I got fan mail.
So, I’ve done a Japan trip two summers in a row now, and the first time I got a request passed to me from one of my wife’s co-workers. She wanted some Japanese Pokemon cards for her 5 year old son.
These weren’t that hard to find, so I picked him up two packs of trading cards and passed them to him through my wife. I heard back that he’d liked them a lot.
This year, I was sitting in the hotel on a Sunday morning watching morning TV programs and getting ready to head out to Comiket.
“Pokemon Sunday” came on. This seems to be a live action variety show featuring bouncy, energetic hosts and the voices of assorted Pokemon. I really can’t tell you more than that - I am not familiar with the series. Let me put it this way - I can, 9 times out of 10, accurately identify Pikachu.
However, it was kind of fun to watch in a “I have no idea what’s going on, but man, those Japanese are good at getting their merchandising hooks into kids” way.
The first half of it seemed to be a presentation about the Tokyo Pokemon Center and all the stuff you could buy there. Oh, and also you could trade Pokemon with people. But mostly it was “Hey, look at all the cool stuff you can buy and how it ties into the new movie.”
At the end of the sales pitch program, they gave directions to the place, and I was a bit shocked to realize that it was apparently a 2 minute walk from the same train station I was taking to go everywhere else in Tokyo. With it being that close, I decided that I would check it out and - here’s the justification - I’d get my wife’s coworker’s kid some new Pokemon stuff, since I’d just watched a presentation on what the new hot stuff was and in theory I’d be helping him trump American first graders by having that stuff before they did.
So: Plan of attack. I stopped preparing for Comiket and walked over to the station. Then I picked the first small child I saw:
And I followed him and his father. I figured this was the easiest way to actually find the place.
They led me right to it, just before the doors opened. The line wasn’t too bad - I was maybe the 50th person in line. The rest of the line was entirely made up of small children and their parents. I felt a bit, I don’t know, conspicuous.
Inside was, um, a bit mad. I didn’t want to look too creepy, so I didn’t take photos, but it was a sea of kids dragging their parents from display to display.
I picked up about 3000 yen worth of trinkets - a couple of packs of the latest trading card series, a “Monster Ball” pokeball full of, I am sure, yummy candy, and a couple of pins. I figured, well, I’m here, I’ll get a pin for myself and one for this kid.
Then I fought my way to the cash registers - they put everything in a nice green Pokemon Center bag with a turtle-looking thing on it and added some free stickers - paid, and ran, not quite screaming. I found it kind of interesting that the Pokemon Center accepts Suica as a payment method. This is basically like being able to use your bus pass to buy stuff. If Japanese kids didn’t ride the train for free, I suspect that a lot of them would be blowing the month’s bus money at this place.
I got back to this fine country, took my pin out of the bag, and handed the rest to my wife with instructions to deliver it.
A few days later, I got this back. Apparently, while he had to ask his mom for help with spelling, the idea to write it and all the words were his own. I’m a bitter, cynical guy a lot of the time, but I found it cute enough to share with you all.
So - side benefit to my latest crazy trip to Japan: I made a kid’s day. I like that.
A three…hour…tour…
OK, no. It’s actually about 45 minutes, not three hours, by river boat from Asakusa from Odaiba, but what really counts isn’t how long it takes but how you’re getting there.
This lovely thing is the Himiko, designed by Leiji Matsumoto, and probably the coolest looking vehicle of any type I have ever enjoyed a ride in.
It’s a limited express boat, so it only stops at Asakusa, Daiba, and Toyosu. This is it approaching the Asakusa pier.
Apparently at night it’s all illuminated and glowey, which is possibly the only thing that could make it look cooler.
Once you’re onboard, the actual cruising down the river is pretty normal. There’s a running commentary track to tell you which of Tokyo’s bridges you’re passing under, point out interesting sights, that sort of thing. Mind you, it’s narrated by the crew of the Galaxy Express 999:
Lots of folks having their friends take pictures of them with the cardboard standees. Note that the captain of the boat, who you can see from behind at the top of the photo, not only gets to pilot the coolest boat on the river - he also gets to wear a cowboy hat while so doing.
I don’t know how many jobs rank higher than that, really.
