Exercise mixes, accidental:
I made a happy discovery last night, and repeated it tonight:
If I select “Mosaic.wav - めがねでねっ！” in my PSP’s “Music” folder and let it play sequentially from there, I get a half-hour of Mosaic.wav, Hamada Shouko, SweetS, and Round Table Featuring Nino, with my half-hour bike workout ending just as Groovin’ Magic is starting to come to the end.
It’s a pretty damn energetic set of artists.
By which I mean, if the aggressively-girlish-voices-at-high-volume genre of music is your thing, this is the sort of thing you would like, if you don’t get diabetes first, which is definitely a possibility.
Biking every night, even for only a half hour, is probably a little aggressive, but here’s the thing:
1) I’m officially not letting myself drive to work - it’s only a mile! until I see the scale say, at most, 188.8 in the morning. I need to lose 2.2 pounds for this.
2) It’s coming up on Oregon’s official “cold and wet” season, which is different from our other three seasons in that it’s slightly colder and slightly wetter.
3) The combination of (1 & 2) is awfully motivating.
More Cat Ear Girl
This post gets quite a few hits, and I’m not above pandering to my audience, so when I was looking for a new desktop background and found that I had another “wallpaper, slightly naughty” from the same artist, I thought I would share it with you.
It’s at least a little more interesting than the kvetching about school and exercise, I hope.
OK, now, THIS is shameless pandering.
The concept of “unlockables” in games has been around since, oh, shortly after some bearded guy in California got the bright idea to simulate table tennis with a CRT and a handful of discrete logic ICs.
As far as rewards go, it’s turned out to be way better than the old “high score” concept at keeping us gamers pushing the buttons. It’s that whole positive-reinforcement thing, with shinier outfits, faster cars, or new songs taking the place of food pellets.
Visual novels are really big on the unlockables; pretty much every one I’ve ever seen has a sort of stamp-card menu where you can review significant scenes from the game after you’ve seen them the first time. This also encourages multiple playthroughs, since there’s no way that you’ll see everything on the first pass.
This, though, is a new one on me.
Since visual novels are pretty much choose-your-own-adventure books, it’s really tempting to hit “save” every time you get to a point where you’re asked to make a decision. If you’re trying to go through the visual novel several times to see all the endings, it’s much faster to restore those save points instead of going through the whole story again from scratch.
Enter Omegane Teacher’s way of discouraging this, which is to give you, for every time you start a new game and finish it, your choice of one more style of eyewear for Sakurai Saya to wear:
It’s good to be pandered to, but this might be pushing the limits. 
I have not lost my way.
It has not escaped my attention that, with all the dungeon sieging and dooming and quaking and racing of late, I have become seriously at risk of losing my “pervy fanboy” credentials. The occasional nekomimi-themed wallpaper doesn’t do much to offset that.
With that in mind, I’ve bumped “Lego Batman” and “Bioshock” from their priority slots in the “hey, play this next” queue, in favor of a couple of titles that have more potential for making my wife shake her head in disbelief and resignation.
On the portable front, I’ll be tackling Izuna 2 : The Unemployed Ninja Returns. The first game featured bespectacled shrine maidens, which is pretty much my definition of Quality.
I will admit that I am easily bought. Now I just have to hope that Tsubaki appears in the sequel.
I know, I know, there are other, you know, MAIN characters, but if it’s wrong to play through an entire RPG just because one of the minor NPCs is a cute girl with glasses, I don’t want to be right.
Speaking of which… The other thing I’m trying out is a visual novel called “Omegane Teacher”, which I couldn’t avoid buying. It’s by Studio Miris and, well, it’s a game for boys who like girls with glasses.
Let’s just imagine I’ve raised my hand here.
It is, of course, an almost entirely text-based game presented in a language I don’t understand very well, so I am expecting a certain degree of difficulty. I’m hoping that familiarity with the thematic stereotypes will compensate, somewhat, for the lack of language skills.
