But before I get into all of that, I will just link the video for any blog readers that are actually just here for video content. See the embedded (or go to real YouTube) for my version of 宙でおやすみ by Aiobahn featuring Yuka Nagase. (It's called "sora de oyasumi" on Spotify which confused me becasue the kanji is for "space", not "sky", so I hadn't seen that reading before)

The music and vocals are unchanged in my version, but I aimed to recreate the original graphics with images from this year's trip and drawings I made to represent myself

On the actual YouTube desktop site, it can play without letterboxing

The original had made me feel a sense of anemoia - which is like nostalgia for something you haven't actually experienced yourself. I hope my video can convey that to you in some way as well!

The Making Of

Since the audio is unchanged, the video has a Copyright claim on YouTube, and I'm just mainly hoping it doesn't actually get a Copyright strike. I'm less worried since my YouTube channel isn't monetized or anything like that though so I think the copyright owner would still get the ad revenue anyway? Worst case scenario, I could edit the one on YouTube to be soundless (it'll make more sense a bit later in the post) or just upload to my blog directly since the video itself is (relatively) small

So I had originally heard this song a few months before going to Japan and the music video really resonated with me, so I thought it would be cool if I made my own version of the video. All during my trip, I tried to remember to occasionally take photos of normal things or things without a specific well-defined subject, kind of to match the vibe of the original. I didn't actually do that great of a job remembering, actually which ended up making me a little nervous while doing the initial edit. I actually thought about talking about the project earlier in the trip, since I had mentioned Aiobahn at that time. Good thing I didn't though, or I probably actually wouldn't have followed through lol

Here's the original video in case you haven't seen it yet and wanted to

As far as actual content, the video contains 226 (I think) photos from my trip overlayed by 18 illustrations. The photos unfortunately don't all get the same screen time, with some spanning less than half a second and a few taking a full 1.8 seconds. Because I had decided to order the entire thing chronologically, that means that sometimes entire days take up less time than photos in other parts of the video but that's just how life is sometimes.

I had a number of setbacks that resulted in me not finishing this sooner.

The largest time loss was me not even deciding to actually do the project for real until last week (a full week after my last blog post lol).

Disregarding that, it took me a day to get all of the photos and then import them into an iMovie timeline and cut them all to the right length based on the original video. After exporting just the photos from iMovie because I decided I hated iMovie, I moved my photos into DaVinci Resolve (another free video editing tool). However, when I added the oginal video so that I could cut it up to figure out the illustration timing, I was aghast to find out that somehow the videos weren't in sync

I didn't know anything about anything when I was starting so I failed to notice that some point one of the videos had changed from the expected frame rate of 30 frames per second to a ~cinematic~ frame rate of 29.97! This meant that over the course of my 5000 frame video, I would drift by 5 frames!!!

But since I didn't even realize why this was happening at first, I wasted time trying to find the frames that were wrong (I looked at every single frame...) and remove them. This was even more tedious that finding the places to cut the images in the first place so I stopped working on it for like a whole day.

The reason why it was tedious this way is because at every frame transition, I would have to check to see if either the original or my video was changing/not changin unexpectedly

After coming back, I realized that the framerate for the project and one of the videos was wrong, so I moved everything to a new, correct timeline. I then figured out where the frames would be added (every 1000 frames starting at frame 500) and then checked that I saw the difference at those spots and then fixed accordingly. I wanted to be frame perfect!!

At this point, I realized I was procrastinating doing the actual hard work of drawing something so decided to buy a wacom tablet off Amazon so that I could actually do it. Just kidding, I was actually super close to convincing myself to buy one of those sick Cintiq drawing tablets but then I remembered I literally already have a regular tablet that I don't even use. I even have a stylus for it and everything. A bit dismayed by my lack of retail therapy, I began drawing.

At first, I tried to just look at the original art and then draw that but as me. And wow, we as a society really need to start respecting artists way more. I was unable to get anything that even looked human basically lol So then, I decided that I would use the original art directly to create like the skeleton of the drawing and then go from there, but even that didn't help me. I don't really think tracing others' art is a good or nice thing to do so I didn't want to go that route and so I ended up taking photos of myself in various positions and then tracing that (tracing in this context isn't as negative a connotation hopefully??).

