Wow, writing blog posts is like having a habit because once you stop regularly updating it, it's hard to get back on track! It's been a couple days since I last updated so I'll try to recap everything, although yesterday was a bit of a lazy day as I mostly took care of chores!
Waseda
On Thursday (October 9), I had decided to finally head to the Waseda area to visit the Eisei Bunko Museum. I also wanted to minimize training to a location to spend like 20 minutes there and then training somewhere else, so I found a couple other places in the area.
My first stop was in Waseda University itself. Haruki Murakami, a notable alum and author I like (not a red flag! probably...), has a library named after him on campus. I decided to stop in for a quick visit.
Before I went, I had thought it was like the main campus library but the building was pretty small and it turns out that all (I think) of the books in the library are various editions and langauge copies of Murakami's books themselves. Since I didn't understand this at the time, I didn't want to disturb anyone so had just visited the cafe area. There was some cool art and overall the cafe also had a nice atmosphere.
Saturn prop from the Kafka on the Shore stage play
After a few minutes of looking around, I decided to head to the Eisei Bunko Museum which was only a like 10 minute walk away. I hadn't thought about it before going but classes were in session during my visit, which I'd never experienced before (other than at more own college I mean). Usually if I am making a trip to some random college to see or do something, it's on the weekend or later in the day so classes are out. However, when I was visiting there was a ton of activity and the area felt energetic in a way. I had also noticed that it seemed like the campus was really diverse comparatively (like there were a lot of foreign students), and looking it up it seems like Waseda University does have a pretty large international student population and wants to increase the percent of their student body that are international students.
As I was nearing the Eisei Bunko Museum, I came to a bit of a small flaw in the plan.
It's steeper IRL!!
This particular set of stairs is called Munatsukizaka Slope, which seemingly means "Chest-Pounding Slope" (according to DeepL). This is pretty accurate, because I was definitely feeling chest-pounding after I summitted, especailly since I ran the last 15 or 20 steps since a guy at the top was trying to take a photo and I didn't want to be in his way. If I had known ahead of time, I would have taken advantage of the rest area part-way up the slope, specifically put there because people get tired on such a steep slope.
After making it to the top, the museum was super close by, so I went straight in. I wish I would have waited a bit though since I was mega sweaty inside which felt a bit embarrassing! After paying the ¥1,000 entrance fee, I made my way to the start of the exhibit: "The Essence of Modern Japanese Paintings from Eisei Bunko Collection: The Cat Returns!".
Promotional flyer originally from the Eisei Bunko Twitter
The exhibit is called "The Cat Returns" because it's celebrating the completion of conservation work of Black Cat by Hishida Shunsō. Since the artwork depicts cats, obviously my interest was piqued! The painting (partially shown in the flyer above) is a designated Important Cultural Property as well.
Actually I've been seeing so many Important Cultural Properties lately I was curious and found that there are over 13,000 of them currently but only 2,070 of them are paintings! I wonder if I've seen 20 in all of my trips to Japan? If so that's 1 percent! Maybe I can see them all! (Just kidding obviously). But maybe I can document which ones I have seen somewhere... I'll consider it. Also interestingly, there are multiple thousands of buildings that are also considered Important Cultural Properties.
Overall the exhibit was pretty short since the museum is basically the size of (big) house. There were 56 individual displays, so it didn't take me too long to work my way through them. If anything, sometimes I felt like I was doing a bit of a perfomance so that people didn't think I was going too fast. Like go to a painting that I don't like, cross my arms, put a hand to my chin and say to myself "Hmm, hmm. I see...". Like a lot of the museums I've been going to lately, photography wasn't allowed. But you can see one of my favorite exhibits, Sketches of Beijing by Kobayashi Kokei on this website. Looking it up now, it's a little coincidental because I actually talked about a painting I really liked by Kobayashi Kokei when I visited the Yamatane Museum of Art the other day.
My only other planned stop was taking a look at a weird bit of architecture in the area - St. Mary's Cathedral, Tokyo.
It looks pretty crazy and imposing from the outside but the inside is even crazier from what I've seen. I didn't go inside for various reasons but you should definitely take a look at what it looks like!
Somehow even after all of that, I completed what I had set out to do in only a few hours so I wandered aimlessly for a bit, had lunch at Royal Host, and called it a day!
Cleaning
On Friday, I actually had a ton of cleaning to do and packing/organizing my luggage from the Hokkaido trip so I decided to get that done. Plus I was a bit behind on my work so I wanted to focus on that a bit too.
I basically only left for lunch (at a different Royal Host) but that basically turned into a multi-hour unintended excursion just looking through a few shops in Akihabara.
I did buy a couple small plushes (Bocchi and Frieren - like I don't have enough of both of those already lol) from the Good Smile pop-up shop. I also saw a quite ~elegant~ Miku figure for the low price of ¥27,500 (~$180) that I totally would have bought if I had even a crumb of a chance of fitting it in my luggage lol. There's apparently also a version of this figure where the dress is fabric instead of PVC like a regular figure that costs like over $1k
Fabric version from the Good Smile store page
Busy day in Ikebukuro and Ginza
Today was the start of an event I had actually been waiting for - PARCO and R11R's collaborative art event "Ukiyo Tokyo GRAPHICAL TOKYO". It technically started yesterday but they only began selling the art books today (I believe), so I didn't want to go all the way out to Ikebukuro to see the posters in Parco and then back again today to actually buy the book. Anyway, the PARCO event is held at the PARCO department store's Ikebukuro location and is a sort of poster takeover plus a few speaker events, artist signings, etc.
