Tokyo!
Part one of my Tokyo adventure. With tons of pictures! I should have posted this sooner, but between being sick twice in the last two weeks, getting distracted with Christmas and New Years, and the sheer bloody LENGTH of this thing, it didn't happen until now.
DAY 1
Not a great way to start my vacation: sick enough that I was tempted to cancel the whole trip. The night before my throat was sore, but I woke up on Friday morning with a full-blown cold or flu or something. Light-headed, groggy, nauseous, all that fun stuff. DAMN IT. My immune system hates me, and seems to let me get sick at exactly the times when it's least convenient. So I lay around my apartment for most of the morning, called my mom on Skype to get some encouragement, took some painkillers, and decided to head out and hope for the best.
Took the train into the city, and from there, I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo. There's still remnants of the All-Japan Games hanging around the station. Hi, Sugiichi!
It's a four hour trip from my area to Tokyo. And when I say four hours, I mean EXACTLY four hours. To the minute. Apparently if the train is more than two minutes late, they give out slips saying so because there's so many businessmen who rely on it being exactly on time. Stuff being on time seems like such a novel concept after that summer in England. There, you just kind of show up at the station and hang around until a train decides to come, and it's just a bonus if it happens to show up at the time written on the schedule.
Anyway. Four hours on the Shinkansen, most of which I either spent playing DS or trying to sleep. I'd definitely take the train again; it's a smooth ride, very comfortable seats, and very calm and quiet. Way better than flying, IMO, even if it takes longer. And it has nicer scenery.
Four hours later, I arrived at Tokyo station. By that point the painkillers were starting to wear off, and all I wanted to do was go to my hotel and rest for a while. Tokyo station turned out to be a bit of a maze, and it took me a while of wandering around before I figured out where the subway lines were and how to get where I wanted to go. At least there was some amusing signage along the way.
The subway map of Tokyo looks like a plate of rainbow spaghetti. It doesn't help that a lot of stations are connected to each other, so you might go four stations out of your way before you realise you could have changed lines ages ago. It didn't take too long to get to my hotel, but it felt like forever since I was sick, exhausted, and dragging a bag around. By the time I finally checked into my hotel and got to my room, the painkillers had pretty much given up and left me to my own devices. And because I'm an idiot, I left the bottle back home on the kitchen table. CRAP.
I meant to go to Shinjuku that evening, but it obviously wasn't happening. So I slept. A lot. Mom called my cell around 9 in the evening, and I woke up around 2 AM long enough to clear my stuff off the bed and get a drink of water, but I essentially slept for 14 hours straight. At least it seemed to kill my flu, because I was feeling 500% better the next morning.
DAY 2
NOT feeling like I was going to faint or throw up? Huge improvement on Friday. I wore one of those germ masks for most of the day just to be considerate, but they're not the most convenient thing for anyone with glasses. Your breath tends to make your glasses fog up while you're wearing it. Still! Time to poke around Tokyo in search of fun, doujinshis, and UFO catchers.
First stop of the day: Shibuya. Destination: the Square-Enix store. I made my way to the nearest station. For the curious: yes, they do have women-only subway cars.
I came out around the Tokyo Opera City building and saw this giant Christmas tree. For a country that's about 1% Christian, they sure like to go all out on Christmas decorations. Santa, pretty lights, and rampant commercialism are universal.
I stopped somewhere to eat before pressing on. A $10 breakfast in Tokyo pretty much gets you this, but considering how sick I was the day before, it was enough.
On to the Square-Enix store! It's kind of tucked away on the other side of a busy street, but it's not hard to spot. Just look for the happy slimes.
MOOGLES.
Sephiroth does indeed live in the SE Store's floor.
Personally, I liked the giant Tonberry and Cactaur plushies.
Yeah, I spent waaaay too long at the SE Store. Partly because I alternated between taking pictures, buying a necklace, and going "JUST ONE MORE PLUSHIE, I SWEAR!", and partly because I ran into two other JETs there. Geeked out about games for a while, and I watched one of them try to score a Kain and Cecil from the randomised FF4 Play Arts toys. No such luck. When he eventually gave up, I bought him one more box to have another go at his prize. And the one I bought him turned out to be the Kain. YES! Victory!
After I was finally finished with the SE Store and its sea of plushies, I headed off in the direction of Shinjuku. It's easy to get trains and subways around Tokyo, but sometimes it's worth your while to walk. Otherwise you'd never see the cool little things poked away where you least expect them. Like this shrine, tucked away in a side-street next to a busy road.