Here's an example of that process from later on in the journey. The video might look like it restarts in the middle but I actually draw the frame twice so that when you layer them, the slight differences create a slightly cooler photo (in my opinion)

Actually, the process of figuring out how to frame the photos and then take the photos of myself was a bit of an ordeal in and of itself. Luckily sometimes the apparatus was just my phone stapped to a limited edition copy of Valkyria Chronicles 4 stacked on top of 2 tables, but even then I'd have to press the shutter button and hope I could get to whatever position before the maximum length timer finished

Faces were by far the hardest part for me. I think the illustrations where I am wearing a mask generally look most like me since on those the eyes were just circles. The mouth and nose gave me immense trouble and even the face shape I was confused on if it was supposed to be that anime face shape thing. I think for a few it makes me look like a Berenstain (Berenstein AM I RIGHT??) Bear or something. At some point I just gave up on the face entirely, althogh I did stop myself from doing the following at least

Channeling my best Iseri Nina face

I think probably the worst of the drawings, and the ones that look the least like me since I didn't trace myself, were the up-close face-only drawings where it's a sequence of 3 that goes from slight smile to open mouth grin. I'm not particularly proud of almost any of them and this one least so. I was considering redoing them but I'd redone a lot of drawings a lot of times and I don't think it would have helped in this case, unless I put it off for like a month and then practiced drawing every day. I mean that is definitely feasible but I wanted to get the project done before I decided to not actually finish it?

It was kind of fun thinking of how I should pose or what acccessories or outfit I should use for the photos though, and also fun doing the drawings and simplifying everything and kind of coming up with a canon of me as a character.

Like there were definitely some things I made sure to try to follow

• Three hair spike things (even though I don't have any of those IRL, at least any more lol)
• Shoes always have 4 Xs instead of drawing shoelaces for real
• Should generally have a bored facial expression lol

Not that I'm good enough at drawing to have any self-consistency is them anyway though. Maybe if I practiced I could remake the video in like 10 years but much better!

IDK where to put this in the blog post, but one thing I noticed while editing my version is that the origianl appears to have scenery in Kansai (like Osaka) and also Okinawa and mine has Tokyo and Hokkaido so it's like the full North/South range of Japan in our combination lol

Oh also, I had redone my drawings a ton of times but the most recent time that I had decided to redo all of them was when I watched this cover of the video that had really cute drawings that they had done themselves! Since they not only edited the video but drew the cute illustrations with their own original character (I think) AND did the cover, I felt that I had to try at least a bit harder. Definitely check theirs out!

Frame Perfect?

Okay so I know I said I wanted to make it frame pefect... but did I succeed? You'll have to check for yourself and let me know! Luckily, there's are sites that let you play multiple YouTube videos at once. For example, using this link you should be able to play both at once. Once you get both buffered and then play, they should be pretty close. If not, try the resync button ;p

Actually when I say frame perfect, at best I can only mean for the transition times. I bascially gave up on editing the video. I did try a lot of the built in plugins but couldn't quite get it how I wanted, so I ended up applying a few small effects (a small displace and some waviness) in Resolve and then doing a slight chromatic aberattion and adding noise via ffmpeg (a command line video processing tool). I also added some like jitteriness intended to be like rogue scanlines but IDK how people felt that effect turned out (I also used ffmpeg for that). I wanted to add the restless footer thing that the original video has but the plugin to do that in DaVinci was part of the $300 upgrade to the pro version and I didn't want to try to figure it out in ffmpeg lol

Also I couldn't figure out the watermark/symbol in the top right corner. I'm unsure if it's actually something from like an old camcorder or something custom for his project, but I had originally hoped it would be tied to a camera so that I'd be able to easily find a filter that I could apply to my video. As you can probably guess, I was unable to make that leap into greatness.

Gallery

I'm not including the 226 main images since they are not actually that interesting on an indivdual level, but here are the drawings I did for the project in the order that they appear in the video (I think lol). I didn't slip in that many anime references, but there is a Frieren plushie, a Haru Urara horse, and a Hatsune Miku sweater. I'm basically a Miku simp and a huge Frieren fanboy, but although I do like Haru Urara (the Uma Musume version), I'm not nearly as well-version in their lore (in game or IRL). I basically just used my most out-there bag (the horse is actually a phone holder/bag thing I think) for a good photo. I'm sorry for using you, Haru Urara!

