Let’s start in December of 2006.  I drove up to Seattle to take my very first crack at the JLPT, and while I was there I met up with a friend and went to the Books Kinokuniya inside Seattle’s Uwajimaya.  It’s a pretty good Books Kinokuniya, by the way, much bigger than the fairly anemic one in Beaverton and possibly even better than the one I used to go to in Los Angeles.

Anyway, while I was there, I bought a Full Metal Alchemist calendar as a Christmas present for my wife, and I bought a couple of artbooks for me.

One of them was Etsu’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” artbook, cover reproduced below:

The title is Truth In Advertising, and since Truth is Beauty, this represents a Thing of Beauty.  Irrefutable logic, there.

It’s actually a (as such things go) fairly classy book, with no nudity.  Cute girls with glasses are well represented:

Some time later, I found a wallpaper that featured the cover image from “Girls, Girls, Girls”, but with the background text chopped out and replaced with a mansion (or maybe restaurant?) background.  Which made sense considering the whole maid thing, I suppose.  Anyway, I thought it looked a lot better that way.

I put it up on my desktop for the sole reason of making my wife roll her eyes when she walked by the computer, and I was actually a little disappointed when I DIDN’T get an eye roll, or even a sigh of resignation.  Apparently she’d become immune.

She did say that the girl on the left looked decidedly uncomfortable, and I have to admit that she has a point

I left it as my desktop wallpaper for a while, failed to elicit any eye rolls, and then changed it out, defeated.

Anyway, that’s not the point I meant to arrive at.  The point I DID mean to arrive at was that I ran into the same image when looking for a wallpaper recently and it was tagged “symmetrical docking”, which I thought was just the goofiest, and possibly greatest, descriptive term ever derived by man.

So I threw “symmetrical docking” at Google Image Search just to see what would come back, and it brought me to One Man’s Quest To Assemble Images Of Girls Standing Too Close Together.

It truly warms the heart to see devotion to a cause.

(Actually, he has a fair number of well-written articles on “serious” topics like analog synthesizers and astronomy mixed in with the cheesecake, so don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat blog, I just came to it down a sordid path.)

“Those minor things aside, serious thumbs up. It’s challenging, it’s satisfying, and – tragic lack of catgirls aside – it’s awfully pretty.”

Well, how was I supposed to know about Mawra?

So, really, pretty much the perfect game.

I wasn’t able to play for about 3 weeks – I had that much homework, and being sick for a week and having a hard drive crash didn’t help – but now that I’m back to it, it continues to entertain.

I’m unfortunately stuck on a – sigh – protect mission, where I have to get an incredible pansy of an NPC to a set point in 20 turns, and if he takes a single hit he’s pretty much dead for sure.

I got quite close once, and then the game decided that, since I’d killed almost every enemy in the level, I needed to have six reinforcements show up, one of them almost on top of the NPC I need to protect.

Still, I will persevere.

It’s at least a little more interesting than the kvetching about school and exercise, I hope.

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.

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.

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.

The console mahjong scene has gotten pretty quiet since the glory days of the Saturn -I don’t think it’s so much that the market for scantily clad anime-style girls has gotten any smaller in the intervening years, it’s more that the big mahjong franchises have moved to the PC where there’s less censorship.

So, modern games are pretty few and far between, but I do see the occasional release, and that brings me, in a rather awkward way, to the rather awkwardly named Chu~Kana Janshi Tenho Painyan Remix.

This is a remake of a PS2 game from a couple of years back, which I think is related to the Suchie Pai series somehow. It’s got the Kenichi Sonoda character designs, it’s got Kanai Mika doing the voice of the main character, I don’t know if it actually fits in to the Suchie Pai universe anywhere but it’s at least a spiritual sequel.

The plot, as best as I can interpret it, involves a rather bratty mahjong master who wants to collect a bunch of mystical stones for the purpose of defending the world from a menace, the nature of which may or may not be specified, but there’s an awful lot of kanji I don’t recognize and really it’s not that important.

You meet people, who are almost all cute, young, and busty, you have a conversation, you play mahjong with them, and when you win you unleash an energy attack that co-incidentally blows most of their clothing to shreds so you can properly search them for these mystical stones.

No naughty bits are exposed, this being a DS game and all that.

Then you explain WHY you had take their mystical stone, they see the light, team up with you and you go off to search for more of the mystical stones together.