For example, it took only knowing a few kanji to get the fact that the main character doesn’t have parents at home because they’re “working overseas”, which is a genre stereotype second only to, I don’t know, the whole “perfectly ordinary school girl turns out to be the only hope for the universe and truth and justice and stuff” stereotype.
So far, I’ve only played for a few minutes, enough to find out that it starts on Valentine’s Day. Traditionally, this is when women give chocolate TO guys in Japan, with the guys expected to reciprocate a month later on “White Day”, and I have in fact already gotten some chocolate from one of the other characters, with a second character obviously wanting to give me chocolate but too embarrassed to do so.
I’m guessing that the story will be based around the period between Valentine’s and White Day, leading up to the main character making a confession on the Day Of Truth and getting either a) lucky or b) rejected.
Just in case you were curious, here’s the character breakdown:
Sakurai Saya:
It wouldn’t make much sense to have a game called “Omegane Teacher” if it didn’t prominently feature a cute teacher with glasses.
Sakazaki Ami:
Every High-School-Guy-Whose-Parents-Are-Working-Overseas needs a Little-Sister-Who’s-Not-Related-By-Blood character. Ami fills that role. She’s also evil - Sure, she spends an entire day slaving away in the kitchen to make you a nice yummy chocolate cake for Valentine’s day, but it’s drugged as part of her - would it be redundant to say evil here? - evil plot to make you fall for her.
Takamisawa Kaoru:
Kaoru is the Childhood Friend Who’s Too Embarrassed To Admit Her Feelings character, rounding out the stereotypes nicely.
I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.
I do not often post wallpaper
…and, in fact, there’s nothing particularly special about this one, it’s just another cute girl-with-nekomimi wallpaper. If you are looking for more, may I kindly direct you to 4chan?
But, I saw the phrase “cat ear girl she is draw girl” in my search referrer log, and it bugged me because I KNEW I’d seen that exact mangled-english phrase on a wallpaper at some point, so I loaded up Picasa and scrolled through my “wallpapers, slightly naughty” folder until I found it.
So, whoever was looking for “cat ear girl she is draw girl”, if you throw that phrase into a search engine again, here you go.
Full disclosure: I do not ACTUALLY have a “wallpapers, slightly naughty” folder, but I think I am going to sort all my wallpaper folders in similar fashion very soon, because the opportunities for coming up with funny folder names are, well, endless.
“Wallpapers, slightly naughty”, “Wallpapers, not terribly naughty at all”, “Wallpapers, actually quite naughty” and so on and so forth.
Akihabara - One Last Time
I’m in that “I’m packed up and don’t want to try to squeeze anything more in” state of things, so I really didn’t need to go back to Akihabara. In truth, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had a directive to go there, but it was also nice to take a last look at it for the trip.
When you leave Akihabara Station, you have to pass through the Maid Gauntlet. This is where girls in maid outfits try to hand you fliers and pretend they’re not thoroughly creeped out by their prospective customers. I guess the girls on flier duty have it easier, really, they’re not the ones who are giving out the massages and reflexology “treatments” and eye exams and guide services and so on. I turned around after I passed the last one and took this shot, facing back down the gauntlet. Unfortunately, apart from the one in foreground, you really don’t get the effect - maybe you can see a frilly headband here and there, but the mass of people kind of obscures the whole thing.
Those guide services I mentioned, that’s taken directly from a flier that got handed me. For Y2000 every 30 minutes, you can have your own personal maid to go on a “date” with you - she’ll go shopping with you, do karaoke, have dinner with you “and so forth”.
I’m guessing that the “and so forth” stops well within the realm of the tame, at least, for those prices. I saw a couple of guys who obviously considered it a reasonable fee to have a girl in a maid outfit hanging off their arm, and they looked happy enough; who am I to criticize?
I wound up in an arcade because I wanted to find an Otomedius machine. This is a shooter that’s gotten plenty of coverage on western game sites, because it combines Gradius gameplay with Yoshizaki Mine character designs.
Two minute’s googling would turn you up plenty of examples, but I went to the trouble of ignoring a clearly posted - in clear, correct English, even - NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign to give you this picture of an advertising standee:
I played through the first three stages before getting a game over sort of screen - I suspect it’s because I had to use a continue to get through the third stage and that if I’d managed it without continues I would have gotten more stages, or something.