Also for most of the photos I tried to match the general idea of the one in the original if possible but also to depict scenes of how I might look if you happened upon me in the wild while visiting Japan or something. I'm not sure I captured either properly but that was my thoguht process!

Wrapping up

I hope you managed to feel a sense of anemoia from the video. I certainly don't feel anything watching it anymore. After editing it and seeing the same thing 100 times I'm unsure I feel anything at all lol But I think probably in like a year from now it will make me nostalgic?

Anyway, thanks for following along on this year's journey! See you next time!! (or if I post the flyers post lol)

I woke up at around 9:20 on October 19 to make my 11 AM checkout. I was pretty sure that I would have plenty of time to spare since I was already packed but I basically ended up deep cleaning the place (even though I basically explicitly didn't need to) so I didn't check out until like 10:50 or something. Here's a look at how I left it, pretty clean overall! I even vacuumed!

I ordered a taxi through Uber and wistfully watched out the window as all of the places I could have visited began to recede into the distance. To be honest, I think I've actually spent enough time in Tokyo now where leaving doesn't feel like too impactful since I know I'll be back sooner or later. So I wasn't feeling particularly sad or anything.

The above is basically the only photo I got on the ride over to Haneda. It's a photo looking out over the Kanda River in Akihabara. I'm not even sure what I was trying to take a picture of, but later I realized I actually have a photo of the spot that I would have been in when taking the photo. See this photo from Shosen Book Tower that I took the other day. I would have been on the left hand side of the road right where it's meeting the window divider thing!

Another kind of fun thing I saw and actually recognized was the Nihonbashi Ebisuko Bettara Ichi Market that I had actually stumbled onto last year! Seeing it from the highway was fun but maybe I should have went and checked it out the night before I left? Maybe next time!

After getting to the airport I checked both of my luggages. I had considered putting my backpack into a coin locker and heading to Kawasaki to expierence more Girls Band Cry stuff since the anime actually takes place in Kawasaki and it's only like a 20 minute train ride from Haneda. However, it seemed like it was about to start pouting outside and even though I had like 3 hours until boarding, I thought I might get anxious about time when I made it to Kawasaki anyway.

The security experience was like 5 minutes max even with them pulling my bag to be checked. I was thinking it might be because I had 2 laptops in my backpack (and hadn't pulled either of them out lol) but I actually have no idea what the reason it got pulled for since the lady took the bag over to the inspectiion station, look at the monitor for a couple seconds, and then gave it to me without even opening it lol

Finally, I made my way to the Delta lounge to hang out for 3 whole hours until it was time to board. Luckily it had a nice view!

I felt like the lounge was familiar but didn't even realize until just now that I had used the same lounge when I visited in 2023. I basically even have a few photos of basically the same things! lol

I had a few snacks and then worked on my previous blog entry, which was actually lucky or who knows how much further delayed this entry would have been (or I might have pulled a 2023 and not even written a final blog post lol). I wrapped up my blog with only an hour remaining, so just watched some YouTube to kill the time. They lounge was empty when I arrrived but had filled up by this time and the lounge employees were pushing around a tempura cart. The tempura ended up being pretty good. Also a guy sitting near me apparently had his birthday that day so the employees came and gave him a special dessert and then like took a commemorative photo for him? Never seen that before haha

Once I was on the plane it was pretty smooth sailing. I had my lay flat seat once again, so I was ready to get in a good night's sleep! Unfortuantely, I ended up getting too enthralled watching movies so didn't sleep at all. Have y'all watched "The Devil Wears Prada" recently? Still pretty good!! I also ended up watching National Treasure again. Also still holds up if you ask me lol

I arrived in Seattle at around 8 AM local time. I hadn't used Global Entry before but it made Customs/Immigration crazy fast for me since you just walk up to the kiosk and it scans your face without evening needing your passport or anything. It literally took like 5 seconds max! How can it match someone's face that quickly?? Very cool

I did end up having to wait around for a bit for my bags but nothing crazy. Since it was still normal waking hours for me (in Japan time), I was actually feeling pretty good and like I could probably stay up for the rest of the day!!

