Robot Claw

The primary reason we’re staying in Kobe is an amusement park… that we discovered today is closed for maintenance for about a month. This wasn’t the case when we planned our trip, but it is what it is and we had to change today’s plans accordingly.

Our solution; Harborland, an entertainment/food/shopping complex. It was much bigger than we expected, with multiple several-story shopping centers and scads of restaurants, but our primary goal was the Ferris Wheel Mosaic.

Kristin rode it with me, which is notable since she’s usually a bit scared of these things. As it turned out this was an extremely stable wheel that turned so slowly there was little feeling of movement. The weather was lovely, the views were nice and it was altogether worth the ride.

That’s a photo from the very top. Kobe is a port and there were a lot of cruise ships and ferries docked. Soon we’ll be on one of them…

We did some shopping, ate many things and had a fun day. We’re in that phase of a vacation where you forget what day it is and you don’t set alarms anyway so it doesn’t matter.

Look at that ridiculous naan bread KLS was served with a vegetable curry bought at a random Indian restaurant we found in a basement dining area. Food is inexpensive here usually, but the weak Yen makes it an even better deal. Her meal (naan and curry, salad and iced tea) was only about US$6.

We also opened – a few days too early – a Fukubukuro (lucky bag)! We bought it at Lashingbang for ¥3000 (about $20) and it was said to contain ‘at least’ 50 items.

Here’s what was inside:

Lots of low Kuji prizes, promotional stuff and cards/stickers from wafer candy. A good chunk of this stuff was for series we’d never heard of, and some of it was over a decade old. We’ve been buying Fukubukuro for a few years now so we knew what (not) to expect and had a good chuckle at this pile of mostly garbage.

The above is what we kept, which meant 84% of the items in the lucky bag have now been trashed.

Should I buy another one?

We’re in Kobe now, after a short multi-train journey from Arima early today. We have a nice hotel room right in the main shopping district and here’s the view as I write this:

Kobe’s one of the biggest cities in Japan and known for its beef (amongst other things) but first on our list is to visit a location I daresay most foreign tourists haven’t ever heard of. I’ll let you wait until tomorrow to hear about it.

There’s a mall across the street from our hotel and the 2nd and 3rd floors are an otaku’s paradise with all manner of game/anime/figure/card shops. I’ve already bought some stuff but will certainly spent more time there these next few days.

That’s KLS eating a chocolate taiyaki from a shop near the station (show in the background). She said it was really good, like a crispy pancake with chocolate inside.

I didn’t take many photos today – I was overwhelmed by the otaku mall – so to end this post here’s a specific story about a gacha experience. It starts with this machine:

If you translate the Japanese it says something about the machine containing photos of “someone else’s dog” and to collect all 15. It was ¥300 (about $2) a go and with the intention of giving whatever it was to Sue I threw my coins in and turned the knob and this came out:

A small ball with an even smaller… photo inside. “Surely this isn’t it“, I thought, “surely it’s a sticker“.

It isn’t. It’s what appears to be a handmade and hand cut tiny photo of a dog. Again: it’s not a sticker, just a slightly poorly printed photo. It’s exactly as described: I paid $2 for a tiny photo of someone else’s dog!

I was tempted to just toss it away, but I bought it for Sue and by golly it’s going to Sue. I hope she likes it 🙂

Anime tourism has been a thing in Japan for decades now, and historically took the form of people visiting spots that had been featured in anime series. The tourist industry took note, and soon enough anime started to deliberately include certain locations, and eventually towns and districts even began funding their own anime for tourist reasons.

After Fukushima in 2011, a tourist group decided to help revitalize tourism in Japan via the creation of Onsenmusume, or ‘hot spring girls’. This combined anime girls, idol bands and tourism. They created characters based on certain locations in Japan, and used them for promotions and to attract tourists. This became a success and the number of characters increased to exceed 100 today. Most of the hot springs I’ve visited have had their ‘own’ hot spring girl, but Arima takes it to a new level since it seems to be not only the hot spring girl characters but also ones from the game/anime Love Live all around the town.

Life-sized standees in particular are common, and we’ve seen dozens of different ones in hotels, shops and shrines.

I’m not familiar enough with these characters to know if they’re from Love Live or not (but I suspect they are), but some standees seem hotel-specific which is to say the character seems to be assigned to a hotel. Here’s ours for instance:

The circular sign on the left shows the pin badge for this hotel, which features this character standing in front of the entrance. I’m sure many hotels here in Arima have their own custom badges with different girls.

I was reading that the use of anime girls to promote onsen tourism has been quite successful, and there are rules in place – such as no online sales of merchandise – that have helped. As a visitor it’s an unusual sight, since this town is very much about tradition and yet there’s anime girl standees all over the place!

One store has a little ‘shrine’ set up showing a vast range of keychains and character merchandise. None of it is for sale, but it’s a glimpse into the extent of this branding for almost 15 years now.

Apparently there are hot spring girls now in every prefecture and district in Japan. We’re going to another onsen in a few days. I wonder if they’ll have their own?