I arrived in Japan late last night. The flight was uneventful (aside from the fact we flew over the Mariana Trench) and navigating the airport and getting to the hotel (by taxi) were both easy.
My room is comedically small, but as with most things in this country it’s a marvel of efficiency and I know I’ll be comfy here during the ten days of this stay.
The hotel is in Akihabara on the river, and there’s a shrine right next door. This lovely fellow greets visitors to the shrine, and as you can see it was raining quite heavily both last night and this morning. I was jet lagged and very tired (I only got a few hours sleep) so today I visited Ikebukuro since I know the area well and knew it would be a less-hectic destination.
But first… I had to eat! I was still on Australian time and famished by the time Saizeriya opened at 10 am and I shoveled spaghetti into my mouth like a beast. I was still not feeling great at this point (from the flight) but I don’t exaggerate when I say the spaghetti energy was like a full life recharge and I left that place a new man!
What followed was a pleasant several hours otaku shopping in the many shops in Ikebukuro. I visited the enormous gacha machine shop, various game and anime stores, some character shops (Rilakkuma, Kamen Rider) an old candy shop and of course several game centers. Most of these I’ve been to – and described on this blog – before, so I won’t go into detail again.
The retro game shop Super Potato is world famous, and in my opinion their better store is the one in Ikebukuro. And yet whenever I visit I’m the only one there – compared to the Akihabara branch which is always mobbed. Once again today I goggled at the items in the cases, the prices on which just continue to rise as the hobby increases in popularity. Even though I sold out of all my non-handheld games, I still love looking at the rarities.
I was particularly thrilled to see The Black Onyx. This nearly 40-year-old game (the above is a 1987 port for a Sega console) is arguably the grand-daddy of all Japanese RPGs and went on to influence many other games including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. It’s never been released in English which is unusual since it was actually written by an American. I’d never seen a copy before today, and would dearly love to play it one day.
A bit later in the day, on my way back to the train station, I visited Mikado, a game center specializing in retro video games (on original hardware). This place was incredible! Across three floors they have many dozens of retro arcade games going all the way back to the 1980s. While clean and well-kept, the building and interior have a bit of a grimy vibe to them, and when you step inside you feel like you’ve stepped back in time. The dimly-lot basement in particular was astounding: full of old men smoking whilst playing mahjong games with ‘questionable’ graphics! I played two somewhat ‘famous’ games I’ve never seen before, Dancing Eyes and Gals Panic 4, before the smoke chased me out 🙂
The new Animate mega-store opened since we were here in January and it’s very impressive. It has eight large floors of anime/otaku merchandise and there’s a good chance of you’re a fan of any current series there’s a whole swathe of merchandise in here for you. I didn’t have the time to look at every floor (or even half of them, this place is massive), but I was taken by a giant range of cookies on the ground floor. So I bought one:
The cookies feature extremely detailed printing onto the icing, and there were dozens (over a hundred even?) available. I chose this character from Granblue Fantasy and when I tried it after dinner was surprised to find it was very hard. As in a-bit-hard-to-bite hard! The icing was super solid and the cookie more like an iron ration. Are these designed to be eaten or collected? I’ll never know 🙂
I saw lots more than I’ve covered here (I’ll save Ultraman for another day for instance) but suffice to say this trip has started strong. Tomorrow I’ll change tack a bit, and show you something new. Stay tuned!