Once I got home, I went to the store to get some food. I did some (very little) unpacking and then told myself a little nap might be good for morale. After waking up 6 hours into my 20 minute nap, I realized that it had all been a mistake and that the jetlag would be continuing a few days!! Finally, I stayed up until like 4 am and remembered how inconvenient it is to be hungry at 4 AM with no food at home and no Family Mart just around the corner. I guess it's still good to be back home!

No More Japan Content ૮(╥﹏╥)ა

Well that wraps it up for my 2025 blog! I will actually have one more post coming in the next few days, similar to the 2024 Flyers post. Looking back on it, I think some of my favorite things that I had done on this trip were the things that weren't really expected. Stuff like the idol concert in Adachi or the surprisingly cool Tokorozawa Sakura Town. Although the Comic1 event and visiting Tokyo Big Sightalso hyped up my otaku sensibilities! lol

I think next year, I am going to try to visit twice for like 2 or 3 weeks each instead of doing one big 4-6 week trip. It will probably help me stress less about luggage space and getting homesick for my own bed and desk. But at the same time, the flight is basically the most expensive part of the trip, so we'll see!

Stats-wise, it looks like I lost 2.5 lbs on my trip (basically negligible tbh) but my step count was 2x to 3x my normal Seattle amount.

The number for the "Sep 28 - Oct 4" data in each photo is different because it only counts the average for the steps actually in that month. The labels would be more accurate if the left was "Sep 28 - Sep 30" and the right was "Oct 1 - Oct 4"

Anyway, time for me to get prepared for the jp-2026 blog!! Thanks for following along and see you next time!! (˵ •̀ ᴗ •́ ˵ ) ✧

Yesterday I didn't get up to much, but I went to see the new Atre collaboration with Girls Band Cry - one of my favorite recent anime. Actually GBC is so popular here, it's gotten an incredible amount of merch and collaborations in only like a year. Not that I'm complaining though!

Actually, the sign had a mistake on it, which is covered in my photo but I saw on Twitter that they replaced the panel today! The Twitter user below documented the replacement lol

河原木桃香

修正完了 https://t.co/TfrVjVBQ9A pic.twitter.com/Cdd6hXC7rI

— 24 (@2outni4) October 17, 2025

There was a decent amount of character art around, especially since I think GBC is actually concurrently having other collabs as well? I know there was a coffee shop one in Yodobashi Camera recently anyway.

My favorite were these goobers recreating the scene from the anime where Subaru and Nina (best girl obvs) carry Momoka home after she'd gotten drunk!

For once something I'd actually want an acrylic standee of

Actually this scene also inspired an (official!!) game where you play various stages carrying Momoka home that released at the end of last month: Momoka (wo) Wasshoi

Tokorozawa Sakura Town

I feel like I haven't done enough this trip to get out of Tokyo or go see less popular areas, so I wanted to make sure to do something like that on my last full day. I was thinking about Chiba, Saitama, or like Kawasaki or something, but I saw a cool photo of Tokorozawa Sakura Town so I decided to go check it out today. It was only a little over an hour away by train and I got to ride a line I'd never ridden before too!

The Tokorozawa area itself (at least around Sakura Town) seems to really be leaning into anime and anime-style art (is there a term for this?) so when I arrived at Higashi-Tokorozawa Station I was greeted by this mural.

Also, the station itself looked pretty cool. After gaining my bearings, I headed towards Tokorozawa Sakura Town but not along the main street, which I found out was a bit of a mistake a little later! The walk was a pleasant 10-ish minutes and it was immediately obvious once I arrived. While the surrounding area seemed to be mostly low-rise businesses (a far cry from the central wards of Tokyo) and normal houses, Sakura Town is comprised of multiple large, artsy buildings.

The building on the right (the same at the one in the back center) houses some exhibition halls, a few stores, and a Family Mart. You can check out the pamphlet for Tokorozawa Sakura Town here, but to me it seemed like the majority of that building didn't have anything going on, at least today. Actually, overall I was a bit surprised by how empty the place was... is it a hidden secret? It is a bit in middle of nowhere I guess?

The building on the left is the Kadokawa Musashino Museum, a culture center that houses a few cafes, some museum-type places, a manga and light novel library, a special exhibition gallery, etc. The building actually felt way bigger on the inside than it looked outside (although it's not like it looked small in the first place). I think it's also called the Kadokawa Culture Center but unsure if they are the exact same thing or if there is a distinction or something.