Ignoring the cute girl factor for the moment, it’s a lot of fun, a 2.5D sort of horizontal shooter affair with lots of 3D characters that move between the backgrounds and the foreground play. The enemies trend towards the weird - lots of penguins, for some reason - and the bosses are appropriately massive screen-filling affairs with glowing weak points that shout “shoot here!”
It’s coming out for the Xbox 360, at least in Japan. It had better see a US release, damnit.
I had a guy hanging over my shoulder waiting for a go at the machine, so i bid it a sad farewell and went off in search of small things that I could stuff into niches in my suitcase and use up my small change on.
I happened across a bank of capsule toy vending machines; these are evil soul-sucking devices that take your yen and give you pretty much exactly every possible toy except the one you want. The first time I was in Japan, I sunk probably twenty bucks into one that had Gainax characters in it, trying for a Noriko from Gunbuster with no luck. After I gave up, my wife - who had no vested interest in ANY of the characters, an important point - put money into the same machine and a Noriko popped out, first try.
I digress. The particular capsule toy vending machine that caught my eye was a Haruhi-characters-in-nekomimi capsule toy vending machine.
I have some simple rules about nekomimi: They’re a simple way to add moe factor to an anime or game character, and it’s generally successful. When a real, live human tries to pull off the look, though, it has something of the effect that a bright red patch has on a frog: It says, “Poison here. Avoid.”
This doesn’t apply to the hard-working staff at Cafe With Cat, however.
But there I go digressing again. Anyway, I saw this machine, and it offered up the option of Haruhi, Nagato, Mikuru, or Tsuraya-san figures in nekomimi.
Assuming I’d get a Tsuruya-san, I put in my Y300.
Out popped a Haruhi. Not bad, I thought to myself, and here I have Y900 left in Y100 coins, let’s see what else comes out.
The second and third were also Haruhis.
While I guess that’s better than three Tsuruya-sans, a man only needs one of these. Arguably he does not even need one, but that goes down that whole road that leads to admitting that I don’t NEED ninety percent of the stuff I own:
Anyway, I had Y300 left and was thinking very unkind thoughts towards the evil machine by this point. Fortunately the fourth round popped out a different character; a Nagato this time, and I beat a hasty retreat.
On the way back to the hotel, there was a nice fog effect around Tokyo Tower, so here’s a shot of that. They’ll be turning off the lights on Tokyo Tower and several other big tourist attractions from tomorrow through the 7th of July, so tonight was the last night that it’ll be lit up for a while.
Thus endeth my final night in Tokyo.
Stalking Miyazaki
I needed something to do today, on my last full day in Japan.
I did get a task from my wife - “go buy me a new gadget”, which was not a simple task, but one which I have accomplished, the new gadget even being something she’s probably forgotten she asked for, and also something that she’ll just have to wait until I get home to find out about.
I needed something more challenging. Something like finding the front door of Japan’s most prestigious anime studio, Studio Ghibli.
The wikipedia entry for Koganei, Tokyo, says the following:
“The famous Studio Ghibli has its studio near the Higashi-koganei station.”
I can now report that this is 100% true. I can also attest to the fact that it is incredibly well hidden - I had the address and it still took me three hours to find it. Granted, it took me two hours of wandering before I even got in the right neighborhood - Japanese street layouts not being what you’d call intuitive - but even once I was in the right neighborhood, on the right block, I still walked past it twice.
The neighborhood around Studio Ghibli is, well, exactly what I would expect. It’s full of small backyard farms and playgrounds, with a few tiny apartment buildings. Some of the streets have dirt paths, under trees, instead of sidewalks, and you don’t have to go too far to find a small river with the biggest damned koi I have ever seen.
It’s IN Tokyo, but it feels incredibly rural.
