A WEEK IN JAPAN (part 2)
And so, the tale of the Tokyo trip continues.
Saturday
Cicadas were out in force, and even though it wasn't that hot, somehow gave the illusion of it being sweltering. Also, Japanese cicadas are surprisingly LOUD. Must have been registering around 80 decibels at a guess. o__o
First order of business on Saturday morning was Books Kinokuniya in Shinjuku. It is 9 stories of books. Spent most of the time in the artbook and design section, came away with a Kusanagi artbook and now deeply regret not purchasing the Summer Wars book when there. Did some window shopping in the ritzy department stores too. Window shopping is a lot more fun when you have displays like this one:
Truly, big cities are a different world.
My travelling companion wandered off to do her own thing unexpectedly at this point, so I headed to Ueno to take a wander around the National Museum, which is impressive in its size and variety of exhibits. I probably only saw a fifth of it before hunger drove me onward. Wandered to Yoyogi park next, where I sat with my curry rice to watch the crows cool off in the fountain and buskers perform. The weather was cloudy for most of the trip, but somehow, in this half hour of sunlight, I managed to get horribly sunburnt. Yay for moon tans.
Walked from Yoyogi Park to Shibuya station, and ate my second crepe of the trip - strawberries and chocolate this time. Caught the train to Ikebukuro from there. Look, Ultraman outside of Sunshine 60!
Enormous hit with the kids. Wasted some time in an arcade on skilltesters, before deciding to see a movie. Unfortunately, I bought a movie ticket for the wrong time. The tragic thing was, I didn't actually flub the Japanese when buying the ticket, I failed at 24 hour time! Oh, embarrassment. Finding myself with a good two or three hours to kill before the movie, so headed up to the Sunshine 60 observatory, even though I went there last trip. Surprise, another Naruto exhibit! They might as well just make it permanent!
Some different pieces of art from the tenth anniversary one in Odaiba, as well as a couple of Akatsuki statues which I couldn't get a photo of. Naruto cosplayers are clearly more opportunistic than Gundam ones, as a girl had brought an Akatsuki coat to take photos in front of the backdrop. It was a very quick and efficient process, appropriately shinobi-like in its execution.
After dinner in the observatory restaurant and thorough perusal of the exhibit (and hey, the twilight view of Tokyo was pretty nice too), it was finally time for the movie! The movie in question? Summer Wars.
This. And guys, it was fantastic. Same team who did the Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Animation was amazing, and it was the perfect balance of hilarious, sad, and dramatic. THE WORLD IS SAVED WITH HANAFUDA CARDS AND MATHS AND VIRTUAL MARTIAL ARTS! It's actually a pretty simple movie, but sort of difficult to explain, due to the duality of setting between the new form of internet and a traditional house in the countryside. I dare not say anything more, lest I spoil its brilliance. Can't wait until it's localised in... crap, Girl Who Leapt Through Time took forever. Hopefully this will be speedier.
Exhausted, I dragged myself back to the hotel at midnight after accidentally getting on an express instead of a local train. (Was staying in Sasazuka) Fail!
Sunday
Sunday was Akihabara day! And can you believe, I left my camera battery on the charger at the hotel! D: So you'll have to settle for description. Beware of the wall of text!
Naturally, shopping was the first order of business! Messe Girls Games was a delight, but we also found an entire building of awesome - GEE. Lower floor was entirely gashapon, subsequent levels had trade figures, t-shirts, cosplay, doujinshi - so much! I spent a lot of money there. o__o The top floor was a maid cafe 'Cure Maid', where we ate lunch. It was actually very relaxing! Very pleasant, quiet, peaceful atmosphere, with classical piano music playing in the background, good food, and excellent service.
Being Sunday, there were a heap of maids shilling their cafes out in the street, which makes for quite a spectacle. There was one from Mai Dream who was particularly aggressive, and after I took the pamphlet shoved into my face, she then followed us, giving us directions, telling us about how wonderful was - and that they even had an english menu! Of course, we'd just eaten at a rival cafe, so that was a bit awkward.
Speaking of awkward, after another couple of hours of shopping (and my third crepe), we went to a different cafe that my travelling companion was keen on - 'Queen Dolce'. It's actually a butler cafe. As in, the girls cross dress as butlers, and talk in masculine Japanese. Very gothic, red and black interior design, specialised in cocktails. Hard to tell who the target audience was - there were quite a few girls, but also some guys, and just to complete the circle, one cross-dressing guy in a straw hat.