Here’s a good view of the boat from the front, pulled into Daiba. It stops right under the “Decks” shopping mall before continuing to Toyosu, and this is as far as I went.
Ticket: About 1500 yen
Super-deformed toy version souvenir: 900 yen
Grinning like a maniac for most of an hour: Priceless.
Surviving Comiket Market / Comiket
If you are as crazy as I am, and for some reason you are a westerner who would like to go to Comic Market in Summer, I thought I would lay out a quick survival kit that you might consider throwing together before you go and stand in line for multiple hours in direct sunlight in 40 degree (that would be 104 degrees, for us in the states) weather.
Which I did, by the way, although I didn’t know it was 40 degrees out until I got back to the hotel and people were talking about it.
Stuff:
1) A small shoulder bag. You can put stuff in this. When you’re at the convention, someone will hand you a promotional bag with handles that you can use to shop with, or you can buy a bag with handles from the Comic Market supplies booth for 300 yen, but you will want something to bring your supplies with you.
I didn’t bring one with me from the US. Somehow, when I was packing, I forgot it. It’s all right, because I picked this one up at a bookstore in Shinjuku for 1000 yen and it’s actually a pretty decent bag. Several different zippered pockets and it can be made expandable by opening one long zipper that runs the length of the bag.
2) Lots of fluids. At least 1500ml of stuff to drink. 500ml of that should be water, because in addition to drinking it, you can pour it on:
3) A towel. This is not a cheesy Douglas Adams “know where your towel is” inside joke / rip off. This is deathly serious. Examine the following picture:
Do you see the happy Japanese people standing outside in 40 degree weather with wet towels on their heads? Do you want to be like the happy Japanese people and have a wet towel on your head? You NEED a towel. A combini will sell you a towel for like 200 yen. Buy one, and be happy with a wet towel on your head.
4) Painkiller. Bring some, buy some, you will need it.
5) Do you wear glasses? Do you want to be able to see through them after you’ve been outside sweating like a pig? You will want something to clean them with, and your shirt will be soaked wet and sweaty. Do not, by the way, be ashamed of being wet and sweaty, because the tiny little 40kg Japanese woman standing next to you in line will also be wet and sweaty even though she’s half your size and a native.
6) Chapstick.
7) Sunglasses.
8 ) A fan. You will not need to buy a fan. In the summer, go to any shopping center, and soon someone will hand you a promotional fan. Once you get into Comic Market, go to the “commercial” section (West halls, upstairs), put your fan in your bag, and someone will hand you a promotional fan advertising something anime related. If you want a bunch of fans, put that one in your bag, walk around a little bit, and someone else will notice your lack of fan and hand you another one. Repeat as much as you can stand, depending on how many fans you want.
9) A change purse, because you are going to wind up with a boatload of change during your time in Japan. Remember - no $1 or $5 equivalent bills. Buy something 1050 yen and pay for it in bills? You’ll get back 950 yen in change. That’s a 500, 4 100s, and a 50, and that assumes you didn’t buy something 1051 yen and wind up with some 1, 5, and 10 yen coins. Your change purse will bulk up fast.
I strongly recommend getting some 1000 yen bills and 500 and 100 yen coins before you go shopping at Comic Market. This isn’t necessary - I have bought something with a 10000 yen bill at Comiket and they’ve given me change - but it just seems polite to have some smaller stuff with you.
10) Some tissues. This is a weird thing about every general-tourist guidebook I’ve seen on Japan - they all say you’ll need tissues because public toilets don’t provide toilet paper. They also say that this isn’t a problem because if you walk around Shibuya for a few minutes, people will hand you lots of little packets of tissues.
These are both lies. At least, well, they are in my experience. I never went in to a public toilet that didn’t have toilet paper, and the people on the street handing out little packets of tissues will look at you, see that you’re not from around here and can’t read the advertising slogan on the packet, and not give you one. I’ve even gone up to a person who’s been trying and failing to distribute tissues and tried asking for a packet, and been rebuffed.
On the other hand, every once in a very great while, one of the people with the packets of tissue WILL be desperate enough to unload them that they WILL hand one to a foreigner. And the sheer horror-value of the thought of being in a toilet and finding out that they don’t supply paper is enough to make me say, it’s probably a good idea to keep trying until you actually have some tissues in your bag, just in case. Or you could buy some.
