Wow, I thought I’d posted the end for this long and strange adventure already but I guess there were some technical issues with the upload…. Well, second time’s the charm. When we last left our traveling gaijin he’d finished a long day wandering Shimokitazawa ending with a near mental breakdown in Shibuya. I’d purchased tickets to go the the Ghibli Museum along with my friend for my last day, the plan being to hit up Akihabara after the museum and then end the evening packing and getting ready to depart. The plan was slightly changed after I’d managed to score a sweet Combattler V JM for Alt, we decided to meet up with him as his office was located within walking distance to the Ghibli museum. We left Utsunomiya early to meet up with him. Of course it decided to rain that day, though luckily it wasn’t much more than a constant sprinkling. after an uneventful train ride we met up with Matt. introductions were exchanged and we started off to grab a quick bite so yen and jm’s could be exchanged. I’d been eating JP food most of the trip so we settled on burgers. During the walk we chit chatted about the local history, Matt pointed out buildings where various anime production houses were once located and he gave us a sneak peak at his latest book. A short walk later we arrived at our lunch destination and ordered, I of course got the mondo mega burger with extra bacon (mmm) and fries.
for some reason I was given mayo to dip them with… weird.
To quote a great man, it was a tasty burger. Before the food arrived and we got greasy we came to the main event, the unveiling of the Combattler V. Till now Alt had only seen a small somewhat grainy picture on my camera in a dimly lit Okinawa restaurant. But looking at it I’d say he was happy with this exchange.
We kapt babbling away, chowing on bacony cow goodness.
Take note of the dude behind Matt wearing the used cub scout uniform, apparently that’s one of the new clothing trends in the area there…Yeah, Japan can be weird… Alt brought a couple things with him for me to check out. One was a copy of Hello please! signed by Matt and Hiroko, an awesome surprise for sure! Also he brought one of the first dead presidents half spray Nekos, totally killer piece.
So, While Alt and I babbled on my friend just sorta sat there, getting into the conversation from time to time, but I do feel kinda bad about how it went. I think you can get an idea as to what her mental state was by this time from this shot here.
We checked the time and had about an hour to kill so we did some more wandering. Matt stopped to show us a Fugu restaurant, of course I had to get a shot with the famously deadly deadly fish.
Ahh look out it’s ghost alt trying to get us from the fish tank! Now even though I was gonna be hitting up Akiba later that night, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to go to another toy shop so we headed over to Toy Cats showcase.
It’s an awesome shop, very open and well set up, it has this total funky industrial feel to it. Unfortunately we were on a time crunch so I wasn’t able to to much digging here, but as I said it was a very cleanly set up shop, not like you really need to do any digging.
As Luck would have it they had a Tomy Giant Robo poly figure which I was able to snag for a decent price, it seemed like fate since I’d already gotten the GR2 at Godzilla Ya. We looked around a bit more and headed out, grabbing my friend who was sitting outside waiting for us (as she put it, she was sick of looking around in toy shops at this point) to head over to the Ghibli Museum, stopping to take one final farewell shot.
We took a shortcut through the park there (forgot the name d’oh) and made our farewells. I won’t get too much into the Ghibli Museum here as this is a TOY brog, but I will say that if you ever get the chance to go there DO IT. The place was amazing… I had been a bit worried as I’d heard from a couple places this it was mainly for little kids but it can’t be further from the truth, tons of interactive exhibits, early production sketches, story boards, scripts, original cels, a built in theater and the architecture of the building was breathtaking in places. Being an obedient tourist I followed all the no photograph signs there so I don’t really have much to post here.. Like I said, if you have the opportunity to go, you should, granted getting the tickets can be a pain (have to go to lawson’s and buy the tix in advance etc ect) but it’s worth it. At this point the trip as a whole was taking a toll on me, between the constant stress and excitement, the cold/rainy weather and lugging bags of shwag I was about ready to keel over. We got to Akiba and I’d say we spent maybe an hour there. One problem was that we didn’t get there will 8pm-ish and alot of the shops had already closed. I saw the maid cafe gals handing out flyers in the rain, many of them with eyes filled with misery, fake giggly grins plastered on their faces as handlers watched from the sidelines (most likely to protect them from being kidnapped by weird otaku). I got a shot next to an awesome Great Mazinger statue.
We walked onward, I took a few pics, stuck my head into a couple arcades, dropping about 800 yen into a couple ufo catchers. By now my funds were just about 100% depleted but I’d managed to get just about everything on my wish list for this trip.
I stuck my head into toys golden age. I could tell it was a good shop at one point but it was rather cramped, stuff was piled up, but not as “nicely” as the other shops I’d been in, and the prices overall seemed a bit on the high side for stuff that wasn’t in all around very good shape (but again by this time I was dropping dead on my feet so my opinions of the shop could be a bit skewed because of this).
I asked about a couple remaining grails for the heck of it but was met with shakes of the head from the shop keeper there. Oh well. More aimless wandering, saw the Gundam Cafe.
We would have gone inside, but the thought of waiting in a long line to pay a $15 cover only to drink expensive gundam themed drinks surrounded by otaku and gundam kits was a bit eh by this point… In retrospect I could have planned the trip a bit better, I really would have wanted to see akiba during the day on a weekend to get the total feel of it. Oh well, just an excuse to make another trip I guess. After another long train ride back to Utsunomiya came the final cursed trial of this adventure…. packing…… You’ve all seen the score pile I’d posted before so you can imagine it was a feat to get everything to fit. I had 3 suitcases to get everything into but after a ton of shifting and puzzling and flattening of boxes and combining of items I managed to get it all to fit, not only that everything was packed such that when I got home nothing was mangled/crushed or smashed! I don’t remember falling asleep by this point but I do remember waking up the next day. Headed off to Narita with my friend tagging along to extend the farewell a few hours more and also to have a spare set of hands to carry luggage. Narita is a very pretty airport, very easy to navigate and the security there was smooth sailing (didn’t have to remove my shoes or get my pop bottle x-rayed w00t). I still had some time to kill and knew there was one last thing I had to do before I left Japan… I had to have one more fried apple pie….mmmmm
It was a blast of a trip… I won’t ever forget the memories I made and the fun times I had. I would have done a couple things different of course but it’s all part of the learning process. Thanks for sticking with the story y’all, hope you all enjoyed it. I’ll leave you with the final shot from the trip, my last view of Japan before I set off across the pacific back to reality….
-End