Being in Shinjuku led me back to the places I went to escape the boring-ass orientation conference back in August. Mainly book stores and UFO catcher arcades. While wandering around the maze of pedestrian streets near the station, I found an arcade that had my current guilty "sweet zombie Jesus what the hell is WRONG with me?" pleasure: the Silent Hill arcade game.
IT IS PURE, OVER-THE-TOP CHEESE LACED WITH CHAINSAW-WIELDING RABBIT CRACK. But it's pure cheese that lets you shoot Pyramid Head, listen to hilariously terrible voice acting, and get attacked by Robbie the Rabbit. And lo and behold, I SAW the Robbies this time, because I actually managed to finish the game. Go me! Too bad I got what amounts to the "bad ending".
My camera didn't go off in time, but it says "WHY DIDN'T YOU SAVE ME?" in the background. Apparently the game's requisite evil/possessed child thinks I suck for not doing whatever random thing I was supposed to do to save her and get a better ending. I'll have to find a partner in crime to go with me to play it some time. I'd love to get a video of the amusement park level, just to share Robbie the Rabbit's creepy-ass laugh.
(Fun fact: even the arcade game can't resist making fun of James Sunderland. There's a part where you can take alternate routes through the prison stage, and one of those routes leads you to a room with a toilet. One of the two hopelessly idiotic main characters reaches into the toilet because he sees something stuck down there, and hey, things crammed down blocked toilets MUST be an important clue that will save us all! Then a bunch of evil slugs crawl out. OWNED.)
On to the UFO catcher arcade! Of which there are many in Shinjuku, and the best ones I've found in Tokyo in terms of actually WINNING shit. I'm a total n00b, and I still managed to score at least six toys during my trip.
Y HALLO THAR, KORILAKKUMA.
(Ugh, I hate my expression in that picture. Oh well.)
Shinjuku seems to have a healthy population of sign-wavers, musicians promoting themselves, and people handing out flyers for random things. There were a bunch of people walking around near the station waving picket signs, which I sadly didn't get a picture of. Not sure what the sign-waving was about, but I caught the word "Christmas" on a few of them, so maybe they were the microscopic minority of Japanese Christians doing their "RESPECT JESUS' AUTHORITAH!" routine. Who knows?
A random musician, braving the chilly evening to play some nicely acoustic jpop outside the station.
Most of the next few hours was spent going in and out of UFO catcher arcades and browsing the English section at one of the big book stores. Picked up pathetically little in the way of English books this time; just the latest Fullmetal Alchemist trade and a kanji-learning workbook. Must place an order at Amazon.jp some time in the near future, so I can catch up on the trades of all the comics I read. Capped off the browsing with a pretty unimpressive dinner at a crowded Chinese restaurant that shared a building with a bunch of foreign-themed restaurants, including a British pub AND an Irish pub.
I ended up in Shinjuku way longer than I thought I would, so there wasn't much left of the evening by the time I left. The subways in Tokyo stop running at midnight, so unless you feel like walking across one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world or paying for a ridiculously expensive cab, midnight's the cut-off. I dropped off my UFO catcher/SE Store haul at my hotel and headed for Nakano to try to hit Nakano Broadway, a kind of...half mall, half enclosed shopping street that branches off into a lot of twisty side-streets. Most stuff was closed when I got there except for a few restaurants and arcades, so I really only got to get a bite to eat and poke around a little.
This cat (kitten, really) was hunkering down outside a closed store, probably eating those discarded McDonald's fries. Aw. Poor homeless kitty.
Back to the hotel with 20 minutes to spare. Pretty good toy haul for one day: three SE Store offerings, three UFO catcher prizes.
DAY 3
Most of this day involved looking through shelves and shelves and TOWERING MOUNTAINS of doujinshi until my arms hurt. The things I do for comics, eh?
The first place I headed on Sunday was Harajuku, since Sunday is the day when all the crazy cosplayers come out to play. Unfortunately, I totally missed the area where most of them hang out. Damn. I did see a lot of them, but I mostly saw them shopping rather than showing off. Since Harajuku is cosplay central, the main shopping street is cluttered with stores like this, selling every over-the-top costume and weird-ass accessory you could ever want for dressing up like a JPOP star wanna-be or gothic lolita princess. Which my brain now associates with that one Offspring song, because it was blasting over the speakers as I poked around one of the stores.