It was pretty interesting experience, the 'butlers' were quite chatty, though they spoke too fast for me to really keep up, and was awkward mostly because it was crowded and we had to share a table. We didn't stay very long, and instead headed out to enjoy some arcades. I found a Tetris machine, and left behind a nice record at the top of the chart. I didn't have enough time to stay and try for an all-time record though. :( Only made it halfway.
Then we found a cosplay event! :O A COSPLAY EVENT, GUYS! And it's so true, Japanese cosplay makes us look so lame, there were so many eye-popping costumes, and the detail! And there I was without my camera! T__T Except you required some sort of green badge or permit to take photos, apparently, so maybe it was a good thing I didn't have my camera. There was a whole heap of Bleach cosplayers (a full set of Arrancar!), K-ON, Haruhi Suzumiya, Tales, and whole bunch of really beautiful ones which I didn't recognise. It was kind of brain exploding, there was so many fantastic cosplays per square metre. I could have just hung around watching for hours, but alas, we did have an event to get to in the evening. We made one last stop in Mandarake (a treasure trove, though a badly organised one), before heading to Ikebukuro again for Press Start 2009.
For those that don't know, Press Start is a games concert held annually in Japan, sponsored by Famitsu magazine. In keeping with the theme of the trip, it was fantastic, even though our seats were in the very last row. Luckily, it was the sort of venue where there were no bad seats (no right angles, high ceiling, good acoustics!). The set list went something like this:
Persona 4 suite (Velvet Room Theme, Reach Out to the Truth, Battle Theme) - I nearly cried hearing this performed live with a full orchestra. Particularly the Velvet Room - the singer hit every note pitch-perfect, after this Shoji Meguro needs to release an orchestrated album. I spent every second drinking in each note, heavy with the knowledge I could only hear it once. ;___; They interviewed Shoji Meguro himself afterwards, and he was excited enough that just maybe it could happen! (On a side note, the guest list was something incredible. Shoji Meguro, Masao Sakurai, Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu - and those were just the ones I recognised!)
Super Mario Medley - these are ubiquitous to game concerts. Excellent, of course, but I will not waste words on a staple.
Kamaitachi no Yoru - obscure old Japanese game, never heard of it before but lovely music.
Suikoden suite - particularly brilliant, an adaptation of the early NES/SNES game music, now I have to try and track down an orchestrated album, dammit.
Famicon Medley - this one was interesting, in that they only played very short snippets of music from various popular famicon series, from Zelda to Dr Mario to Sonic, and the idea was that the audience was supposed to guess and start clapping along once they figured it out. Except I kind of wanted them to play the full versions of all the themes!
Portal, Still Alive - sort of weird hearing this one in Japanese, even if they did a fantastic job of converting it. What on earth would GLaDoS sound like in Japanese? I guess now I know.
Intermission, then...
Okami - really neat, especially since they brought out a pan flute player and a guy who played the koto like a rockstar.
Ace Combat Zero - I'd heard this game has fantastic music, but hadn't heard any before now, and find myself suddenly desiring to track down the soundtrack even though I have zero desire to play the game itself. This is also included in Eminence's Night in Fantasia 2009 setlist, so that's something to look forward to.
Rhythm Heaven - As befitting a piece taken from a rhythm game, they actually made this one interactive. They used the ninja game, and had some sticks and tamborines and whatnot. Nobuo Uematsu and another one of the guest composers, I think it might have been Sakurai, came out, selected some people from the audience, and took turns playing white ninja and black ninja. Uematsu is a surprisingly funny guy! He did a little dance for each move, and then abandoned the sticks altgoether and used his voice, to the horror of the volunteer. XD For the third round, they had the audience clap. A surprisingly interactive concert overall, now I think about it.
Fantasion - another old obscure Japanese game, this one was kind of average, not sure why they chose it.
Tales of Destiny - Tales Of games generally have pretty good music, if a little generic. Compared to the masterpieces of the first half, I was a little underwhelmed by this one.
BUT THEN. THEN, FOR THE ENCORE, THEY PLAYED THE MAIN THEME OF FINAL FANTASY X!
FINAL FANTASY X! I nearly cried. ;___; Normally when they perform FF music live, they go FFVII, VI, or one of the earlier games, and very occasionally the Sending theme from FFX. BUT THE OPENING THEME! It was beautiful. And I felt vindicated in my prediction that they had to play some Final Fantasy music, since they had Uematsu as a guest, and not playing FF music when he was there would just be rude.