The Kadokawa Musashino Museum

After exploring the outdoor areas of the site, I made my way into the culture center and bought a ticket to be able to see all of the exhibitions for ¥3,700 (expensive??). This ticket was called the 1-day passport and allows for re-entry etc. to all the exhibits all day. I didn't realize (but I guess I would have visited anyway), but 2 of the 5 floors were actually closed today. The 5th floor Musashino Gallery appeared to be changing exhibitions for the upcoming exhibit on the founder of Kadokawa Shoten, Genyoshi Kadokawa. The 3rd floor was also closed, which was super unfortunate because it was one of the onees that sounded most interesting to me, the EJ Anime Museum!! I don't know if it doesn't have a regular exhibit or is just switching right now or something but the Twitter Account for the Museum seems to indicate the next exhbition is in late December. (｡•́︿•̀｡)

Anyway, the other stuff sounded interesting anyway, so I wasn't too upset. I first headed down to the first floor to check out the Immersive Digital Art Theater: Ukiyo-e RE:BORN exhibit. The exhibit was really cool, so definitely check out the link because it will likely explain better than me but I will try lol

The exhibit first starts with a brief explaination of how the art of ukiyo-e woodblock printing started and talked about various influences, etc. It actually also made me realize that the Hatsune Miku Beauty Looking Back figure I was gushing about the other day is actually a reference to a painting of the same name by Hishikawa Moronobu!!

After that section, you go into a big wider open area with multiple benches and bean bags, etc. I actually hadn't realized at this point that there was a "sit-down and watch" portion of the exhibition, so I was briefly stunlocked but then was able to get a beanbag seat right as the show was starting. Since I arrived right at the top of the hour, the presentation had a voiceover in Japanese. If you go and want an English voiceover, I think it's possible to go to the :30 minute showings which are music-only and then listen to the English audio on your phone. I'm not one to wait 30 minutes for something like that though!

The story was broken up into various chapters that seemed to describe the various types of ukiyo-e art. The music was really good and I thought the projection mapping was also done super well, like it seemed like the projection didn't bleed onto anything it wasn't supposed to. Overalll the whole atmosphere and vibe was very cool.

I was able to recognize a pretty good number of the artists but there were a lot (especially in the depictions of warriors) that I hadn't seen before. There were also some pieces that literally everyone would recognize

The only thing that kind of took me out of it was that the art had been turned into video by like animating the different layers (and obviously widening the scene etc) and it seemed like it was probably done by hand (lovingly, by an artist!!) but in some cases things like billowing of clouds etc. seemed like they were done with AI so there was weird warping and stuff but I actually just thing it's some regular distortion effect or something. Regardless of how that particular effect was made I didn't think it looked particularly good though lol

I think overall though the video was very good and cool, I'd probably recommend to anyone. I also felt like it was worth it since the video was probably like 20 minutes long. The bean-bag chair was pretty comfortable as well!

After that there was a cool exhibit showing off Utagawa Hiroshige's The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, which had each print along with a map showing where on the route between Edo (now Tokyo) and Kyoto each print was located.

The rest of the exhibit talked about the various types of ukiyo-e and had a (replica I think) printing block set for The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival (also by Hiroshige) which was pretty cool.

After viewing the special exhition, I headed to the manga library, also on the first floor. I obviously wouldn't be able to really take advantage of it but wanted to check it out. The library was a little small but definitely cozy and quiet enough to read if you were so inclined. Luckily for me, there was also interesting things to see other than the books, like a life-size Rem!

I think I saw someone online say Rem with a nose is cursed but I think it's just because of how pointy it is? Lol Like she has a nose in this figure and it doesn't seem as weird haha

There was also various singatures from famous people (mostly associated with Kadokawa) that had visited. For example, here is one from from Kouhaku Kuroboshi who is a famous illustrator and character designer! For me personally, I'm a big fan of his design for Hokusai from FGO (I actually took so many re-run banners to get her) and Ina from Hololive!!!

Next, I headed to the 4th floor to see a couple more exhibits. I stumbled upon the 2 story "Bookshelf Theatre". It actually just looked like a regular library to me, except slightly inconvenient to get to some of the books.