Most of said stores have "OMG NO PICTURES ALLOWED!!11"-type signs out front. There was one tiny little gothy boutique run by an old man who looked like he should be yelling at kids to get off his lawn (you know, if anyone in Japan actually HAD a lawn), and this store had a sign that said "No photos penalty pay ¥100,00." (Their punctuation, not mine. I wrote it down and everything.) I was SO tempted to take a picture of the sign, just to see what would happen. I'm not an expert on the Japanese legal system, and it DOES tend to do everything it can to reinforce that we uncivilised foreigners are dangerous and not to be trusted...but I'm fairly sure there's no law going to support you if you demand the equivalent of $100 if someone happens to snap a picture of your crappy, over-priced gothic maid costumes.
Speaking of clothes, I randomly stumbled across this at one of the significantly less over-priced stores. Even in Japan, Pedobear will find you.
(The katakana says "Bear Claw", if you're curious.)
Despite the horrendous crowds, Harajuku's interesting to walk around in. Some of the stores are actually interesting and quirky, like this clothing store. The inside was decorated with random Barbies and stuffed animals, and the outside had this cool teddy bear tree. Bears seem to be a recurring theme on this trip.
You also can't walk five feet without seeing a place selling crêpes.
I gave in. Blueberry crêpe FTW.
Up a bit further, on one of the LESS atrociously crowded streets, I found a hair salon. I'll talk more about that later, because I ended up back there the next day. There was some interesting graffiti along the way.
Note the guy in the reindeer costume on the left. All the cell phone stores seemed to have their employees decked out as reindeer (or in the case of female employees, sexy Santa outfits). The things you have to do to work retail in Japan...
From there, I took a train up to Ikebukuro. Japan is confusing to navigate at the best of times, thanks to it not being concerned with little things like "urban planning" or "having enough room to fucking move". I'm used to it by now, but out of all the places I wandered in Tokyo, Ikebukuro was the one that still managed to make me dizzy just trying to walk down a street. The shopping guide I printed off had periodic "sanity check" landmarks, and thank God for that, because you sure as hell need them.
After you leave the massive, labyrinthine train station, you hope you have good enough directions and find your way to the main pedestrian shopping street of INSANITY. Crowded as hell, tons of stores, and very, very neon. Sadly, the UFO catcher arcades in Ikebukuro suck compared to the ones in Shinjuku. SO UNFAIR that it was the only place I found a machine with Gloomy Bear toys.
Not only was it one of the machines that makes it almost impossible to win anything, the employees were stingy. TRUFAX: if you can't seem to win something out of a UFO catcher machine, you can actually flag down an employee and ask them to make it EASIER for you. The ones in Shinjuku were happy to do so. In Ikebukuro? No such luck. The guy moved the bear over about 1/4 of an inch, and it was still almost impossible to make any headway with it. Maybe if I had an hour and $100 worth of coins to throw away, but I'm not THAT obsessive. When I gave up and wandered away, I saw the same employee open the case and move the bear BACK, thus screwing over anyone else who might have benefited from the tiny bit I managed to move it. Bastard.
Anyway. Random shots of Ikebukuro.
Bow down before the power of BALLOON SANTA.
Neon signs and...what?!
A rare sighting of Sexual Harassment Panda in the wild?
I don't have photos of most of the time I was in Ikebukuro, because I spent it going from one anime and manga store to another with the surprisingly fantastic directions in the guide I mentioned earlier. Said guide is actually meant as a guide to anime porn shopping, but since practically every anime and manga store sells porn of some kind alongside everything else, it's ends up being a fantastic all-purpose guide no matter what you're shopping for (in my case, doujinshis).
There's a HUGE number of stores in the area, so I went from one to another in search of interesting comics. First I hit Animate, which didn't impress. At all. Too crowded, all retail price, nothing especially interesting that I couldn't find at a million other stores. Just down from Animate was a small used doujin store, which was a lot more interesting to poke around. I didn't get to Mandrake, but I spent an insane amount of time at K-Books. Which is actually broken up into several smaller stores along the same street. The best thing I found at the toy store part was a fully functioning replica of the State Alchemist pocketwatch from Fullmetal Alchemist. SO AWESOME, but sadly, not quite awesome enough to make me part with $200.