This is the 4th time R11R (a design firm?) and PARCO are doing this collab, and I've actually seen three of them myself - which is pretty coincidental considering I only stay for a random month every year and the collab only lasts a month. I actually briefly talked about the version last year - Emotions 2024 - in my last blog entry for my 2024 trip.
A very small subset of posters in PARCO
This year, you can view the posters not only in the Ikebukuro PARCO but also on the event site here. Sort of related but from now on when I include a link in my blog, I'm also going to double check that it's in the Internet Archive so that if a link breaks in the future, I can replace it. It would be a shame if the event ends and then people can't see the posters online anymore!
In the past years, I actually hadn't known about the art books that catalogue the art for the event so I ended up needing to buy them secondhand off of JP Mercari after my last trip. It was actually a super fruitful thing to do because it gave me a nice art book to look through and also tons of artists that I could follow for great art! Actually when I received last year's, I was surprised when I had opened it and found multiple artist signatures in the book!
The listing made no mention of this whatsoever lol
So this year, when it popped up on my timeline, I knew that I wanted to go grab my own art book. Luckily, multiple artists I follow were selected for this year, so I knew right away! When I was heading to PARCO, I was actually a bit worried that I'd have to wait in a long line but when I arrived there was literally no one there buying merch even though it was the first day. I wonder if this type of event/product has only a very niche audience? LOL
After I bought the book (for a hefty ¥4,500), I realized that the people standing around in the area were like handlers or ushers or something for the event because a signing was also going on at that time. Luckily one of them spoke very good English and told me that I could get a signature, helped me find the proper page, and had me line up. There was only the person already actually getting the signature ahead of me, so I wasn't waiting for too long before it was my turn.
I don't know enough Japanese and don't know the specific artist so I felt a little bit awkward but I told them I thought their art piece was cool and cute (is it ok to be both? lol) and they said thank you. The handler guy had me write down my name and then the artist signed my copy of the book and gave a me a little sticker.
It was a little unfortunate that they had given the artist a gold pen to write on the art with tons of browns because it made the signature hard to see but it just says "To JD, 2025.10.11, Utabou, Thank you!" Very simple, and I'm happy they used the best date format! You can follow the artist, Utabou, on Twitter! Very cool. I must have arrived at a really good time actually because the artist mentioned on their Twitter about having to rush because so many people were waiting. I think it helped my chances that it was rainy all day today!
I don't really have time now but once I get back to Seattle, I'm definitely going to take a leisurely stroll through the new book (it's 400 pages full color!) and find some new artists to follow!
Actually kind of related but wow, I am sort of ready to be done 'traveling'. It would be mega cool to unpack my stuff and have my desk and nice TV and play some video games on my PS5 to relax. I mean I have really been enjoying my time here and will continue to, but my sleep hours are weird, my bed is less comfy now, and the only hobbies I have time for are 'Exploring Tokyo' and 'Blogging About Exploring Tokyo'. Not really a bad thing, and a super priveleged complaint to have, I know. But I think you can never fully relax if you aren't home. I think next year I will try to split my stay into two parts. Maybe three weeks in cherry blossom season since I've never been in that period and two weeks in November since I think I've liked that month the most out of the times I've been so far.
~Back to your regularly scheduled content~
After leaving PARCO, I headed to the K-Pop-specific Lashingbang second-hand store in the area to pick up some Stray Kids (who even) merch for my sister. I did find some merch and had to struggle through the interaction of "Is this stray kids? It's for my little sister, it's her favorite. @ho does this weird plushie represent?". To her credit, the attendant was very helpful and knowledgeable. I was going to get a piggy (?) but then I asked who the chicken was and she knew it was for Felix. Maybe it's common knowledge? (How do you even pronounce SKZOO? "S K Zoo" "skizoo" "skazoo"?) It was actually also kind of lucky because they only had the two plushes in the first place.
Looking at this maybe he's actually a duck? But Google is telling me my gut feeling of chicken is correct?
Once I finally decided to leave Ikebukuro, I headed to Ginza to meet a couple of friends before they head back to the States in a couple days. We basically just explored the Ginza Six shopping mall for a bit, recreated a few photos from my first trip to Japan with them in 2018, and then decided to do a little snacking. Upscale snacking. At CAFÉ DIOR, obviously.
Now, I don't know much about fashion brands, but isn't it weird for Dior to have a cafe? Or am I truly ignorant of the world? Or maybe you only know about these things when you're invited, like when you are invited to join the Illuminati, etc.
We ordered 2 food items and each ordered a tea, which came with the teapot so maybe we could have gotten less teas lol. My royal milk tea was pretty good and I liked the white tea we had as well, but I wasn't really a fan of the food at all. If you're interested, you can see the menu here. I think price-wise it was pretty expensive since our total bill was ¥12,000 which was only ¥600 cheaper than our actual dinner at Din Tai Fung later. The experience was nice but I don't think I'd personally go again.
I also felt a little out-of-place since I was wearing jogger shorts and a hoodie t-shirt. Add this look to the Dior Autumn 2025 look book
Disclaimer & apologies for using Gemini to cut myself out like this, it's already 4 AM so I didn't do it by hand, or even using a non-AI tool to do it with regular ~algorithms~. I'm still anti-AI generally!!!