EPIC Japan trip report

[wednesday_10_00]

Okay, let's face it: this trip could be summed up with "shopping, shopping, shopping, a little fangirling, shopping and shopping." But you guys asked for it, so here it is.

Dec 26/27 (Wed/Thurs)
After spending most of Christmas frantically packing, doing laundry, cleaning my room (I hate coming home to a mess), and sorting through some manga I was thinking about taking to sell for a few pennies, I got up at the crack of still-pitch-black so I could get to the airport in time for my 6:00 am flight. (Oh, the things I will do to arrive early enough to make it to Tokyo before the stores close...) As I waited for my flight to Chicago, they announced that our flight was going to be delayed by at least an hour and a half, which meant missing my connection. So I headed up to the ticket counter (with nearly everyone else on my flight) to get rescheduled. As it turned out, I was able to get on a direct flight from Chicago (rather than flying through Dallas, which I hadn't wanted to do anyway) and only arrive an hour later than my original schedule. However, this did mean I needed to get a hold of spacealien_vamp, who was planning on meeting me at the airport. So I coughed up the $8.00 fee to use the airport's wireless service and sent an e-mail. My flight was unremarkable, I made it through customs fine (fingerprints and all) and found SV [what can I say, I'm way too lazy to type LJ tags for this whole thing] waiting for me. I had expected mangaroo to be there, too, but it turned out that her flight had been delayed, so we hopped on the bus that would take us to the Sunshine City Prince Hotel, our home for the next week. (The Sunshine Prince is located in Ikebukuro, and is directly adjacent to Otome Road. Several times when talking to former students and coworkers, I would be asked why we were staying in Ikebukuro, and I would patiently explain that Akihabara was for boy nerds and Ikebukuro was for girl nerds.)

I will distract you from the boring text with pretty pictures (Pictures are all links to bigger versions.)

The view from our hotel room	New Years decorations in Ikebukuro

After what seemed to be a very long bus ride (we got stuck in traffic a lot), we arrived, unloaded our luggage, and headed out for the first shopping. We went to Animate first, looking for a Comiket catalogue, but were unsuccessful...though I did manage to pick up a bag full of magazines. We then headed down the street, stopping next at Rashinban La Shin Bang the store next door, when we saw that they had a couple copies of the CD ROM version of the Comiket catalogue left. We were shopping at K-Books when SV's cell phone rang. After some minor confusion, we met up with sara_tanaquil. (There was some more shopping in there somewhere while we were all split up. Hey, you can look for friends anytime, but you can only shop while the stores are open.) By the time the three of us hooked up, the book stores were all closed (it will forever remain a mystery to me why so many stores in Japan close at 8:00), so we then proceeded to head to various convenience stores in the area attempting to find some konbu onigiri, which I was dying to eat. After our first store, we ran into M, who was also looking for dinner, so we dragged her off on our quest. We struck out at the second store, but then we discovered that the Sunshine Prince (best hotel EVAR) went and built a Family Mart practically in their lobby. So I got my konbu onigiri and nori potato chips and we headed up to our room (or rooms, rather, since it was two connected doubles) to have dinner. For dessert we had the Christmas cake that SV had thoughtfully bought for us, which was delicious, although problematic to eat as we had no plates or forks. (Use tea cups and chopsticks instead? Don't mind if we do!) I think it wasn't too long after that that we crashed (seeing how some of us had only slept a few hours the past two days).

Christmas cake!	We ♥ Family Mart

Dec 28 (Fri)
We all woke up pretty early (yay jet lag!) the next morning, and at some point got hungry and wandered down to the conbini, where I happened to discover tofu cream bread, which is just what it sounds like: tofu bread filled with tofu cream. It's pretty amazing, let me tell you, and became a regular breakfast staple for the rest of the trip. After breakfast we played with the Comiket CD ROM and strategized about the next few days. We'd been planning to go all three days of Comiket, but it turned out that nearly everything we wanted was on Sunday. So we made Saturday a "practice day," (for those in our party who had not experienced Comiket before) and decided to forego Monday entirely. Aww, no train porn for us. The problem with the CD ROM version of the catalogue is that there aren't any handy maps included; you're meant to print them out from your computer. Which is fine if you HAVE a printer, but of course we didn't. We decided to hook my laptop up to the printer in the lobby to print out the maps later in the evening. (I of course, was not there that evening, so the tale of that little adventure is not mine to tell.)