It's the comic part that ended up eating most of my afternoon. I've never seen more doujins in my life than I did at K-Books. They have a whole floor for new ones, then another whole floor for used ones that has almost every shelf crammed to capacity. The down side is that they're all sealed in plastic, so you can't actually look at them until you buy them. I was mostly only interested in gen (with a few exceptions made for rare and/or sufficiently weird-ass finds), but much like your average internet fandom, finding gen involves digging through 70% slash and 20% het. It's hit-and-miss, but at least there seems to be some kind of unspoken doujin artist code that gives the cover some clues about the actual content. Nice of them to gives the reader a sporting chance of figuring out whether it's a silly gag comic or loli catgirl bukakke tentacle rape.
I emerged with a pile of Phoenix Wright, Final Fantasy, Supernatural, and a few random weird finds. And down a few notches on the Faith-In-Humanity scale thanks to the existence of Anpanman yaoi and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory slash.
There's actually a fair amount of doujinshi out for certain western shows and movies, but I had no luck finding any Heroes doujins. Trust me, I looked. It's probably too soon, since they're only halfway through airing season 1 in Japan. Damn it, Japan, catch up! The western fangirls already have a head start on you. This time next year I DEMAND to be wading through a shelf of hilariously awful Petrellicest, keeping my eyes peeled for gag comics and cursing the lack of Sylar gen.
One last find in Ikebukuro: the butler café, Swallowtail. It's actually RIGHT below K-Books. I went in to check it out, but it turns out you need a reservation to get in. So I missed out on having cute guys in tuxes calling me "madam" and serving me tea and awesome desserts. Sadness. Swallowtail has two bakery-type stores in the area (staffed by women dressed as maids), so I was still able to buy a nice-looking pastry and some tea leaves for later.
When I made my way back to the train station, I got to move on to the "HOLY FUCKING HELL I HATE JAPAN!" portion of the trip. See, I was running a little low on cash by this point, even though I made a point of taking extra before I left home. So when I got to the Ikebukuro station, I decided I'd stop by a bank machine and get a bit of extra cash.
Now, if you're a foreigner, Japan hates you. Or at least, its government and technology does. There's the "all foreigners are terrorists, so we must fingerprint them!" debacle. There's the fact that I have to let people make photocopies of my gaijin card and passport just to do something as simple as get a membership card for an internet café or stay at a hotel. And there's the fact that if you don't have a Japanese credit card, you're fucked.
Yes, even though Japan is a cash-based society where most stores still don't accept credit cards or debit cards for payment, you need a credit card to actually GET cash out of a lot of ATMs or bank machines. And not just any credit card. Japanese credit cards only. I have a perfectly legitimate Japanese debit card for my bank account, and not a single machine would take it. I have a perfectly valid Canadian credit card that I never had any problem using when I was in England and Germany, and not a single bank machine or ATM would do anything but spit it back out at me with the machine equivalent of "SCREW YOU, GAIJIN".
After trying every bank machine in the station and getting nowhere, I consulted one of my guidebooks, and it claimed that post offices sometimes have bank machines that accept non-Japanese credit cards. Which didn't do me a whole lot of good, since (1) it was 8:00 Sunday evening and (2) Monday was a holiday, so they weren't going to be open. I ended up going back to my hotel and asking at the front desk to see if any of the staff could point me to a place to take out money. And God bless 'em, they went out of their way to help me out. One of them not only tracked down a bank machine for me (no idea how, but it might as well have been magic), he printed off a map for me and told me exactly how to get there. Which involved taking the subway a station or two down (yes, they're THAT rare) to get to the Nagatachō/Akasaka area and reach a 24-hour Citibank machine.
The station is a maze, and I managed to go out the wrong exit and walk in the complete opposite direction for a while. On the plus side, I got to see this hotel's Christmas lights.
Going back and taking the RIGHT exit this time, I finally found the bank machine. Despite its repeated attempts to thwart me (the door lock would only open for my DEBIT card, and the machine itself would only accept my CREDIT card), I finally managed to get some cash. VICTORY. And as a bonus, there was a nice Christmas light display in the courtyard of the office building beside it. For some reason, my best shot ended up being the one I took with my cell phone.
Some victory arms next to the Christmas tree. \o/
There wasn't much of the night left after that, so I just ended up searching the pedestrian back-streets in the area until I found a restaurant that was still open and didn't lie about being closed even though they were open for another hour. Ended up at an overpriced Italian place because it was either that, ramen, or McDonald's. Italian food is always a disappointment here, so in hindsight, I should have gone for the ramen. But whatever. I had cash, I ate something, and I got back to my hotel before the subways shut down, so that was as much of a victory as I was going to get.
Last picture of the day is from one of the subway platforms I waited around on the way back. I liked all the straight lines at this angle.
