We woke so early yesterday! Our internal clocks have still not set themselves fully to JP time, so we were up and ready to start the day hours before the rest of this country was! It was raining in the AM as we left (at 6 o’clock) with our destination Asakusa. A lazy walk through Yanaka towards Ueno led us to Yamashiroya for breakfast.
< Yum!
Yes, beef bowl for breakfast. It was, of course, delicious, and I can assure those that have eaten at the chain elsewhere in the world that the JP version is far, far superior. We chose this place mostly because very few others (including coffee shops) were even open! Happily, it ended up being a great breakfast choice. JBF may want to know that, sadly, the Jonathons has closed…
Ueno park was quiet and very wet. We’ll be back here in on a sunnier day!
We hopped on a train to Asakusa (a few minutes away from Ueno on the Ginza line) and walked around the quiet streets for a while as the rain phased between hardly there and quite heavy. Much of the sights in this part of the city are outdoors, and we realized that it was wiser to change our plans to something more rain-friendly, and with that, at around 9, hopped on the train again with our destination Nakano Broadway mall in a suburb of the city named Nakano.
Nakano is one of Tokyo’s foremost otaku shopping destinations, and although we were perhaps expecting our descent into otakudom would wait a few days it would necessarily begin yesterday!
To the left you can see a Star Wars pachinko machine. The balls drop through the metal pins around and to the left of the video screen in the middle (where Yoda is). It’s hard to appreciate how interesting this device is from a single photo, but even so I didn’t play it. There still seems to be, in my mind, some sort of wall I must surpass to play pachinko! The other 2 shots are me playing Death Smiles 2, the (very) new Cave bullet-hell shooter. It was great, and I will play it again this trip!
Nakano is an interesting place. It’s as close to a traditional mall as we are used to in the US (or Australia), which itself is rare in Japan. And yet the ground floors are the usual food/clothing/etc shops and the upper floors (there are 4) are absolutely inundated with otaku shops selling games, manga, anime, model kits, all manner of weird toys and collectibles.
At most of these photography is forbidden, and I tried to observe that, but even so I managed to snap a few shots of particularly interesting stuff:
The leftmost photo shows an item I would so love to purchase! The legendary 1:1 scale Keroro Gunso action figure. A steal at $105 but big and heavy enough to make transporting it difficult (to say the least). Hrm… could I think of something I wonder? The middle shot shows the window display of one of the several cosplay stores in Nakano. These places sell premade (and highly detailed) costumes for dress-up purposes (to those assuming lewd intent – cosplay is the act of dressing up as characters from games and anime and is a wholesome and long-standing hobby in Japan). As you may imagine the employees of these stores are all cosplaying themselves, and maid outfits seemed popular yesterday. The rightmost figure is of Ulquiorra (sp?) from Bleach, or a ~15cm figure of him that stole our hearts briefly yesterday!
We made lots of purchases. Toys and cards and an astoundingly detailed and discounted Neo ZX-Tole figure from Guyver and even the most expensive PSP game I have ever bought (or will buy) – Wizardry Empire III (for ~$65). KLS bought a magazine that came with a free Le Sportsac purse. I bought a super sized Mt Dew to chase the last of the jetlag demons away!
< Went down well
Lunch was a Japanese restaurant at which KLS ordered chicken tonkatsu (aka ‘schnitzel’) on cold Udon noodles and I ordered grilled ‘Alaskan Salmon’. The fish was delicious but (amusingly and obviously in retrospect) full of bones which were tricky to remove with chopsticks alone!
< I didn’t eat the condiments!
Here are some more random shots from Nakano:
The leftmost shot is me failing to be as handsome as Bae Yong Joon from Winter Sonata (we’ve seen his face more than a few times already this trip). Here he is obviously selling glasses. The middle shot, taken in a drugstore, shows a range of hair dye for women branded with art by Ai Yazawa, creators of Nana and Paradise Kiss, amongst others. Many products sold in stores here use manga-style art on the packaging, and more than a few carry art by famous creators. The rightmost shot was taken in a bookstore and shows a piece of original art by Takeshi Obata. Although I can’t read the text, my guess it is some sort of thankyou to the store for selling a zillion copies of Death Note (from which these characters are taken). Such art is relatively common in shops here that sell manga, and it’s always a thrill to see when the artist is one we follow.
We spent hours at Nakano before heading back to the Ryokan to drop off our booty and go out again, this time to Ueno, for dinner and further exploration. It was fairly late now and night had fallen, so after a visit to the mega toy store Yamashiroya we had some quick KFC for dinner before visiting many game centers.
Intriguingly, although Sega seems to have closed their massive Joypolis complex in Ueno, many more arcades have sprung up including a fancy new Taito one (heavily branded with Space Invaders imagery). I’ll talk more about arcades in a future post (oh the sites I have seen!) but here’s a preview:
That gargantuan device on the left is one of those machines where you throw tokens in at a pile of tokens in an attempt to knock them into the collection bin. Yep, that’s all it is, although as you can see this one (called Galileo) is massive, multi-player and astounding in an impossible-machinish kind of way. The rightmost shot is me playing (selecting my character actually) Konami’s super high-rez Gradius spiritual successor named ‘Otomedius’ and featuring art by Mine Yoshizaki (Keroro Gunso mangaka). The game is awesome and I will certainly go back and play it again!
< KLS!
Nothing more than a lovely shot of KLS there.
I’ll end this post with two examples of the subtlety of the Japanese marketing machine:
The leftmost photo are weight loss pills. The rightmost image, taken in a KFC, is… well it’s sort of undefendably isn’t it? 🙂
I’ll have some of those weight loss pills please 😉