Its presence is announced by the following small sign:
I didn’t see this sign until after I’d decided that the building it was in front of MUST be the right one, by the process of eliminating all other buildings in the area as possibilities. Here’s what the front door of Studio Ghibli looks like:
This does not exactly leap out at you when you’re passing by; it hides behind foliage. It looks more like a quiet private residence whose inhabitant loves gardening.
Here’s a corner view:
If you’re standing in front of the building, looking in to the lobby, you can see more signs that you’re in the right place - a giant nekobus, a hanging sign that looks taken straight from the window of Guchokipanya bakery, framed animation cels on the walls…
I used to drive past Disney Feature Animation, in Los Angeles, on the way home from work. That building is huge, capped with a massive wizard’s cap from Fantasia - you can see it for miles, but to get to it you’d have to pass through gates and armed security and all manner of measures designed to keep the riff-raff away from the studio.
Getting into Studio Ghibli would involve swinging open a small cast-iron gate and knocking on the front door.
Somehow, that was enough to keep me politely at bay; I took my photos and left.
If you ever i feel like repeating this little pilgramage, I will say this to you, because half the fun of hidden places is in the finding of them:
“The famous Studio Ghibli has its studio near the Higashi-koganei station.”
In which, our hero tempts fate.
There are plenty of ways one can tempt fate.
The most common is to precede any action with the phrase “Hey, y’all, watch this.”
To my credit, I didn’t do that.
On the other hand, I did blindly assert to my wife that finding her the soundtrack for the anime “Twelve Kingdoms” would be NO problem in Tokyo.
I may have, in fact, scoffed just a little bit at the suggestion that I might have difficulty.
I set out this morning with the intention of finding that for her, and getting some shopping in along the way. Small surprise there, I’m sure.
The smart shopper in Tokyo is aided by the existence of numerous “Recycle Shops”, basically operations that deal in used goods - CDs, manga, DVDs, toys, and so on. If you’re a little behind the cutting edge of fandom - as I typically am - you can pick up last year’s Hot Must Have Items for a quarter to a half of their original price.
This has its downside - nothing like seeing stuff you paid full price for selling for peanuts - but its upside as well - feeling justified in having waited to get something as you pick it up for, as mentioned, peanuts.
Particularly enjoyable was the CD recycle shop in Nakano Broadway that was selling several bins of anime soundtracks for Y300 each - or Y300 for 3, essentially a “buy one get two free” sale. It was mostly mid-90s anime and voice actor CDs, with a particularly strong emphasis on Hayashibara Megumi albums. I’m a fan, I stocked up.
That was also the first place I checked for the Twelve Kingdoms soundtrack. They didn’t have it, used or new, but I wasn’t worried too much because Mandarake has a huge CD and DVD shop in the same building.
I struck out at Mandarake, too.
I was starting to build up a nice bundle of Mosaic.wav and Kotoko albums for me, but I was going to feel really ashamed if I went all the way to Tokyo and couldn’t deliver the goods for my wife.
It was time for the gloves to come off. I went back to Akihabara.
K-Books didn’t have the soundtrack. Neither did Liberty, or Trader, or Gamers, or a bunch of other small stores that I tried. I was even checking the “rare items” showcases, where these places show off stuff you don’t really WANT to pay for, but might be forced to pay for.
I was a broken, defeated man, and heading to get some dinner, when I passed the Akihabara branch of Animate. Looking at their store directory, I saw “Anime CDs - Sixth Floor.”
I thought to myself, do I really feel up to climbing to the sixth floor to be disappointed again?
Then I thought about going home and saying “Hey, I couldn’t find the ONE LITTLE THING you asked for, but look at all this stuff I got for me!”
And I hit the stairs.
Animate, at least, had a divider in their CD section for Twelve Kingdoms, but it didn’t look like they had the soundtrack. They had a drama album, and something that looked like an image album, but that was it.
Then I realized that there was a small spacer next to the divider, and that, upon pulling it off the shelf, it said, essentially, “for the Twelve Kingdoms soundtrack, take this to the register.”
I did this, and upon doing so the reason I’d had so damn much trouble finding the soundtrack was revealed.