NEXT TIME: haircut, Christmas eve at Nakano, surly shrine security guards, and jugglers.
DAY 1
Not a great way to start my vacation: sick enough that I was tempted to cancel the whole trip. The night before my throat was sore, but I woke up on Friday morning with a full-blown cold or flu or something. Light-headed, groggy, nauseous, all that fun stuff. DAMN IT. My immune system hates me, and seems to let me get sick at exactly the times when it's least convenient. So I lay around my apartment for most of the morning, called my mom on Skype to get some encouragement, took some painkillers, and decided to head out and hope for the best.
Took the train into the city, and from there, I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo. There's still remnants of the All-Japan Games hanging around the station. Hi, Sugiichi!
It's a four hour trip from my area to Tokyo. And when I say four hours, I mean EXACTLY four hours. To the minute. Apparently if the train is more than two minutes late, they give out slips saying so because there's so many businessmen who rely on it being exactly on time. Stuff being on time seems like such a novel concept after that summer in England. There, you just kind of show up at the station and hang around until a train decides to come, and it's just a bonus if it happens to show up at the time written on the schedule.
Anyway. Four hours on the Shinkansen, most of which I either spent playing DS or trying to sleep. I'd definitely take the train again; it's a smooth ride, very comfortable seats, and very calm and quiet. Way better than flying, IMO, even if it takes longer. And it has nicer scenery.
Four hours later, I arrived at Tokyo station. By that point the painkillers were starting to wear off, and all I wanted to do was go to my hotel and rest for a while. Tokyo station turned out to be a bit of a maze, and it took me a while of wandering around before I figured out where the subway lines were and how to get where I wanted to go. At least there was some amusing signage along the way.
The subway map of Tokyo looks like a plate of rainbow spaghetti. It doesn't help that a lot of stations are connected to each other, so you might go four stations out of your way before you realise you could have changed lines ages ago. It didn't take too long to get to my hotel, but it felt like forever since I was sick, exhausted, and dragging a bag around. By the time I finally checked into my hotel and got to my room, the painkillers had pretty much given up and left me to my own devices. And because I'm an idiot, I left the bottle back home on the kitchen table. CRAP.
I meant to go to Shinjuku that evening, but it obviously wasn't happening. So I slept. A lot. Mom called my cell around 9 in the evening, and I woke up around 2 AM long enough to clear my stuff off the bed and get a drink of water, but I essentially slept for 14 hours straight. At least it seemed to kill my flu, because I was feeling 500% better the next morning.
DAY 2
NOT feeling like I was going to faint or throw up? Huge improvement on Friday. I wore one of those germ masks for most of the day just to be considerate, but they're not the most convenient thing for anyone with glasses. Your breath tends to make your glasses fog up while you're wearing it. Still! Time to poke around Tokyo in search of fun, doujinshis, and UFO catchers.
First stop of the day: Shibuya. Destination: the Square-Enix store. I made my way to the nearest station. For the curious: yes, they do have women-only subway cars.
I came out around the Tokyo Opera City building and saw this giant Christmas tree. For a country that's about 1% Christian, they sure like to go all out on Christmas decorations. Santa, pretty lights, and rampant commercialism are universal.
I stopped somewhere to eat before pressing on. A $10 breakfast in Tokyo pretty much gets you this, but considering how sick I was the day before, it was enough.
On to the Square-Enix store! It's kind of tucked away on the other side of a busy street, but it's not hard to spot. Just look for the happy slimes.
MOOGLES.
Sephiroth does indeed live in the SE Store's floor.
Personally, I liked the giant Tonberry and Cactaur plushies.
Yeah, I spent waaaay too long at the SE Store. Partly because I alternated between taking pictures, buying a necklace, and going "JUST ONE MORE PLUSHIE, I SWEAR!", and partly because I ran into two other JETs there. Geeked out about games for a while, and I watched one of them try to score a Kain and Cecil from the randomised FF4 Play Arts toys. No such luck. When he eventually gave up, I bought him one more box to have another go at his prize. And the one I bought him turned out to be the Kain. YES! Victory!
After I was finally finished with the SE Store and its sea of plushies, I headed off in the direction of Shinjuku. It's easy to get trains and subways around Tokyo, but sometimes it's worth your while to walk. Otherwise you'd never see the cool little things poked away where you least expect them. Like this shrine, tucked away in a side-street next to a busy road.
