Dan and Jeff in Japan

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Dan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:45:48 +0000

We have returned home. We are very tired after a very long day.

Entering the final 24

Dan — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:11:41 +0000

Well, it’s 5:00 Saturday here in Japan. In 24 hours we should hopefully be getting ready for take-off for the long flight back to Canada. Since tomorrow is basically checking out and heading to the airport and waiting today is really the finale to our Japan trip. It has been a fitting finale. We got up and headed out for the Tokyo International Anime Fair. It was all our expectations and more. First off the line-up to get in was incredible. We got there about a half-hour before the show and the line was already stretching out of the building, down the concourse and around the corner for three blocks by the time we got to the end. Amazingly we were still near the beginning, after we had waited in line for a hour, made our way through the show for an hour and then exited the line was still all the way down the block. I believe they were projecting about 50,000 people to enter TAF on Saturday alone.

Anyways inside was naturally a massive audio and visual assault on the senses mixed with what got to be a crushing crowd. Imagine trying to listen to ten different songs at once and you just begin to get the idea of this place. Booths big and small were all over the place and many had large screens showing the latest anime, much of which hasn’t even come out in Japan yet. Jeff and I made the rounds, grabbed what free stuff we could and exited. The crowd was crushing and like I said, the line up to get in was still massive.

After that we returned to Akihabara and the hotel to drop stuff off. We’re going to do a final round of Akihabara and then probably call it a day. We’ll spend the evening trying to cram our vast anime haul into our luggage in prep for tomorrow’s journey.

Dan out

Trip to Japan: Endgame begin!!

bakablack — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:09:16 +0000

We’re down to just two days left and really only one day of doing anything fun. Saturday is the Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) and then Sunday is flying home…anyone who doesn’t know which is the fun day please refer to the early blog posts about our flight here.

Today wasn’t too exciting, we switched rooms, spent more money in Akihabara and that’s really about it. Dinner was a bit of an adventure. We went to the 8th floor of the Yotoboshi Camera for dinner and found a shabu-shabu place. Essentially for shabu-shabu, you have a pot of boiling water in the middle of your table in which you cook vegetables and in our case beef and pull things out as they’ve finished cooking. We probably provided entertainment to the Japanese folks at the restaurant as we really had no idea what we were doing. It’s essentially an all you can eat place. You get 90 minutes to eat as much as you can, they keep bringing the beef as you need it and you can help yourself to the veggies and noodles for the shabu-shabu. There was also rice and miso soup, but we didn’t bother with them, and ice cream for dessert.

Saturday is going to be a lot standing in line and walking slowly fight through crowds, but we should get to see of the new anime that is currently in production, and maybe find some anime related goods that we couldn’t even find in Akihabara. It’s not too likely, it is mostly a trade show, but still we hope.

Another day travelling alone

bakablack — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:41:46 +0000

Dan took the day to rest up his sore, tired feet, so I wandered up to the Imperial Palace and just around the Kanda region. Can’t say a lot for the Imperial Palace, they really don’t let you get too close. I was amused at the sight of 2 swans sleeping in the waterway bumping into one another and waking up abruptly, then quickly falling back to sleep. After seeing what I could of the palace I stopped of at Hibiya Park. Again, not a lot to see there, there were a lot of people sitting in the park sketching or painting something or other in the park. It’s a sight I’ve grown accustomed to seeing, it’s a rather common occurrence to see someone in a park or the sidewalk with a sketchbook in hand or behind an easel.

After Hibiya Park, I hopped on a subway up to Jinbocho, the used book district. I can’t say I’ve ever seen so many bookstores in such a small area before. I poked my head into a couple shops, but being unable to read Japanese made my chances of finding something to read very low. Some shops do have good sized foreign collections, but I had no idea which ones, and I don’t think any of the stores I ventured into had much to offer me. At this point I really had no other plans for the day, so I just kept walking the streets of Kanda looking for something interesting…and lunch, I was getting hungry by this point. You could tell which places were the popular ones, they had people lining up out front waiting to get in. I decided to try a burger place that claimed to have “the ultimate cheeseburger,” it seemed fairly popular (it had a small line) so I figured why not. Well, it wasn’t the ultimate cheeseburger, they actually used real cheese, which is always good, but the burger itself was lacking. They didn’t have any English on the menu, so I ended up just pointing to a random drink on the list. It turned out that I selected a chocolate milkshake…with ice. So the first part of the milkshake was very good, but by the end of lunch it was a bit watered down.

After lunch I found myself in the musical instrument district, much like Jinbocho, but instead of used book stores, musical instrument stores. I didn’t bother stopping in any of those stores. I crossed the river and passed by the Yushima Seido shrine. It was a nice small local shrine. There were some sakura trees nearby which hopefully made for some nice pictures. I also saw a yakimo truck in front of the shrine, which was really exciting. I really wanted to try a sweet potato cooked over coals, but he was just setting up, he hadn’t even started cooking any potatoes. I was crushed, but I continued on, I kept walking until I realized that I just walked by the Denny’s Dan and I went to breakfast at one morning and noticed I was back in Akihabara. My trip was a bit shorter than expected but I can’t really complain, Saturday is going to be really tough on the feet, so a couple of short days are a good thing.