11) Last, and most important: A Suica. This little card puts Tokyo into EASY MODE. Instead of having to get different tickets for different transit systems or figuring out exactly what it will cost to get from point A to point C by way of transferring at point B, you just buy one of these things from a ticket vending machine for 2000 yen, which comes with a 1500 yen credit, and from then on you just swipe it past a sensor when entering a train station or getting on a bus, and then you swipe it again when you get off and it calculates how much you owe and deducts it. You can also put it back in to the same machine you bought it from and add money to it in 1000 yen increments, which is a GREAT way to get rid of all the change you pick up.
In addition, you can use it to buy stuff from train station vending machines and some shops. Even the Tokyo Pokemon Center takes Suica. I don’t know how much self control Japanese kids have, but I know that if I was 10 and I could buy toys and trading cards with MY bus pass, I would probably wind up having to walk a lot.
To sum up: Tokyo, easy mode, get a Suica and a towel and be happy.
A brief bit on taking a Cell Phone to Japan
As I mentioned a few months ago, I bought a Nokia 6630 because, among other things, it was a dual-mode phone that would work on Japanese cellular phone systems.
At the time I was fairly dubious about this, but I figured I should try it out and see what happened.
Short version: note the ever-so-important “NTT DoCoMo” operator ID:
A couple of problems:
1) YES! It worked. To a point. That point being, I couldn’t make any international calls. Whenever I tried, I got a polite message, in English, from NTT DoCoMo, telling me that I could not make this call from this phone. I was able to receive calls from the US, however, using my US phone number, which meant that my very patient and forgiving wife WAS able to get in touch with me when I forgot to call her at a reasonable time. Being able to make LOCAL phone calls wasn’t much help, because in any case where I would have wanted to make a local phone call, it would have been considerably cheaper simply to use a pay phone.
2) For 4 incoming phone calls, total talk time approximately 32 minutes, I paid 77.13 in roaming charges.
So, yeah, it worked, and to be honest, it was worth it to me just to be reachable, but I thought I’d warn people.
9 hours to go…
Well, I’m packed up and ready to hit the road. Time for a healthy five hours of sleep before getting up at 4 AM to get a cab to the airport. I’m already looking forward to finding out what I’ve forgotten to pack.
Proactively leveraging synergy.
…or, in today’s installment, I am an idiot sometimes.
We had planned to have my gamerspouse and his wife over to our place today to look at vacation photos, since we racked up about 4GB of photos on our recent trip to Alaska and, well, you need to show them to people to prove you went somewhere and didn’t just sit around the house watching TV all week.
Plan A: We’ll load all the photos on to the Mac mini we have hooked up to the HDTV in the front room, then display them using iPhoto. Great plan. We’ve never used iPhoto before, but it’s a Mac, right? It actually turned out to be pretty easy to deal with, just took a while to import the photos.
Complication: We get a call. It turns out they can’t come over because a family member had to be in the hospital the night before, so they want to stick close to home in case there are any problems.
This throws a wrench in my plans, because they don’t have a handy Mac mini hooked to their TV.
This calls for:
Plan B: We’ll burn them to a DVD-video. iPhoto even has a burn to DVD option. This renders for about two hours and makes a DVD. Unfortunately, it’s really not very useful since all the photos are displayed for 5 seconds and then fade to the next photo - there’s no way to quickly flip through photos. Also, it means that all the nice high res photos are now downsized to DVD resolutions.
This calls for:
Plan C: We’ll put them on the Acer laptop, grab an S-video cable, and hook it in to their TV. I try this at home. It doesn’t go well, but it works… if we don’t mind having the Windows Fax & Picture viewer UI on the screen all the time. If I try to go to full-screen slideshow mode, it forces all the pictures to the laptop display. Also, over S-video, the picture is even worse than playing them off a DVD-video. Not good. But: time is short and it’s taken over an hour just to get this far, so we deal with it and I pack the laptop over and we get on the road.
We get to their house and I start setting up for the photo display session.
Complication: Their HDTV has front composite and component inputs, no S-video inputs on the front. He goes to get a flashlight so we can fiddle around behind the thing and get the laptop hooked up, and I notice the big white box staring us in the face.