For whatever ungodly reason, they packaged the thing in a DVD keep case. I shouldn’t have been looking in the “rare” sections of CD shops, I should have been looking on whatever shelf they kept CDs in weird packaging. I would still probably have looked right past it - anime DVDs are hideously expensive in Japan, so for sanity’s sake I tend to gloss right over them.
Nonetheless, my quest ended on a high note.
Then I went to Cafe Mai:lish for dinner. There wasn’t a line today, so I got to walk right in.
I may have stared a bit at the girl who greeted me as I entered, I’m sure they kind of expect that, but I wasn’t staring out of lechery - I was staring because she was wearing some sort of weird purple dress trimmed with fake fur.
I realized very quickly that it was a theme day - no maid outfits today. All the staff was in Idolmaster cosplay outfits and, of course, the classical music that they usually play was replaced with Idolmaster music.
I actually LIKE the music from Idolmaster, but it did kind of spoil the effect the place usually has, which is sort of an oasis in the middle of Akihabara where you can recuperate from the madness. Having the staff in cosplay mode brought the madness right on inside.
Also, there wasn’t a Ritsuko, which was unforgivable.
Oh, and some outfits - purple things with fake fur trim, for example - should be left in the realm of the virtual. For sanity’s sake.
No pictures today. I’ve been to Akihabara and Nakano Broadway on previous trips, I didn’t think I needed to spend more memory card space on them. Nothing much has changed. The Asobit City near the station seems to have shut down, but their other branch is still there. I thought for a little bit that the Messe Sanoh doujin-soft shop had closed, too, which would have been a disappointment, but I finally found it a couple of blocks away from where I thought it should have been.
Tomorrow my father comes to Tokyo and I get to show him around. I think I’ll spare him the maid/cosplay cafe experience, or perhaps I’ll spare the maid/cosplay cafes the “my father” experience. Either way.
Kochi Ramblings
Kochi reminds me a lot of Eugene, the town I grew up in. In certain aspects, anyway. Both are on the small side, but large enough that the outside world knows about them - while you don’t have access to EVERYTHING you’d have in a larger city, you’re not completely bereft of options.
They’re both also small enough that you can get most anywhere on foot, or by bus if you don’t feel like walking. Kochi has the advantage of having a streetcar in addition to the bus system, which is dreadfully convenient.
Oh, and both start to shut down around six o’clock and are mostly dead by nine.
But, during the day anyway, Kochi is actually quite a busy place. After checking out of my hotel and stowing my backpack at the JR station, I went exploring.
Now, it’s worth mentioning here that my initial exposure to Kochi came from watching Umi Ga Kikoeru, one of the Studio Ghibli movies that I don’t think has been released in the US yet. Much of the movie focuses on the differences between Kochi people and a Tokyo native who’s forced to live there - and hates it, of course, because it’s so backwards and everyone talks weird there.
Having seen plenty of Tokyo now, I wanted to see somewhere completely different: Kochi fit the description nicely.
The Japanese are not big into superstores, which is a good thing, because Kochi is the sort of town that they drop a Wal-Mart into the middle of and watch all the local merchants die. It has several shopping districts, all full of the sort of small-but-intensely-specialized shops that typify Japan - as an example: A shop that only sells towels.
The Japanese also aren’t big into food courts; the restaurants are mixed right in with the stores. Dozens of tiny restaurants, most selling their own little food specialty, with plenty of competition for food of any type - nothing like American malls, where one fast food joint will have a monopoly on burgers, another a monopoly on tacos, and so on.
End result: The shopping streets are busy, crowded, noisy, confusing, and all-around fun. I might think differently if I had to try to make sense of them in order to buy life essentials - but, as a tourist, I quite enjoy wandering them.
Actually, if you need anything ESSENTIAL, a combini will probably carry it - if you just need a towel, right now, for whatever reason, a combini will hook you up with a plain, servicable white towel without any trouble.
But I digress. Kochi has several of these shopping districts and they were fun to explore.