Being in Shinjuku led me back to the places I went to escape the boring-ass orientation conference back in August. Mainly book stores and UFO catcher arcades. While wandering around the maze of pedestrian streets near the station, I found an arcade that had my current guilty "sweet zombie Jesus what the hell is WRONG with me?" pleasure: the Silent Hill arcade game.
IT IS PURE, OVER-THE-TOP CHEESE LACED WITH CHAINSAW-WIELDING RABBIT CRACK. But it's pure cheese that lets you shoot Pyramid Head, listen to hilariously terrible voice acting, and get attacked by Robbie the Rabbit. And lo and behold, I SAW the Robbies this time, because I actually managed to finish the game. Go me! Too bad I got what amounts to the "bad ending".
My camera didn't go off in time, but it says "WHY DIDN'T YOU SAVE ME?" in the background. Apparently the game's requisite evil/possessed child thinks I suck for not doing whatever random thing I was supposed to do to save her and get a better ending. I'll have to find a partner in crime to go with me to play it some time. I'd love to get a video of the amusement park level, just to share Robbie the Rabbit's creepy-ass laugh.
(Fun fact: even the arcade game can't resist making fun of James Sunderland. There's a part where you can take alternate routes through the prison stage, and one of those routes leads you to a room with a toilet. One of the two hopelessly idiotic main characters reaches into the toilet because he sees something stuck down there, and hey, things crammed down blocked toilets MUST be an important clue that will save us all! Then a bunch of evil slugs crawl out. OWNED.)
On to the UFO catcher arcade! Of which there are many in Shinjuku, and the best ones I've found in Tokyo in terms of actually WINNING shit. I'm a total n00b, and I still managed to score at least six toys during my trip.
Y HALLO THAR, KORILAKKUMA.
(Ugh, I hate my expression in that picture. Oh well.)
Shinjuku seems to have a healthy population of sign-wavers, musicians promoting themselves, and people handing out flyers for random things. There were a bunch of people walking around near the station waving picket signs, which I sadly didn't get a picture of. Not sure what the sign-waving was about, but I caught the word "Christmas" on a few of them, so maybe they were the microscopic minority of Japanese Christians doing their "RESPECT JESUS' AUTHORITAH!" routine. Who knows?
A random musician, braving the chilly evening to play some nicely acoustic jpop outside the station.
Most of the next few hours was spent going in and out of UFO catcher arcades and browsing the English section at one of the big book stores. Picked up pathetically little in the way of English books this time; just the latest Fullmetal Alchemist trade and a kanji-learning workbook. Must place an order at Amazon.jp some time in the near future, so I can catch up on the trades of all the comics I read. Capped off the browsing with a pretty unimpressive dinner at a crowded Chinese restaurant that shared a building with a bunch of foreign-themed restaurants, including a British pub AND an Irish pub.
I ended up in Shinjuku way longer than I thought I would, so there wasn't much left of the evening by the time I left. The subways in Tokyo stop running at midnight, so unless you feel like walking across one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world or paying for a ridiculously expensive cab, midnight's the cut-off. I dropped off my UFO catcher/SE Store haul at my hotel and headed for Nakano to try to hit Nakano Broadway, a kind of...half mall, half enclosed shopping street that branches off into a lot of twisty side-streets. Most stuff was closed when I got there except for a few restaurants and arcades, so I really only got to get a bite to eat and poke around a little.
This cat (kitten, really) was hunkering down outside a closed store, probably eating those discarded McDonald's fries. Aw. Poor homeless kitty.
Back to the hotel with 20 minutes to spare. Pretty good toy haul for one day: three SE Store offerings, three UFO catcher prizes.
DAY 3
Most of this day involved looking through shelves and shelves and TOWERING MOUNTAINS of doujinshi until my arms hurt. The things I do for comics, eh?
The first place I headed on Sunday was Harajuku, since Sunday is the day when all the crazy cosplayers come out to play. Unfortunately, I totally missed the area where most of them hang out. Damn. I did see a lot of them, but I mostly saw them shopping rather than showing off. Since Harajuku is cosplay central, the main shopping street is cluttered with stores like this, selling every over-the-top costume and weird-ass accessory you could ever want for dressing up like a JPOP star wanna-be or gothic lolita princess. Which my brain now associates with that one Offspring song, because it was blasting over the speakers as I poked around one of the stores.