Once the stores had opened (at 11:00, though we later discovered that Animate now opens at 10:00) we headed out to start the REAL shopping. After some heavy damage at the K-Books manga branch (where we discovered you only get the free prizes [this year's free prize was a deck of cards with illustrations by popular BL mangaka, which we dubbed "porn cards"] if you use cash, not credit card) and doujinshi branch, we headed to the Sunshine City mall for lunch at Miami Garden (which I mention by name only because I've eaten there a million times but can never remember the name). There, our unfortunate waitress proceeded to make seemingly as many mistakes as possible during the course of our meal. My personal favorite was how, after I asked, repeatedly, if she was sure there was no bacon or ham in the pasta I was ordering, and she reassured me that there wasn't (I was sure there was because I've ordered it before, but hey, it had been almost two years since I'd been there), my pasta arrived with generous portions of ham. (Oh Japan, did you miss me and my crazy ordering of pasta with no meat?)

After lunch we lounged in the hotel room a bit, and then I headed off to Chiba to see some of my students, while the other shoppers went off to play at Mandarake. It was fun seeing my students and they treated me to a delicious dinner at a tofu restaurant. On the train back to Ikebukuro, I got a call on my (rented) cell phone from a student in my other class (I had two conversation groups), asking me if I'd be able to visit them in Chiba on Saturday, which I (stupidly, perhaps) agreed to do. Back in Ikebukuro, I meant to collapse into bed right away, as I was pretty tired, but somehow ended staying up late talking to M and ST. (Okay, now I know that was stupid.)

Dec 29 (Sat)
Our "practice" day at Comiket. We were there purely for Phoenix Wright and Odoru Daisousasen. After conquering these sections (located conveniently on opposite sides of Big Sight), we decided to check out the corporate booths, which was unfortunate because apparently so had everybody else in Tokyo. We decided that nothing could possibly be worth this sort of shoving and trampling and left as soon as we found the exit (so please nobody tell me about how they were giving out free pirate porn and I missed it).

Random weird art(?) at Big Sight

I think we all felt pretty much exhausted at this point, so we headed back to Ikebukuro for lunch and (what else?) more shopping. At this point, I remember feeling ready to take a nap, but instead it was time for me to head off to Chiba for dinner again. I really enjoyed seeing my students (and having yet another tofu dinner), but I was completely exhausted after about an hour with them. I hung in for about another hour, but they could tell I was tired (I know I could tell because I was finding myself increasingly unable to understand a word anyone said to me) and let me head back. I think there was a little last-minute strategizing for our big day and then we all hit the sack.

Dec 30 (Sun)
Alas, M woke up with food poisoning (from the evil Mexican restaurant to which we will never go again) and was much too ill for Comiket, so the remaining three of us headed out. We arrived about two hours before it opened, but I discovered an added bonus of bringing a suitcase to haul doujinshi and spent most of the time in line sitting on that and playing Phoenix Wright. We had done a LOT of strategizing and planning for this day, so we were mostly successful, with the major disappointments being: 1. Matsuoka Natsuki sold out of one of the doujinshi I wanted from her (not the newest one, but the one before that, which was almost more disappointing to me as the newest one is supposed to be a direct sequel). Why didn't I go there fiiiiirst? T_T 2. I didn't wait in the ridiculously long Ougi Yuzuha line because I wasn't sure if the tiny, thin, paper-only doujin she was selling would be worth it. (Now I'll never know. -_-) 3. Naono Bohra (who was in the section for "misc. Shounen Jump series" rather than original BL and thus in the hall we went to second) was completely sold out by the time we got to her table.

Back at the hotel room, we dropped off our things, checked on M, had lunch, and then, yes, went back out for more shopping. (Though, to be honest, I don't have much memory of what shopping we did this day, other than that at some point we were hunting various conbini for ginger ale (though not Vernors, my beverage of choice when I'm sick) and saltines. Back in the hotel room, M was feeling good enough for us to give her a show and tell of our day's spoils.

Dec 31 (Mon)
After lazing around in bed reading, we (The Non-Poisoned Three) headed out shopping again. We made a quick trip into K-Books in an attempt for me to get a third set of porn cards (thinking I could give it away as a gift), but I think they distributed them differently this year (in the past, there was a certain amount set aside for each day of Comiket, but as I checked out pretty soon after they opened, I don't think that was the case), so it was not to be. After that, we headed to Akihabara, as ST had never been there and also wanted to look for used DS games. After wandering around a bit, buying some games and then some serious damage (toys for me and iPod accessories for ST) at Yodobashi Akiba, I headed off by myself to Ueno to shop for toys for my brother and me.

