A short blog today because I didn't really do anything! I woke up after only sleeping less than 5 hours but I'm unsure if it was the ambient light or what. I haven't really been super tired all day or anything but have been feeling lethargic all day. Anyway, once I realized I was up earlier than expected, I decided to book a ticket to the see the new Demon Slayer movie that's out right now. There are actually English-subtitled showings at a few locations in Japan and one of them I had actually been to previously (check that blog post for pics of the theater etc. lmao).
After making my online purchase, I made my way to Shinjuku (still hate it) to hit up the 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku theater inside the Kabubicho Tower (which I do actually like). I had a bit of a kerfuffle with the machine to get a printed ticket but nothing that Google Translate couldn't help with! After getting my ticket I accidentally mixed up the screen number and my seat number so I went and sat in a half-way finished showing of How to Train Your Dragon (or something similar) for a few seconds until I realized my mistake. The 10ish people in that theater must have been like WTF. Pretty embarassing but I somehow made it through.
After making it to the proper screen, I was greeted at the door by an employee who was handing out like mini-posters as a commemorative gift.
I'm unsure if there were other kinds or just this one, but if there were other kinds I wish I got a different one. I don't hate Zenitsu but...
Overall the movie was super good. The action and art was incredible and there were both emotional and hype moments throughout. If I had one minor complaint, I guess I would say the pacing was kind of weird? That's not a huge deal though which goes to show why it just had the biggest anime opening ever in the US. I'd definitely recommend going to see it in theaters while it's still airing!!
The only downside is it's almost 3 hours long and I think we will have to wait for the other 2 movies to finish this arc...
After finishing the movie, I didn't really feel like doing anything (especially in Shinjuku) so I decided to just ride the Yamanote line to Ueno, grab a bite to eat, and then walk home. Ueno Station seemed pretty serene compared to the likes of Shinjuku Station today or Ikebukuro yesterday. It was actually a little weird at first because I usually think of Ueno as also very busy, so I don't know if I just caught it at a good time or what.
I was getting pretty hungry around then so decided to find a place to eat in the only way that I know how - wandering shopping malls and looking for restaurants with opens seats so I don't have to figure out a reservation! Luckily a branch of the Marui department store (mall? thing?) was nearby so I popped in and made my way to the top floor. I find the food in the mall is usually in the top floor or B1F for sit down places or 1F for like takeaway or snacks. The top floor did have what I was looking for in general - restaurants with open seating - but none of them had enticing enough platic food models to convince me to come in.
I know I literally just said yesterday that I should try to not eat at Sushiro or convenience stores at least once per day but can you guess who had both of his meals today from those places?
In unrelated news, there are 4 Genshin mini-figures in the Sushiro collab as shown below.
Originally from the Sushiro JP Twitter account
So I am unsure if I am really lucky or unlucky to be the proud owner of 2 Yumemizuki Mizuki mini figures?
Can you blame me for trying to get another one? How can I not when I am sitting at the coutner and there are infinite ads forcing me to???
After that I basically came home for a bit, went out to get Spaghetti from Lawson for dinner and then started typing this. Now that the blog has caught up to this exact moment I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do...
Also I forgot to mention it yesterday but I made some general blog improvements. If you are on desktop, you can now click images to bring up an image viewer that should allow you to zoom more into images. Also, I made an aggregate blog page at https://jdvp.me/blog/ that contains all my blog posts in one place (but the Japan ones will remain separated). IDK if I will use it in the future or not to blog when I'm not like traveling traveling but we'll see. It exists now at least. It does not include the entries from the yearly blogs in its atom.xml field though so if you use like an atom reader or rss or whatever, you'd still want to do that for the actual 2025 site instead I guess