Naturally enough, he has an Xbox 360.
…wait… that’s a Media Center Extender…
…I have a Media Center laptop right here…
15 minutes later, I’ve downloaded the necessary Media Center Extensions, the laptop is talking to the 360, and we’re looking at our vacation photos in 1080-lines-of-resolution-glory.
If I’d thought about it, I could have just taken over a DVD-ROM of photos, since the 360 would have happily displayed the photos right off a DVD-ROM… or even a USB flash drive.
Moral of the story: Don’t casually dismiss the extra multimedia functions of the Xbox 360, because they can save you a lot of hassle if you actually remember them.
That’s not much of a moral, I admit. You can probably adapt it to your own circumstances.
The world is a tiny place.
I will admit that, in the primitive times that were early 90’s anime fandom, I did occasionally buy something just because it was Japanese, or just because it featured anime characters - even ones I’d never heard of - just because actually finding anything Japanese or anime related in Eugene in the 1990-1994 timeframe was so mindbogglingly rare as to be noteworthy.
In 1994 or thereabouts, Beaverton got a Japanese bookstore, and I would make periodic pilgrimages up to shop there, so it got a little less unique, and then in 1995 I moved to Los Angeles largely to be closer to Little Tokyo. In retrospect, you shouldn’t move 2000 miles to be closer to shopping when you have self control issues…
But, asides aside, things were pretty rough for the internationally-minded fanboy back then.
By way of contrast:
My father just got back from a month in China, including some time at a panda preserve and breeding center. He bought me a t-shirt from the panda preserve, and it is an awesome t-shirt. It has pandas doing tai-chi on it. It is super cool, and I would put up a picture, but it is unnecessary, because googling “panda tai chi” results in multiple hits from people who are offering to sell the same t-shirt, in child’s or adult sizes, world-wide from China.
This is not to say that I don’t appreciate his hand-carrying this super cool T-shirt back, or that I think it’s any less cool because I could have mail-ordered one, it’s just that, wow, the world seems a much smaller place noawadays.
Also: Let’s Learn Japanese Progress: 9/52
An unfortunate pattern.
When something happens only once, it’s possible that it’s a unique event.
When something happens more than once, it starts looking like a pattern.
That’s about as “deep” as I get in the morning.
At any rate, the pattern in this case seems to be: My wife suggests we go to an outlet mall. I grouse about the inconvenience, the crowds, the lack of parking, the sheer banality that the very concept of outlet malls embody. Eventually I break down and we go to the outlet mall, wherein somehow I wind up walking out with a shopping bag of my very own.
In this case, she wanted to go to the “LeSportsac” company store in Tulalip, WA. Since we also have a good friend who lives in Seattle, we had two reasons to drive up north (about 220 miles, each way, a bit rough for a day trip but doable)
I groused, I kvetched, I tried to get the “outlet mall” portion of the trip canceled in favor of spending more time hanging out in Seattle. I did not prevail.
The LeSportsac store was a scary place, but I have to admit that the prices there were only mildly insane as compared to the full-on-insane prices that Tokidoki products command at regular retail establishments. My wife wound up with two bags, and since I do not remember the names other than that they were italian sounding and started with a “C” and a “T” I will name them after pasta. If you are, like her, a twisted Tokidoki fan, you will know what I am trying to say when I say she bought a “Cannelloni” and an “Tortellini”, in “Paradiso” and “Inferno” respectively. If you are not, then the actual product names won’t matter and the only effect this should have on you is to possibly make you a little hungry.
Moving right along…
I have an unfortunate attraction to the combination of “black” and “shiny” objects and as a result I have been lusting after a Movado watch since I first became aware of their existence. This is something of a sad comment on the effects of advertising on the weak masculine mind.
The downside of course is that, since the Movado people are apparently well aware of the effects of “black” and “shiny” on the weak masculine mind, they charge a bloody fortune for their watches. I am not going to say they’re overpriced or anything, because that’s a judgment call I don’t have the authority to make, but they’re well outside my price range.