I wasn’t really expecting to see anything fanboy oriented in Kochi, so it was a bit of a surprise to run into a nicely-stocked Animate. I say nicely-stocked even though I didn’t buy anything: one of the important lessons I’ve learned travelling around Japan with a backpack is that you have to carry everything you buy IN the backpack.
Also, I blew half my shopping budget on day 2 when I bought the EEE, so I’m being good.
To a point.
Did I just digress again? My apologies.
Anyway, one of the streets I was rambling down opened out into a sort of plaza with an oddly shaped building in the middle of it - I wasn’t sure what it was, but it looked funky and it drew me close.
It turned out to be - and I think it’s only this through the end of August, I don’t think that this is a permanent exhibition - the “Treasure Island of Kaiyodo” exhibition.
Kaiyodo being a manufacturer of plastic models and super-detailed action figures and, in general, many very cool things that I won’t ever own.
This, I did not expect to find in Kochi.
After a moment’s confusion where I tried to walk into the exhibit hall without paying - I didn’t yet realize what I’d walked into and thought it was just a store - I got permission to take photographs and spent a happy 40 minutes or so wandering through the exhibits taking pictures of, well, action figures. Yeah, I dropped Y500 so I could wander around and photograph toys. Anyone who has a problem with that, you’re not My People anyway.
There was also a store, thoughtfully stocked with many of the VERY SAME action figures from the exhibits - how peculiar, right? - in addition to some Kaiyodo merchandise only available at the exhibition. I passed on the Y4700 Monsieur Bome repaint figures: I’m not crazy, also the whole backpack thing.
One of the locations semi-prominently featured in Umi Ga Kikoeru is the waterfront in Kochi. I couldn’t figure out where this was, since it wasn’t on the tourist-centric map I got from the hotel. Kochi is also a bit inland, so I came to the conclusion that the characters must have been in a neighboring town in those scenes, or something.
Then I passed a sign that said “Kochi Port - 3km” at just about the same time a streetcar pulled up facing in the direction of the arrow on the sign.
I tell you, life works in mysterious ways.
For the record: When you are boarding a streetcar in Kochi, you get on through the REAR entrance and you pay when you are getting OFF. In addition, if you don’t have exact change, there’s a small change exchanger up by the driver, directly to the left of the slot you drop payment in to. I mention these things in the small hope that they may be helpful to someone else someday, probably under quite peculiar circumstances.
Or, if you’re me, you get on board through the wrong door, ask how much the fare is, try to hand it directly to the attendant, get told to put it in the small change exchanger because you’re trying to pay Y200 for a Y190 fare, get exact change that way, try to hand it to the attendant, get the fare slot pointed out to you, try to pay immediately and get met with a hand physically imposed between your change and the fare slot and a curt “pay later” instruction.
ANYWAY. For the record, on the streetcar BACK, I acquited myself better.
I got to Kochi port and wasn’t quite sure what to do next - I mean, just because movie characters can stroll on down to the waterfront doesn’t mean that you can do it in real life, especially not in the US where casually walking around a port with a camera out would almost certainly get you arrested and beaten.
Then I saw a bunch of people fishing off a dock and figured that it was probably OK to go wandering around over there.
If you need a good antidote to the high-speed life, I strongly recommend travelling to Kochi, in mid-June, on a day with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-70s, and spending some time standing on the docks watching people fish and enjoying an extremely refreshing breeze.
I recognize, having said that, that it’s not exactly a VIABLE stress cure if you don’t already happen to be on Shikoku or if it’s not June, but go for it anyway.
It took some effort to pull myself away and head back into town to look for lunch. I never did get any katsuo no tataki, the mostly-raw tuna specialty I was talking about yesterday, it turned out to be another of those regional specialities that’s not actually all that common. The one place I DID find advertising it was apparently only open for dinner; I’d walked past it the previous night and it had been brightly lit up and quite lively looking, during the day it was locked down tight.
Oh, and it also had a big whale sign, which being Japan probably wasn’t just for looks.
Attention, Japan: Whales are friends, not food.
No, really, GUYS.