Other things I tried today were, Sakura Mist (a drink by Canada Dry), which I believe was a cherry blossom flavoured ginger ale, very tasty. Bruschetta flavoured pringles (they taste more like spaghetti sauce) and some gourmet cheese flavoured pringles (parmesan cheese to exact, very yummy). Tomorrow is our day to buy the stuff we want from Akihabara before we leave, Saturday is the Tokyo International Anime Fair, then Sunday is the trip home. FYI for anyone who ever thought they had a long day, Sunday will be 38 hours long for Dan and I, I did the math.

Omikuji Video

Dan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:06:41 +0000

Some pics of Sensoji, Sumida River Cruise and from the Tokyo Tower

Dan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:33:40 +0000

Kaminarimon

Sensoji Shrine

Sumida River

Himiko Cruise Boat

Older, but better cruise boat

Tall Ship

Rainbow Bridge

Two views from Tokyo Tower

Ueno Zoo

Dan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:28:17 +0000

The day after Sensoji and the Tokyo Tower we headed out to Ueno to see the zoo. I have to admit that zoos are always a little mixed for me. It is really cool seeing such a wide variety of animals that you couldn’t see otherwise but I also can’t help but notice the cages and pens keeping the animals there. In the long run I hope that the benefits of educating and familiarizing the public with the wild animals of the world is ultimately for the greater good. As one would expect for anywhere in Tokyo the place was crowded. We were lucky enough to slip in by the back gate and get a look at some of the exhibits before the crowds got too intense but once we headed over to the eastern part of the zoo with the big exhibits like the pandas, lions, tigers and bears it was pretty crowded. Oh yeah, Giant Pandas are way over-rated as a zoo attraction. Red Pandas are much better.

and the Red Panda

A tour of Tokyo

bakablack — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:55:13 +0000

We finally got around to doing the whole tourist thing in Tokyo, visiting the Sensoji Temple, Tokyo Tower, and taking a river cruise down the Sumida River. It was a good day, lunch was at a curry shop while waiting for our boat to arrive. I had a croquette curry, essentially an oval plate half covered with rice, the other half with curry sauce and 2 potato croquettes on top. I can’t imagine a better way to have curry it was absolutely delicious. Dan had the pork cutlet curry, same thing expect replace the croquettes with a pork cutlet. Dinner was at an English pub we found nearby, I had the Chicken and chips with some garlic bread, Dan had some spicy french fries and a duck pastrami, both were good, but the portions were a little small.

We tried the Omikuji, at the temple. Numbered sticks are in a little barrel with a small hole, you shake the barrel until one of the sticks comes out. You then open the drawer with that number on it and take the fortune out to see what your future holds. I got regular luck, Dan got bad luck, so he tied the fortune to the rack provided to make it go away. The he went to one of the other Omikuji and got good luck. So we figure it should all balance out. I got a video of Dan’s second attempt but it’s a bit of a pain to put it up on this blog so you are stuck with my description of it.

Here are some more random pictures:

The sakura are just starting to bloom, they won’t fall until after we leave…too bad.

The Wind and Thunder gods at the Sensoji Temple:

A view looking down from the Tokyo Tower observation deck:

Hachiko in Shibuya

My feet hurt and some pictures from Tokyo

Dan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:50:20 +0000

Backstreet in Akihabara

Tora no Ana in Akihabara

Tokyo Dome

Shibuya

Defeated again by the rain

bakablack — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:55:08 +0000

With it being a rainy day in Tokyo we took shelter in Nakano Broadway, a four story shopping arcade, with a bunch of anime related stores, used cd shops and other related goods. We got there at about 10:00 am, but most of the stores didn’t open until noon. Fortunately there were a couple of arcades there. Most of games were pachinko or slot machines, so not really what we were looking for. We did try one of the crane games, to get a Yuki Nagato figure, but we both failed, after giving it several valiant tries. In the other arcade I found a taiko drum game. It’s a lot like guitar hero, but you hit a drum when it tells you, that killed about half an hour, and got us to about 11:00 when a few of the stores started to open. We search some of the used cd stores and found a few more albums to buy. When noon rolled around we hit the stores there pretty hard, and found a bunch of stuff that we hadn’t seen in other places. We spent about another 3 hours there. After a quick stop at the beef bowl for lunch and to the hotel to drop off our purchases we headed back out to do some more shopping. This time we went to Shibuya to the Oriental Bazaar and to Kiddy Land, and of course no trip to Shibuya would be complete without going to Shibuya station and seeing the station of Hachiko. A dog who saw his master off to work at the station, and came back to greet him every day, even after his master’s death. Hachi was often seen in the Super Gals anime, so it was something I really wanted to see. I don’t know if any of our pictures of Hachiko came out, we’ll see next time I get the pictures off my camera.