On the other hand, when your wife takes you by the hand and drags you into the Movado company store at the same time as they’re having a 70% off sale on watches…
Look, even 30% of the regular price of one of these is 3 times as much as I’ve ever spent on a watch. Since I’ve bought one other watch in the last 15 years, that means that this one has to last me 45 years:
But it’s …black AND shiny…
After putting that on the Visa bill - and I’ve already logged on to my bank account and sent Visa the payment, first thing I did after having a nice cup of yogurt this morning - we finally drove back to Seattle to meet our friend and check out her new house, which is a really amazing 1920s era house that she’s turned into half living quarters for her / half a day care / preschool center. Both sides are really impressive - The amount of space she has gave us some serious apartment-dweller-envy and the school looked like the best parts of every kindergarten classroom carefully cut out and assembled into one space.
We hung out for a while, I did my best to break her computer in the name of being “helpful”, we went out for some rather nice sushi at “Blue C” sushi near UW, then we drove home, arrived at 2AM, and crashed in the manner of hard crashing things. Good times.
I don’t (heart) LA
But we lived there for five years anyway.
If you’re a fanboy, LA is like a giant box of things you probably want. Honestly, it’s no Akihabara but it’s full of stores that want to sell you cool things.
That aside… well, you’re in this giant town with lots of cool places to go, but if you want to go from, say, Santa Monica to, say, Five Star Laser in San Gabriel (which we did), it’s a 90 minute trip. Both ways. 3 hours of sitting in traffic burning $3.50 gasoline. I have a good friend down there who buys almost everything he owns from Amazon - I didn’t get the point when I lived in LA, I mean, he was buying stuff online and waiting for it to be shipped when he could just have gone to the mall…
…Now I understand, and see the wisdom of his ways.
Still, we were down there, and I had forgotten just how long it takes to get anywhere, so we went to the aforementioned Five Star Laser and picked up some DVDs. All Region-3 releases, and they look fairly legit.
(Ye gods, though, there are a lot of bootlegs out there these days, it’s really bad. Even stores on Sawtelle, which wasn’t a big bootleg district before, had lots of bootleg DVDs. I didn’t expect that. Still, they’re blatantly obvious and fairly easy to avoid.)
We got Shimotsuma Monogatari (Kamikaze Girls) because the US release, while it claims to be anamorphic, isn’t, Gamera The Brave because I love me some giant flying turtles, Green Snake because we still needed to replace the laserdisc, Wheels on Meals (another laserdisc replacement), Twin Dragons, because if ONE Jackie Chan is good, two must be better, “The Lucky Guy” because it has Stephen Chow AND Sammi Cheng, The God of Cookery because it has Stephen Chow, The Diary of a Big Man because we decided we wanted to see Chow Yun-Fat in a romantic comedy, and Ayumi Hamasaki Arena Tour 2006 because, well, the wife likes her some weird costumes and Ayumi live shows tend to be packed full of weird costumes.
We also went to an anime store in Westside Pavillion and bought a couple of figures, then realized they needed to be shipped because we’d packed really light for the weekend trip and wouldn’t be able to get them home in luggage. Pictures when and if they arrive.
Alaska trip is go! And Vista update
Got the email today from the travel agency saying that they’d charged us a huge sum of money and would be sending us travel documents, so come July we’re off for a bit over a week of hard core tourism in and around the inside passage. Which sounds dirty, but just means the little squiggly bit of Alaska that’s down in the south west corner of the state.
We have many activities planned. We’re going to ride dogsleds and take helicopter tours and go on day cruises and go looking for bears.
That last bit strikes me as insane. Bears are big and eat people. Unless they are Gentle Ben, but I understand Gentle Ben is retired, has a nice place in the Valley and lives off royalty checks. We won’t be seeing Gentle Ben in Alaska. We’re more likely to see his cousin, Homicidal Bill.
I have a contingency plan should we go looking for bears and find them. It involves screaming and running.
On another note, the Acer Vista “Express Upgrade” came in today’s mail, so that’s the end of my involvement with Moduslink. I do feel some sympathy for them - from the sounds of things, they had no bloody clue what kind of mess they were getting in to when they took the Vista upgrade contract and if they’re to be believed they’re both a) losing bags of money on the whole thing and b) staining their reputation for generations to come.
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.