I wound up eating at the station before hopping the train back to Okayama and then switching to a Shinkansen for Tokyo. Done directly like this, instead of splitting it over a couple of days and exploring as I go, it means that I lose a good seven hours right in the middle of one of my vacation days - I should take this personally, but somehow I’m quite relaxed about it.
I found the Momotaro statue while I was switching trains in Okayama, anyway, this is a meeting-people landmark in much the same way that Hachiko is in Shibuya, or so I’m told. Momotaro was mostly covered with pigeons, which is a sad fate but one that befalls all statues.
Oh, Kochi prefecture is apparently the birthplace of Anpanman, Japan’s favorite edible superhero, so some of the local trains are covered in Anpanman characters. Here’s one that happened to stop in front of me while I waited for my train back to Okayama.
It’s funny; writing all of the above, I expected the return to Tokyo to be jarring. Instead, it was surprisingly comforting - it’s nice to have half the signs in English, it’s nice not to stand out too much as a foreigner, and I actually kind of like the crowds - even at 10PM, people are still on the move, restaurants and businesses are still open, the place feels alive.
What a way to wake up…
Waking up in a strange bed is a pretty unsettling moment.
Waking up in a strange bed in Tokyo when you’re not expecting it is really quite terrifying.
My morning started like that, with a bit of sheer “where the hell am I?” panic. It’s gotten better, though.
The flight to Tokyo, now that I’m fully aware of where I am and have spent a full day roaming the city, was pretty decent. I’m getting used to the process: I get up godawful early to make a plane, spend an hour or two getting to Seattle or San Francisco, spend several hours reflecting on Douglas Adam’s “It is no coincidence that no language on earth has ever created the phrase “Pretty as an airport”", and then spend 9 to 11 hours on another plane slowly grinding its way across the Pacific.
It’s important to get on the plane and fall asleep pretty much immediately; this makes it so you’re almost on Tokyo time when you get there.
Just as I’m getting used to the flight, Japan seems to be getting used to me. The customs inspector flipped through my passport, commented on the multiple entry visas, and wished me a friendly “welcome back”, the front desk guy at the hotel thanked me for returning and didn’t even ask if I needed help finding the room.
The JR pass I bought for this trip is turning out to have been an awesome investment, by the way. It means slight delays at every station - I have to use the single manned ticket gate and can’t whip through the automatic turnstiles with my Suica - but it’s saved me Y5000 at least in train fare so far, and I got to take the Narita Express in from the airport instead of the slow train.
Getting to the hotel around 6PM last night, I had the bright idea of trying to go out and do stuff; this might have been a good idea if I hadn’t also squeezed in a much-needed bath and change of clothes. By the time I got to Ikebukuro, it was after 8PM and places were starting to shut down. I grabbed a chicken curry rice omelet and trudged back to the hotel to get some rest.
This morning started with the aforementioned moment of sheer terror, and as also aforementioned it got better.
First, I went off to Ginza to visit the Sony Building, which was full of shiny things I could not buy. The few things they DO offer for sale in their store there are all “overseas” versions - basically the same stuff I could get at a Sony store in the US. Very disappointing from a buy-stuff perspective, less disappointing from a “wow, neat shiny things” perspective. I got to watch a terribly perky saleswoman demonstrate a Rolly, and I am befuddled as to its popularity.
Then I went back to Ikebukuro, where all the stores were open, and hit up the Uniqlo for a bunch of T-shirts. Damnit, I put in an awful lot of effort to get myself down to the weight where I COULD wear a Japanese XL size, I’m going to buy some shirts. Uniqlo has a cool thing going where they have shirts based on Shonen Jump manga, so I wound up with a lot of shirts.
I thought about going into the Ikebukuro Animate, but then I walked over to the street it’s on.
The girls have taken over. That is to say, that part of town has been Otome Road for a while now, but when I was there a year ago, it was at least partially boy-themed stores mixed in with the girl-oriented stores.
It’s all BL and yaoi now, and the hordes of teenage Japanese girls crowding into the shops were, well, they were a MULTITUDE. Saturday being a school half-day, most of them were wearing their uniforms; this would have been a fantasy-fulfilling vision if it weren’t for, well, knowing what they were there to buy.