Typical view in Akihabara	Yodobashi Akiba

I arrived back at the hotel, laden with bags and bags of toys. While we watched Kouhaku and ate our toshikoshi soba (I think this was the closest we got to "culture" this trip), I opened my bags and showed off all my new toys. (The stuff I bought for myself was mostly of the "little tiny household item" variety. I'll talk more about these later for those who aren't familiar with them.) We tried to ignore the Korean soccer team holding practice on the floor above us and rooted in vain for the red team, but the (inferior!) white team won and Tokyo Tower was lit up all white in celebration.

Jan 1 (Tues)
As part of our extra-expensive hotel fee for the holidays, we got a viking buffet breakfast on the 1st and 2nd, so we trooped down to the lobby bright and early for our...french fries. (What? Japan hasn't seem to have discovered hash browns yet. What other potatoes would you have for breakfast?) After breakfast (and some reading in the room, probably), we headed out to shop...no, I lied! Well sort of. We did go shopping, but my first order of business was to unload some of the manga I'd brought with me. Unfortunately, K-Books took all of four books from the suitcase-full that I'd brought. -_- So after that, it was back to the hotel to drop off the books, and then on to Animate, where we discovered that the entrance had been decorated as though it was shrine. We took pictures and agreed that this was by far the most appropriate hatsumoude for the four of us. (Who needs Meiji Jingu when you have Otome Road Jinja?)

Otome Road Jinja

After that, I think we hung around in the hotel until late afternoon, when ST, M and I decided we needed to go get our rail passes, since we would be at Disneyland the next day and wouldn't have time to get it done. At Ikebukuro Station, however, the rail pass exchange office was not operating. But the very helpful woman there stopped us from running off to Shinjuku (we had been planning to go to Kinokuniya anyway, so figured it would be perfect), telling us that the office closed too early for us to make it. Instead, she directed us to Tokyo Station (for those unfamiliar with Tokyo, it takes almost half an hour to get to Tokyo Station from Ikebukuro), where we wandered around for a while and finally had to ask someone for directions, because someone thought it would be a good idea to put the office in a secret hidden location. After getting our rail passes taken care of, we headed off to Shinjuku for Kinokuniya...which turned out to be closed. We also saw an advertisement for a Book Off, at which point I kicked myself for not bringing my manga to sell. (Though with our luck that day, it probably would have been closed.)

tiny New Years decorations outside a cafe	Year of the Rat in Sunshine City

That evening, after SV hit the sack early, ST, M and I stayed up late and invented the best game EVER. We decided that we wanted to play with the porn cards, but none of us could think of a good game for three people. We played one hand of Oh Hell, but quickly decided that we wanted some game that would somehow involve the pictures on the cards. What we came up with was a variation of Go Fish (dubbed "BL Fish"), wherein you are still trying to match the cards' numbers, but the questions you ask are all related to the pictures on cards ("Do you have any school uniforms?" "Do you have a reluctant uke?"). Since, even if you manage to win a card from your opponent, it will not necessarily match any cards in your hand, the game takes a long time, but is tons of fun. Despite the fact that we were planning on getting up early the next morning, we stayed up quite late playing it. [Side note: we need to come up with some electronic version of the game so we can play it more than once or twice a year.]

See the porn cards for yourself:



Jan 2 (Wed)
This was our planned Disneyland day...but when we woke up, we discovered that SV wasn't feeling well, so we elected to not go. Well, except that M went to get trading pins for her brother...so for most of the day, it was just me and ST putzing around Tokyo. First we explored Tokyu Hands (where I found the tiniest scissors EVER) and browsed the shops around Otome Road a bit before lunch and a break at the hotel (hoping M would come back so she could join us). We then headed out to Shinjuku, where I planned to take my manga to Book Off and browse Kinokuniya, which I thought might have some manga that was out of stock all over Otome Road (thanks to the Comiket rush), plus I was looking for some Japanese study books for a friend. We elected to hit Kinokuniya first, where I found most of the books I was looking for, and also Kono BL ga Yabai! (the title of this is apparently a parody of Kono Manga ga Sugoi!), which ranks the best BL manga (and novels, characters, etc) of 2007. I had never heard of the number 2 book (Kuimonodokoro Akira) and was intrigued by the description, but it wasn't at Kinokuniya, so I made a mental note to look for it elsewhere. We then headed to Book Off, where I was relieved to finally unload my unwanted manga...for a whole $12. (*sigh*) I then proceeded to spend about $50 in manga and one used DS game. (Why didn't anyone TELL me they made a DS version of the taiko game??)