Then, for an extra encore, A KIRBY MEDLEY OMG ALSKFJDSLKFJ. BRILLIANT. It stayed in my head for days. I am sort of sad that it's finally disappeared from my brain!
Floated away from the concert on a high not quite as cloud nine as Tenimyu, but somewhere in the upper atmosphere none-the-less. Back at the hotel, watched some TV, and saw a weird program called 'The Post-Man'. People write to show asking them to find old acquaintances they've lost contact with and want to find again - usually for some heart-warming reason like wanting to thank them for something they'd done for them in the past, or to give them some good news. This sometimes takes them all over the world! Has anyone else heard of this before? It was actually a pretty neat show in all, and I wouldn't mind watching that sort of thing here, except I doubt we'd manage to attach the same sort of epic music for relatively mundane matters the way the Japanese do so shamelessly. Am sort of tempted to find and download more of it.
Monday
Even though I'd been to Ikebukuro twice before already, Monday was officially 'Ikebukuro Day'. Unfortunately, we got there way too early, and nothing was open yet (you can forget anything in Tokyo being open before 10, sometimes 11). Fortunately, Tokyu Hands bucked this trend, so we spent a while in there. It's kind of a department store, except it carries everything except food and clothes. We found novelty toilet paper! Including one which the author of 'The Ring' had written a novel on, called 'Drop'. I wound up buying that as well as the one with 100000 yen notes printed on it.
Things finally started opening, so, in keeping with our 'let's go into every weird cafe we find' directive, we went to a CAT CAFE.
Yes indeed. A cafe, of cats. Specifically, Cat Cafe Nekorobi.
You pay a cover charge, and you get unlimited drinks from the machine, and can then play with the cats, pet them, or just watch - whatever you want. The cats themselves are the most pampered creatures in existence, and do pretty much whatever they want, and this includes ignoring you. There was a kid there who had serious cat toy technique, though, and managed to rouse them from their disinterest. We arrived there right on feeding time:
It was maybe one of the most overwhelming cute experiences of my life. I could see this being a huge hit in any capital city where you get a lot of people unable to own pets.
After the cat cafe, we went to go see the new Evangelion movie, 'You can (not) advance'. (Skip the following paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers). It was spectacular on the big screen, except they've completely thrown away canon on these remakes, but can you even say that when the original people are remaking them? In any case, they skipped a bunch of angels, introduced a whole new character, Kaworu turns up really early, and Asuka and Toji's roles in particular have been completely messed up! Not necessarily in a bad way, but it mostly just made me want to watch the original series again. I'm liking what Shiro Sagisu has been doing with his music lately, though.
One hilarious note was that apparently now even Gainax is thinking of fangirls, with an unexpected Kaji/Shinji moment. As Kaji said, 'Eye service'. XD
After the movie, the true highlight - Otome Road. K-Books was first! I found the first Eyeshield21 OST for only 420yen. So cheap! That's like $5!
After scouring K-Books for bargains, it was on to Animate headquarters. And they were having a Gintama event on the top floor!
I swear, I tripped over anime exhibits ever time I turned around. So awesome. You weren't allowed photos of most of the exhibit (consisting largely of original animation stills and artwork), but they had a cool collection of top-of-the-line cosplay!
A great deal of money was spent in Animate. Picked up Natsume Yuujinchou doujinshi! And a heap of soundtracks and character goods. Animate is such a dangerous place for my wallet.
After a good two hours scouring Animate, we headed out to find this cosplay speciality store. Sorry for the blurry photo - but Code Geass costumes! Incredible Code Geass costumes. I was so close to buying a Zero costume. ;___;
We were sort of tired by that point, so headed back to the hotel a little earlier. And lo and behold, the Yamanote line we caught back, was covered with Pokemon.
A Pokemon train. The entire outside plastered with Pokemon images. The entire inside plastered with nothing but Pokemon ads. Even the screen above the door that played advertisements only played Pokemon trailers. Nintendo owned this train. And the kids LOVED it. Every kid under eight who saw it practically exploded with delight. The platform was filled with cries of 'Pokemon' and 'Pikachu'!
No wonder it continues to sell millions every year.
One last note for the day - back at the hotel, I drank Final Fantasy Dissidia potion! The can is so beautiful.
Surprisingly tasty! Wasn't sure after the first few sips, but by the end of the can I wanted more. Maybe there are secret ingredients. Either way, my HP and MP were restored. Tragically, I had already paid for the Inn.
This post has become kind of huge, so that's it for now. I'll post the rest of the photos and stories tomorrow maybe.