I was thinking that maybe sometimes groups would come and perform here or something to legitimize the "theatre" name but shortly after arriving, a show started. Do I have impeccable timing today or what?? This facility also seems to really like projection mapping. You can check out this offical video to get a better look at the space.

One cool aspect was that although the narration was in Japanese, they actually made use of the screens to show English subtitles. Nifty! Apparently shows start every 20 minutes and seem to last like 5 or 6 (my best guess). The theme was around rebuilding after the wars in the 20th century and housing books to make sure that it didn't happen again (or something like that, it was hard to focus on the subs with the show lol)

The 4th floor also had a cool microcomputer exhibit going on! I thought the exhibit was actually pretty funny. In the greeting to the exhibit, it said the following

In any kind of business that, is related to intelligence, there are always a certain number of freaks that are interested and curious about all kinds of things.

The sudden use of "freaks" in the otherwise serious passage really got me. See the full greeting below if interested.

The exhibit was both informative and neat.

It was around this time that I realized that both the 3rd and 5th floor were out of commission for the time being. Rather than despairing, I took it as a sign that I should move on to other attractions and keep on keeping on.

Tokorozawa Sakura Town also has a pretty modern looking shrine at its facility. I somehow didn't directly take any photos of it, but you can take a look here. Definitely a beautiful building! The large torii nearby also glows different colors at night, maybe I should have came later in the day?? Either way, I did manage get a goshuin here and actually, it was the last one I needed to finish filling out the front half of my goshuincho!

The Shinto priest that did the seal seemed a little surprised that I was visiting and asked how I even heard of the place. We chatted for a bit and he also seemed surprised that I would visit on the last day of a month-long trip. Maybe the town isn't super popular with foreign tourists? I actually don't think I really saw any while I was visiting the entire day, although I did see a couple Japanese tour groups touring the museum. Even among vistors to the shrine, I didn't really see too many people going in for goshuin.

That being said, I do wonder if more people are going in when they have special events going on? I had read somewhere that there had been a Spice & Wolf collab at the shrine and I definitely would have gotten goods if that was the case still. I did find one tweet documenting this, but I can't embed it because Twitter says it is adult content for some reason, so I'm including a screenshot here

Originally from @Crow_Gorira on Twitter

Unfortunately, that event was in 2023 and the more recent events didn't seem appealing to me personally (although none was going on today anyway). Too bad I didn't even know about goshuin or Tokorozawa Sakura Town in 2023!!

I decided to head back to the station so head towards the main Saitama City area. But on the way, I would be looking at the special LED anime manhole covers! First, I made my way through the park adjacent to Tokorozawa Sakura Town, which was pleasant and felt far removed from something like the technology-filled museum. Once I had made it through the park to what I assume is one of the main streets of the town, I managed to begin seeing the first of the 28 anime manhole covers in the city! Unfortunately, it was still light out as I was visiting, so I didn't get to see them illuminated, but still cool to see. Unfortunately, this is where my pathing mistake from earlier comes in. Since I had no walked along the main street on the way to Tokorozawa Sakura Town, I ended up walking to the station on one side of the steet and the walking back along the other side and the walking back to the station again in order to see all of the covers. Here are some of my favorites!

Once I had completed that pilgrimage, I hopped back on the Mushashino Line back towards Minami-Urawa Station. I had thought I would go to the The Railway Museum in Saitama, but it turned out it would be another 30 minutes away after getting to Minami-Urawa, and by then it would be 4:30. Since the museum closes at 5, I opted instead to just hop of the train and explore around my transfer station.

Luckily the Musashino Line was empty going in this direction!

I walked around the area for a bit and stumbled upon the Oyabahikawa Shrine. The shrine itself seemed nice but I found it kind of funny that the perimeter had a ton of small animal statues greeting passersby. Right near the entrance stairs, there were frogs!

After wandering around for a bit longer, I decided to head for dinner and head home a bit early to make sure I was packed. Of course, I headed to Sushiro for one last hurrah.

See you tomorrow for my final day in Japan for 2025!

But jumping back to the present, I actually had plans for today that I had scheduled maybe a couple weeks ago. An event had been scheduled for the Steins;Gate series. I definitely recommend watching, it's probably about time I give it a rewatch too actually. Anyway, I really liked Steins;Gate when I had watched it and although I've forgotten a lot of the details, I decided to go to the STEINS;GATE PHOTO EXHIBITION event at Shosen Book Tower.

