy the games new, let alone back home.

I also found more awesome model shops (one of them had extensive collections of model trains, costing immense amounts of money but looking really cool) and quite a few more porno shops. Seriously, you can’t throw a cat in Akiba without hitting a porno shop.

At this point I was nearly dead so I returned to the hotel and did some catch-up on the blogging.

Day Four: Shop, Shop, Shop!

Trejkaz — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:05:00 +1000

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.

Day Three: Anime Mania

Trejkaz — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:59:00 +1000

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.