Back at the hotel, we met up with M and decided to actually go out for dinner. Our restaurant of choice (Nataraj, a vegetarian Indian place in Ogikubo) was closed for the holidays, but the hotel concierge recommended a place near Ikebukuro Station, kindly printed out a map, and then called a made us a reservation--good thing, too, since there were all of two other people when we got to the restaurant. At any rate, the food was excellent (if the mango lassi a little sub-par) and we stuffed ourselves silly while lamenting the lack of doggie bags in Japan. (Not that they would have fit in our tiny, tiny refrigerators, which had more motor than space.) We returned to our hotel room and attempted to cram things into our luggage for the trip to Moriyama (where SV lives) the next day. At some point I gave up, deciding to finish in the morning, and crashed.

Jan 3 (Thurs)
Of course, half-packed suitcases are never pleasant things to wake up to. Still, I managed to get everything crammed in (two suitcases to be left at the hotel, one suitcase and a backpack to travel with me), and we went down to the lobby to check out and check our luggage. We then dragged poor SV (who was feeling well enough to leave her bed, but still not 100%) to Nakano, because Mandarake (which had been closed for the past two days) was finally open and the rest of us were anxious to go there before leaving Tokyo. At this point I had checked K-Books for the Yabai #2 book (or Quest Manga, as it came to be called) and not found it, so I thought maybe I could find it at Mandarake. No luck, but I did manage to buy a bunch of other stuff. We headed back to Ikebukuro for a little last-minute shopping (i.e. me checking at Animate to see if they had the Quest Manga...nope), and then picking up our (disproportionately sized for a trip of three days) luggage and hauling it to Tokyo Station, where we just missed the train we wanted (or, to be more precise, saw that it was leaving in five minutes and didn't rush up to the platform, because rushing for a shinkansen is never fun) and ended up waiting for about an hour for the next one. (We did manage to get exactly the seats we wanted...however, that was hardly a feat, seeing how there were about three other people in our car.) We spent the trip perusing Yabai and playing BL Fish. After the fun of transferring at Maibara (where there are no escalators or elevators to the platform of the local trains), we finally arrived at Moriyama, where the book store's holiday hours prevented me from looking for my book where we made a quick stop at the grocery store and then dragged our luggage to SV's apartment, which is about a 15 minute walk from the train station. As soon as we arrived, we laid out our futons and burrowed under the covers. (Having had experience with how cold Japanese apartments are, I had packed my long underwear, fleece pajamas and fuzzy socks, and oh how glad I was.)

Jan 4 (Fri)
We lazed around for a while in the morning, but our companions couldn't ignore M's and my hints that we wanted to go to a video store and bookstore (respectively), so we headed out again. First stop was a bookstore (where I didn't find the Quest Manga, again), then off to the video store, where we were successful in finding the end of Kyo Kara Maoh for M to rent. The others went home while I took a quick bike ride to the other local store to see if they had my book (they didn't), and the rest of the day was pretty much just a KKM marathon. [My notes here say: "We shared ice, Sara folded my laundry." I remember the laundry, but I'm not sure why I made a special note of the ice on this particular day, since M and I (who both like our drinks to be very cold) bought ice and split it pretty often. Maybe someone else can refresh my memory...?]

Jan 5 (Sat)
We spent what seemed like a large portion of the day marathoning the Hanakimi drama, though I think we only made it about halfway through the show. In the evening, we had a feast of potato!takoyaki, potato casserole, and two kinds of potato salad. After our potato feast, we played Once Upon a Time...or some sort of strange BL hybrid, I guess, since we also incorporated our porn cards. ("Once Upon a Gay Time"?) Somehow, I managed to not look in any stores ALL DAY.

(I forgot to take pictures of the potato feast. ;_; No more distractions, sorry)

Jan 6 (Sun)
After breakfast and some manga reading, we headed into Kyoto to meet up with gnine. At Animate, I immediately looked for the Quest Manga and didn't see it. As I browsed the BL section, however, I noticed that there was a area devoted to the top ten manga ranked in Yabai...and there was #2! Like, four copies of it! I grabbed one for myself and then ran to wave it at ST and M until they ended up getting copies also.