Most of said stores have "OMG NO PICTURES ALLOWED!!11"-type signs out front. There was one tiny little gothy boutique run by an old man who looked like he should be yelling at kids to get off his lawn (you know, if anyone in Japan actually HAD a lawn), and this store had a sign that said "No photos penalty pay ¥100,00." (Their punctuation, not mine. I wrote it down and everything.) I was SO tempted to take a picture of the sign, just to see what would happen. I'm not an expert on the Japanese legal system, and it DOES tend to do everything it can to reinforce that we uncivilised foreigners are dangerous and not to be trusted...but I'm fairly sure there's no law going to support you if you demand the equivalent of $100 if someone happens to snap a picture of your crappy, over-priced gothic maid costumes.
Speaking of clothes, I randomly stumbled across this at one of the significantly less over-priced stores. Even in Japan, Pedobear will find you.
(The katakana says "Bear Claw", if you're curious.)
Despite the horrendous crowds, Harajuku's interesting to walk around in. Some of the stores are actually interesting and quirky, like this clothing store. The inside was decorated with random Barbies and stuffed animals, and the outside had this cool teddy bear tree. Bears seem to be a recurring theme on this trip.
You also can't walk five feet without seeing a place selling crêpes.
I gave in. Blueberry crêpe FTW.
Up a bit further, on one of the LESS atrociously crowded streets, I found a hair salon. I'll talk more about that later, because I ended up back there the next day. There was some interesting graffiti along the way.
Note the guy in the reindeer costume on the left. All the cell phone stores seemed to have their employees decked out as reindeer (or in the case of female employees, sexy Santa outfits). The things you have to do to work retail in Japan...
From there, I took a train up to Ikebukuro. Japan is confusing to navigate at the best of times, thanks to it not being concerned with little things like "urban planning" or "having enough room to fucking move". I'm used to it by now, but out of all the places I wandered in Tokyo, Ikebukuro was the one that still managed to make me dizzy just trying to walk down a street. The shopping guide I printed off had periodic "sanity check" landmarks, and thank God for that, because you sure as hell need them.
After you leave the massive, labyrinthine train station, you hope you have good enough directions and find your way to the main pedestrian shopping street of INSANITY. Crowded as hell, tons of stores, and very, very neon. Sadly, the UFO catcher arcades in Ikebukuro suck compared to the ones in Shinjuku. SO UNFAIR that it was the only place I found a machine with Gloomy Bear toys.
Not only was it one of the machines that makes it almost impossible to win anything, the employees were stingy. TRUFAX: if you can't seem to win something out of a UFO catcher machine, you can actually flag down an employee and ask them to make it EASIER for you. The ones in Shinjuku were happy to do so. In Ikebukuro? No such luck. The guy moved the bear over about 1/4 of an inch, and it was still almost impossible to make any headway with it. Maybe if I had an hour and $100 worth of coins to throw away, but I'm not THAT obsessive. When I gave up and wandered away, I saw the same employee open the case and move the bear BACK, thus screwing over anyone else who might have benefited from the tiny bit I managed to move it. Bastard.
Anyway. Random shots of Ikebukuro.
Bow down before the power of BALLOON SANTA.
Neon signs and...what?!
A rare sighting of Sexual Harassment Panda in the wild?
I don't have photos of most of the time I was in Ikebukuro, because I spent it going from one anime and manga store to another with the surprisingly fantastic directions in the guide I mentioned earlier. Said guide is actually meant as a guide to anime porn shopping, but since practically every anime and manga store sells porn of some kind alongside everything else, it's ends up being a fantastic all-purpose guide no matter what you're shopping for (in my case, doujinshis).
There's a HUGE number of stores in the area, so I went from one to another in search of interesting comics. First I hit Animate, which didn't impress. At all. Too crowded, all retail price, nothing especially interesting that I couldn't find at a million other stores. Just down from Animate was a small used doujin store, which was a lot more interesting to poke around. I didn't get to Mandrake, but I spent an insane amount of time at K-Books. Which is actually broken up into several smaller stores along the same street. The best thing I found at the toy store part was a fully functioning replica of the State Alchemist pocketwatch from Fullmetal Alchemist. SO AWESOME, but sadly, not quite awesome enough to make me part with $200.
It's the comic part that ended up eating most of my afternoon. I've never seen more doujins in my life than I did at K-Books. They have a whole floor for new ones, then another whole floor for used ones that has almost every shelf crammed to capacity. The down side is that they're all sealed in plastic, so you can't actually look at them until you buy them. I was mostly only interested in gen (with a few exceptions made for rare and/or sufficiently weird-ass finds), but much like your average internet fandom, finding gen involves digging through 70% slash and 20% het. It's hit-and-miss, but at least there seems to be some kind of unspoken doujin artist code that gives the cover some clues about the actual content. Nice of them to gives the reader a sporting chance of figuring out whether it's a silly gag comic or loli catgirl bukakke tentacle rape.