I made a quick exit. I’m all for equality in access to naughty manga, but actually seeing equality in action was more than a little intimidating.
I did get a cool sticker in Tokyu Hands. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually put it on anything, though. Nobody’s likely to be able to read it, and constantly having to explain what it says would take the humor right out of it.
So, Ginza and Ikebukuro visited, it was off to the first of Japan’s Three Holy Places: Akihabara.
My eternally suffering wife puts up with an awful lot, and her husband trotting halfway around the world to the Land of Fanboy Temptation is just one of the things she has to deal with. Her exact words were “don’t buy too many gadgets”, and my reply was “I won’t buy TOO MANY gadgets.”
I intended to buy one of the Crimson Red PSPs I saw on Kotaku a few months ago, and it turns out that this was surprisingly difficult, even in Akihabara.
Put this way: I saw multiple “Crisis Core” PSPs for sale, and that was a famously limited edition. I didn’t see a single red PSP.
The Crisis Core PSPs were in the $300 range. Presumably the red ones, if they could be found, would be that much or more. That’s a lot just to get another PSP. I was half thinking that I might be able to get out of Akihabara without breaking the bank.
Then I thought to myself “Hey, the hotel has free internet access and an ethernet jack in every room. Wouldn’t it be cool to pick up a cheap used laptop and blog from Japan?”
Used laptops are pretty available and pretty cheap in Akihabara; if you don’t mind that they have no warranty whatsoever and are probably going to have a completely dead battery, you can pick one up for under $200. It was looking like I’d had a pretty good idea.
Then I walked by a display for the Asus EEE, and, well, I was lost. I hadn’t gotten a chance to use one in person before, so I hadn’t gotten to see how cute it was and how surprisingly decent the keyboard and touchpad were.
I wound up dropping roughly $400 on the EEE. At least it runs Windows XP home and they include a USB optical mouse and 4GB SDHC card in that price, a US machine for the same amount comes with Linux and no accessories.
Oh, and they offer it in pink, but the last shreds of my manhood surfaced just in time to make me buy a white one.
I wanted to pay a return visit to Mai:lish, a maid cafe in Akihabara that’s remarkably foreigner-friendly, but they had a heck of a queue to get in.
I wound up, instead, at Cafe With Cat, the nekomimi-maid-themed restaurant in Comic Toranoana. Perv factor: very high. Food (I had beef curry): Not bad.
They serve it with your rice molded into the shape of a valentine heart, which I would call a touch over the top if it weren’t being served by a girl in a frilly maid outfit with cat ears. Really, once you’re there, there’s no more “over the top” to go to.
No pictures of the staff, sorry. You’ll just have to go there for the experience.
Oh, both Comic Toranoana AND the Akihabara Mandarake are pretty much given over to the girl themed doujinshi. So you have this male-fantasy-fulfillment cafe on the second floor of a building that mostly caters to girls now. It’s a little odd.
On the way out of Toranoana and headed back to the station, I realized that the crowd on the sidewalk was considerably heavier than normal, and then I realized that I was approaching the memorial that’s been set up for the victims of last weekend’s… I don’t know what to call it. Tragedy? That’s an over-used word. Sheer damned craziness is a better term; the whole thing is so non-Japanese that it doesn’t seem possible.
The memorial is a huge mound of bouquets and the crowd of people stopping to offer prayers is pretty intense, made the more so because the nearby shops seem to have considerably turned down the volume out of respect; it’s a small area of quiet and contemplation in the middle of the neon hurricane that is Akihabara.
I didn’t expect to walk past it and doing so shook me up a little. It’s not enough to make me feel unsafe here; this is still Japan after all, but I hope it stops here and that nobody decides to go copycat.
OK, serious moment over. Tomorrow I’m going to take full advantage of this JR pass and head off in the direction of Japan’s SECOND Holy Place: Osu in Nagoya. The shinkansen northbound is still out of service from this morning’s earthquake, but I’m assured that southbound is running just fine.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
