Baud Attitude

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.”

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 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.