I emerged with a pile of Phoenix Wright, Final Fantasy, Supernatural, and a few random weird finds. And down a few notches on the Faith-In-Humanity scale thanks to the existence of Anpanman yaoi and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory slash.
There's actually a fair amount of doujinshi out for certain western shows and movies, but I had no luck finding any Heroes doujins. Trust me, I looked. It's probably too soon, since they're only halfway through airing season 1 in Japan. Damn it, Japan, catch up! The western fangirls already have a head start on you. This time next year I DEMAND to be wading through a shelf of hilariously awful Petrellicest, keeping my eyes peeled for gag comics and cursing the lack of Sylar gen.
One last find in Ikebukuro: the butler café, Swallowtail. It's actually RIGHT below K-Books. I went in to check it out, but it turns out you need a reservation to get in. So I missed out on having cute guys in tuxes calling me "madam" and serving me tea and awesome desserts. Sadness. Swallowtail has two bakery-type stores in the area (staffed by women dressed as maids), so I was still able to buy a nice-looking pastry and some tea leaves for later.
When I made my way back to the train station, I got to move on to the "HOLY FUCKING HELL I HATE JAPAN!" portion of the trip. See, I was running a little low on cash by this point, even though I made a point of taking extra before I left home. So when I got to the Ikebukuro station, I decided I'd stop by a bank machine and get a bit of extra cash.
Now, if you're a foreigner, Japan hates you. Or at least, its government and technology does. There's the "all foreigners are terrorists, so we must fingerprint them!" debacle. There's the fact that I have to let people make photocopies of my gaijin card and passport just to do something as simple as get a membership card for an internet café or stay at a hotel. And there's the fact that if you don't have a Japanese credit card, you're fucked.
Yes, even though Japan is a cash-based society where most stores still don't accept credit cards or debit cards for payment, you need a credit card to actually GET cash out of a lot of ATMs or bank machines. And not just any credit card. Japanese credit cards only. I have a perfectly legitimate Japanese debit card for my bank account, and not a single machine would take it. I have a perfectly valid Canadian credit card that I never had any problem using when I was in England and Germany, and not a single bank machine or ATM would do anything but spit it back out at me with the machine equivalent of "SCREW YOU, GAIJIN".
After trying every bank machine in the station and getting nowhere, I consulted one of my guidebooks, and it claimed that post offices sometimes have bank machines that accept non-Japanese credit cards. Which didn't do me a whole lot of good, since (1) it was 8:00 Sunday evening and (2) Monday was a holiday, so they weren't going to be open. I ended up going back to my hotel and asking at the front desk to see if any of the staff could point me to a place to take out money. And God bless 'em, they went out of their way to help me out. One of them not only tracked down a bank machine for me (no idea how, but it might as well have been magic), he printed off a map for me and told me exactly how to get there. Which involved taking the subway a station or two down (yes, they're THAT rare) to get to the Nagatachō/Akasaka area and reach a 24-hour Citibank machine.
The station is a maze, and I managed to go out the wrong exit and walk in the complete opposite direction for a while. On the plus side, I got to see this hotel's Christmas lights.
Going back and taking the RIGHT exit this time, I finally found the bank machine. Despite its repeated attempts to thwart me (the door lock would only open for my DEBIT card, and the machine itself would only accept my CREDIT card), I finally managed to get some cash. VICTORY. And as a bonus, there was a nice Christmas light display in the courtyard of the office building beside it. For some reason, my best shot ended up being the one I took with my cell phone.
Some victory arms next to the Christmas tree. \o/
There wasn't much of the night left after that, so I just ended up searching the pedestrian back-streets in the area until I found a restaurant that was still open and didn't lie about being closed even though they were open for another hour. Ended up at an overpriced Italian place because it was either that, ramen, or McDonald's. Italian food is always a disappointment here, so in hindsight, I should have gone for the ramen. But whatever. I had cash, I ate something, and I got back to my hotel before the subways shut down, so that was as much of a victory as I was going to get.
Last picture of the day is from one of the subway platforms I waited around on the way back. I liked all the straight lines at this angle.
NEXT TIME: haircut, Christmas eve at Nakano, surly shrine security guards, and jugglers.