I am sitting in a manga kissaten (manga cafe), side by side with
telophase,
bravecows, and
sho-sunaga, all of us typing away on our respective LJs. It is a great moment in the history of geekdom, especially since it is the culmination of a day which also included manga-shopping, doujinshi-shopping, and a dinner in which we regaled each other with tales of how we discovered slash, fic, and fandom.
Meeting
bravecows and
sho-sunaga was definitely one of the best bits of Worldcon for me. I think some of you know the former already, but the latter is newish to LJ; she is a Japanese fan who is into manga, SGA, Supernatural, Sentinel, Star Trek,, and fic.
Today, after a brief stop at an English used bookshop, Good Day Books in Ebisu (where Stephanie was briefly trapped in the elevator), we met up at the statue of Hachiko the loyal dog at Shibuya station, along with approximately one thousand others attempting to meet friends at the same coordinates.
We went to a bookshop, where I bought several copies of Saiyuki Gaiden 3 and was irritated that many of
sho-sunaga's favorite manga have not yet been translated into English, and where
telophase bravecows bought bilingual Tale of Genji manga.
Then we went to Mandarake, a massive doujinshi shop, where
bravecows talked me into buying a mysterious doujinshi with the subtitle "The love between an animal and a plant," from the RPS section-- I think it might be Russell Crowe/Paul Bethany.
telophase made an astonishing find, detailed on her LJ.
Then we proceeded to an izakaya, where I had a lychee soda, and we all had a fantastic appetizer of Vietnamese/Japanese/California spring roll sushi-ish thingies, before proceeding to sashimi, fried chicken wings, soup with noodles and cabbage, and oyakodon (chicken and egg over rice). It turns out that me and both had original Trek as one of our first fandoms, and discovered slash when searching for it online.
bravecows, the baby of the group, began with Hanson fic at the tender age of ten!
sho-sunaga showed us some downloaded manga she can read on her cellphone (which also connects to the internet.) When it gets to the rape scene, the phone vibrates!