I speedran Akihabara this morning, spending every last minute buying stuff to fill the suitcases.
Lunch was (as predicted) sushi again. I discovered the joy of ‘hamburger steak sushi’ which I’ll surely be eating again one day!
No more delays: we’ve boarded and will soon be headed home. Goodbye again Japan; as always it was wonderful 🙂
Due to a flight delay, we’re still here! In fact our entire itinerary was pushed back 24 hours, but we were lucky to find out early enough that our room remained available for another night (for about $150). So we had an extra day in Tokyo!
We decided to visit the planetarium in Ikebukuro to watch a show called The Fantastic Night A Cat Showed Me The Stars. We were offered English language devices, but opted out since we wanted to just relax to soothing Japanese voice over and images.
And relax is what we did! The above pic was taken before the show proper begins, and you can see they were projecting cats onto the dome for the pre show. The actual presentation seemed to tell a story of a cat describing some unusual constellations (including milk!) and was every bit as ‘peaceful’ and ‘healing’ (as the Japanese say) as we expected. It’s almost certain, in the dark room with projected stars and whispering voices, that I fell asleep multiple times 🙂
Afterwards we went looking for the new Ultraman pachinko machine with no success. It had been a few years since we’d gone into a pachinko parlour and we were surprised to see almost every machine these days is licensed, with loads of various series represented. The machines are elaborate as you can see, but we didn’t play any since they didn’t take cash.
We explored a few more game centers…
Failed to win anything on crane games…
But had a great time with a brand new IC-card Kamen Rider game. I played this one a few times to get more cards and got a double of what I assume is a chase card. I’m sure I’ll play this again in the future.
Dinner was sushi (which will probably be lunch tomorrow as well) and then it was time to retire and end our extra day.
In spite of the delay, and despite the rain (the only poor weather we’ve had this trip) we made the most of this unexpected extra day. This time tomorrow, I’m sure we’ll actually be flying home 🙂
That’s a vintage Star Wars figure, carded, in fantastic condition for ‘only’ about $190 US dollars. If this had been R2D2 then I wouldn’t have hesitated to buy it for this price, which is much less than it would typically sell for in the west.
That’s a Five Star Stories model kit for ¥55,000, or about $350 US dollars. This is of course a professionally assembled and painted example, but if I were to buy the kit I’d hardly be able to make it much less paint it, and I’d be out $350!
This is one of the weird things about shopping the otaku shops here: the prices. Occasionally items that seem like they should be expensive aren’t at all, and then you see things you’d imagine were basically trash that are for sale at insane prices (such as a single Danganronpa trading card we saw today for ¥10,000).
After a quick trip to Shibuya to get KLS a new release cosmetic (which released today!) we returned to Akihabara for the usual hijinks, and were out after dark visiting the arcades and finishing our shopping.
It’s always a struggle of space and weight, shopping here, and yesterday I saw an item with a box larger than our suitcases and I actually spent some time theorizing how to buy it and get it home. Ultimately reason prevailed!
At the last minute I saw a wonderful Zoffy figure that I ‘needed’ but it was used and unboxed, so I began a mad scramble around Akiba once again to find a new version. While I would ultimately not succeed, it was during this adventure that I discovered an even better Zoffy figurine I hadn’t even known existed:
It’s big, and so is the box, but it’s now packed 🙂
Since we’re going home tomorrow this will be the last blog entry from this trip. I’m sure once we’ve had a chance to unpack and unwind I’ll post about some of my pickups, but for now I’ll sign off from this, my 16th visit to Japan!
The gacha machines are still everywhere, and the variety continues to astound. Here’s a random collection of examples I took photos of.
An LCD game, tiny models of tissue and toilet paper, and mushroom accessories for your ear. We saw a girl feeding money into the middle machine to get 3 or 4 capsules. I wonder what she was after?
The cigarette one is a mystery; why would you want a mini cigarette model? For that matter why would you want cats modeled as shoes or tiny plastic pipes? There’s many machines containing unusual items like these.
Figurines of MEGAN (from the film), tiny model routers and very unusual large-headed… fruit zombies?
Game and anime based machines are of course very popular, like this Fire Emblem one. Machines based on western properties are rarer, but you occasionally see Star Wars or Marvel examples. We only saw the R2 one once (in Nagoya) so I bought two capsules from it. We often don’t open the capsules until we return from the trip, to extend the surprise.
The middle one seemed to contain tiny printouts of cat photos, as if someone had just made them at home and stuck them in capsules. A mystery!
I saw the above yesterday, and it translates to ‘Pasta recipes written by cute girls. Truly handwritten!’. I’m a sucker for these super weird types of machine, and had to put ¥200 in to see what I got.
That’s what came out: a piece of paper folded up and placed in a capsule. I opened it and translated it and here it is:
It seems ‘Honoka’ wrote this tuna and corn pasta recipe herself, so feel free to make it if it sounds good to you 🙂
It’s the final days and we’re waking tired. It’s time to cross off the remaining things on our ‘lists’, which basically means shopping and game centers!
We returned to Ikebukuro and there was some sort of cosplay event on – we saw people (almost exclusively girls) in full costume everywhere. I noted elaborate uniform cosplay seemed to be very popular, and some of the outfits were amazingly detailed and would have taken vast amounts of work. We visited a cosplay shop and the above pic was the wig section, showing all the colours you can order wigs in. I saw a girl with a photo of 2B (from Nier) trying to pick the correct colour 🙂
And that’s just a selection of the available contact lenses. If you look closely you’ll see many have dark rims around the edge, to make your eye more resemble a drawn anime eye. Some even have white rings at the edge to make your pupil smaller (to make girls look more like boys). The selection is so vast it would be a challenge to choose!
We returned to Akiba and I went to play games while Kristin visited a cat cafe. She said there were more than twenty cats, but it was late in the day and they were full of treats so they didn’t mob her when she purchased a lollipop for them.
The cats roam free in a large room but she said they all had aloof attitudes since they were sick of people! They were all very cute though.
She was there for feeding time, where the cats all line up next to each other for their food. Again, since it was late in the day they weren’t super enthusiastic and lost interest quickly. You’d want to go for the morning feed to see this at its best.
I finally got around to packing, which took me many hours but revealed we’ve still got some space left. I’m sure we’ll try to fill it tomorrow!