We then spent some time wandering around the mall until we found an okonomiyaki place to have lunch. (The food was excellent, although we got laughed at when we all ordered the cheese okonomiyaki.) We did a little more shopping, and then hit the karaoke box. After singing our hearts out, we decided to check out the parfait restaurant we'd seen earlier (when we were still too full from okonomiyaki for dessert). This place looked like it had about a hundred different parfaits available, including one monstrously huge one that cost $100 and fed 10-20 people. (And yes, there were plastic models of all them.) We all had different parfaits and they were quite good, although the waitstaff was clearly terrified of us and couldn't wait for us to leave.

We said goodbye to G and headed for our final stop, Book Off. On the way, we were accosted by an old man who wanted to speak English to us. (Coincidentally, he'd spent three years at the major universities of each of our home states. Uh-huh.) He talked me to death all the way to the store (at one point he asked if M was my mother [we both have blond hair, so of course we must be related!], which meant of course that this became a running joke for the rest of the trip), and then kept me from going in by asking me to look at...I'm not sure what they were, but they looked like pages from a J-E dictionary that he had corrected. Anyway, after five or ten minutes of this, M managed to rescue me from him (THANK YOU) and we escaped into the store, where we happily spent our money, and then headed home. There, it was another flurry of packing, ST, M and I stealing a read of the wonderful Ryuu no Yuigon doujin that SV found, and bed.

Jan 7 (Mon)
We got up early in an attempt to leave the apartment at the same time as SV (who had to go to work), but failed, mostly because I was trying to cram my pillow (don't ask) into my suitcase. After a few failed attempts and the zipper threatening to break on me, M generously offered to stick it in her bag and carry it, even though it weighed 800 pounds and nearly killed her. We opted to go through Kyoto, which involves a little bit of backtracking, but can sometimes be faster (because more trains stop there). Also, I cannot stress enough the importance of escalators when you are carting around very, VERY heavy luggage. Unfortunately for us, we just missed our train (it could only have been closer if we had lept onto the tracks as the train pulled away) and had to wait a half hour for the next one.

After lugging our manga-laden suitcases across Tokyo, we managed to check into the hotel, arrange our bus tickets to the airport for the following day, get all our luggage (including the pile that hadn't traveled to Moriyama) to our room, and determine that the hotel had a scale we could borrow. At this point, I headed off to Chiba (yes, again), this time to see my former coworkers. I hadn't told any of them that I was coming, so they were a little surprised, to put it mildly. It was fun to talk to everyone, though taking care of getting the rest of my tax refund turned out to be a bigger pain than expected and it was later than I would have liked when I left...not that that stopped me from checking out the toy selection at Yodobashi Camera (which turned out to be a good thing, as they had one of the things my brother asked me to get) and having a bite to eat at Pompadour, the bakery where I used to eat lunch almost every day. (But alas, no potato bread for me. Do they not make it anymore, or was it just too late in the day? I may never know.)

Eventually, I made it back to Ikebukuro and met up with ST and M to have okonomiyaki for dinner and crepes for dessert. As we stood outside the arcade eating our crepes (which probably made the employees of the arcade nervous: Am I going to have to tell those gaijin they can't eat in here?), I spied a UFO catcher full of little 801-chan plushies. It took a few tries, but I managed to snag one. After that it was back to the hotel for packing and wailing and moaning.

Jan 8 (Tues)
...And more packing and wailing and moaning when we woke up. There was also one last tofu bread breakfast, and then we borrowed the hotel's scale to make sure our suitcases weren't overweight. (ST and I each had one suitcase overweight, but figured that paying the stupid $50 fee was as cheap or cheaper than shipping something home, so planned to just suck it up and pay.) Then last-minute shopping, last-minute luggage rearrangement in the lobby (during which I discovered that I had misplaced my American money [~$100 >.<] and could only hope it wasn't left behind in the hotel room), and before I knew it we were getting on the bus to head for the airport. On the way we sawmaybe the Diet Building, which made us all happy. Unfortunately, American is apparently the only US-based airline that uses Terminal 1, so I had to say goodbye to my traveling companions on the bus.

The rest of my journey was mostly uneventful, other than maybe the really tight connection in Chicago (late arrival + customs = no fun). Also, I would like to thank whoever dropped that 500 yen coin in the security area at Narita, as it allowed me to eat dinner while waiting for my flight. Also also, in case anyone was wondering about my missing $100, turns out it was in the pocket I thought it was the whole time, it just had slipped inside (what else?) a book.

I thought it might be a bit much to also post all the pictures of my haul, but here's a little preview:



The rest of them are here.