Like I said, the plot’s really not that important. It’s mahjong with a dose of cheesecake and Suchie-pai-style over-the-top special attacks and powerups.

Oh, and there’s a Tanuki girl and a seven-tailed-fox-girl in it, which aren’t exactly common moe’ style characters, so it gets some points there.

On the other hand, there’s really no reason to play through it more than once, because there seems to only be one path through the story, and the power-ups and special attacks kind of detract from the actual playing mahjong, so I can’t really recommend it unless you’re a big Kenichi Sonoda fan or you’re enough of a mahjong fanboy that you’ll try anything.

Unfortunately, that describes me pretty well.

Update:  This post gets an awful lot of hits for “Tanuki Girls” and “Cute Tanuki”, so, for those of you who came here looking for that, here’s a scan of Tanuko’s character page from the manual.  Knock yerself out.

Brave Story remains quite enjoyable.  It’s just gotten to the “OK! You can go anywhere in the world now, and there are all these little side quests and optional bosses to fight!” stage, which is where a lot of RPGs start to drag. Hopefully this won’t be one of those, but I’m a little bit nervous.

Oh, and one little thing about the damn Blue Dragon in Lanka Forest: Either I was supposed to do a WHOLE lot of leveling up before going after him, or he is a Grade A Number One Cheap Sumbitch.

Still got him. Took three tries though.

From the searches that bring people to this site – I’m not alone here.  People come here looking for anime girls with cat ears, or ninjas, or ninja girls, or anime ninja girls with cat ears.  If you’ve been brought here by a similar search, well, you are in good company.

Oddly enough, though, after you filter through the list of moe traits, the next most popular thing that brings people here is “Shadow of the Colossus”.  All I can say to that is that people have excellent taste in games.

In the spirit of pandering, I wanted to show off a character good that I bought at Nakano Broadway back in August, and then we can count all the groups it panders to together.

So, let’s see:

You’ve got your Haruhi fans.  And WE ARE LEGION.  This caters to us pretty well.  It’s got Haruhi, Mikuru, Yuki, AND Tsuruya-san, so it’s not like anyone’s favorite character is being left out… Well, unless your favorite character isn’t one of those four.  Hmm.  It’s got a good chance of not leaving anyone’s favorite character out, anyway.

You’ve got your nekomimi fans covered here, too, and your cosplay fans.

Unfortunately, it’s the post-glasses Nagato Yuki, so no pandering to us meganeko-lovers.  They missed a chance there.

And I suppose it also caters to anyone who just likes putting together jigsaw puzzles.  Who doesn’t like to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon putting together a jigsaw puzzle?   This doesn’t even look like a terribly difficult one. The orange background might be a little dicey, I guess.

So this gets a solid B+ on the pandering scale and still manages to stay on the good side of decency.  You could have this half-completed on a card table and have people over without fear of more than a raised eyebrow.

All that, and it was marked down to 800 Yen.

I’m not a big comics fan, and not a habitual con-goer, but I tagged along anyway. We collected a third friend, who’s recently gone through a major comic book burnout, on the way.

So, count so far: Three people, of whom only one actually buys comics on a regular basis.

I haven’t been to the local comic book show in quite a while – quite possibly not since 1995. The venue hasn’t changed much – it’s still a bunch of folding tables laid out in the dungeon-like basement of the local convention center, and the overall air of “please buy this crap so I don’t have to carry it home” hasn’t changed much, either. I found that I could get offered an instant discount at most tables just by picking something up, looking at it, and putting it back down.

I had to buy SOMETHING after paying seven bucks to walk in the door, and I didn’t really feel like comics shopping, so I wound up buying a couple of Monsieur Bome figures.

One I quite like:

The Bome figures have been around for quite some while, and this “toramusume” is the second in the series. It might be a little overdone in terms of sheer number of moe fetishes, but I thought it was a really well made figure. Detailed, a neat dynamic pose, and surprisingly stable thanks to a solid base and some clever balance work.

Then there’s this:

Misty May is Gainax’s over-the-top parody of magical girls show heroines, as seen in Otaku no Video, and since I was going on about Otaku no Video a few days ago, I felt compelled to buy this figure when I saw it.

Having brought it home and put it on the shelf, though, I’m kind of regretting that. It’s a well made figure, sure, but, well, the pose is, uh, well, I’m actually a little ashamed to have it on display. I didn’t think that possible, but apparently even I have my limits.