The ticketing site had talked about how it would include photography of important places in the story but in real life with superimposed imagery from the series, which I thought sounded cool.

The event was on the top floor of the Shosen Book Tower and was pretty small exhibit, which I had expected in the first place since the tower's footprint is pretty small. Upon entry, I was given a map of that marked the locations of all of the places in the iconic photos.

I actually thought that was a little funny because there was another copy of the same map on one wall, and it was one of the only items in the exhibit that wasn't supposed to be photographed lol

Along one of the walls were portraits of the Steins;Gate cast, portrayed on top of IRL photos taken relatively recently in Akihabara (how recent though? I know the GiGO had Genshin posters on it for years, but is it still like that? I forgot to check today lol). For example, Mayuri is in front of the gachapon machines on the side of the Animate building.

There were also another 40 or so prints with various places in Akihabara, focused on more than just the central station-front area. There were actually a few places that I wasn't familiar with so I made sure to add them to my mental checklist

Fureai Bridge

In addtion to the photos of the locations that appear in the series, each is overlayed with text (styled to look like a VN) that talks a little bit about each location. For example, if Google Translate is to be believed, the description about Fureai Bridge, above, talks about how the bridge is a convenient shortcut from Yanagimori Shrine to the main Akihabara area, and talks about specific moments from the series that take place here. In the animate gacha photo below, it talks about how there used to be vending machines here but now it's gacha machines and talks about Okabe Rintaro and Makise Kurisu chatting here.

Animate again but this time without Mayuri :'(

Overall, I thought the photography was good, but was a little shocked at how few people the photographer managed to capture in the photos. For example, when I went to check out a few of these spots afterwards, it was hard to get photos without people in the foreground in some places (but waiting worked) and in some places, it was impossible. The animate building is basically as busy as you can get in Akiba, and the gacha machines are located right off the main street. I was able to get a photo without people directly in it, but it's cropped much closer and doesn't get a good view of the alley itself, so the subject is completely changed.

I was thinking about it while I was in the exhibit and I kept thinking the photos had to have been taken in middle of the night or right after dawn in order to capture such empty streets. I think I was right because in the gift area they were selling books that the photographer, Junya Watanabe, had published. Among them was a book called "Roam Around Night City - Akihabara"!

In addtion to the art, there was a giant phone mockup that looped through a few like group chats with the gang and a few video calls with Kurisu. I could only read bits and pieces so I can't relay that experience here lol

Overall, I thought the exhibit was fine. For ¥1,100 maybe a little pricy comparatively but I don't feel like I wasted my money or anything. I think the venue was also nice for it since the view from the tower is pretty good as well

After leaving, I decided to check out a few of the spots that I hadn't personally been to before (such as Fureai Bridge which I showed a photo of earlier). Before doing that, I decided to stop at Royal Host to get a hot fudge sundae (sunday?). The fudge came on the side so I had the fun experience of pouring it over myself. But then I promptly made a mess because the chocolate immediately ran over the edges of the cup all over the plate. I guess that's why it came on a plate in the first place haha

After checking out a few more places, I just wandered around for a bit. Even though a lot of the specific places from the Steins;Gate photo exhibit were really busy, there are places in Akihabara that feel much emptier, even one steet over from the main street. These places can be lifesavers when you are using a convoluted route to go home and avoid making eye contact with the maids

And finally, I'll leave you with a photo of one of my favorite closed shops (not that it's always closed, just at the time I took the photo). Why can't all stores with shutters have such nice art on the shutters?? I think this specifically place is a small art gallery / pop up space and I have seen it open a couple times with pop up events

Today, I also didn't do much because I forgot to set my alarm before going to sleep so ended up waking up at 1 PM. I guess I did need the sleep though? By the time I finished waking up, doing chores, and getting ready for the day it was already 3 PM! I decided I would head to the Tokyo National Museum since it's pretty close by and I didn't have anything better planned and wanted to stay somewhere walkable since my energy levels were low and I figured that would mean I wouldn't want to stay out until after the trains cleared from rush hour

The main cool thing I saw was the special exhibit, Expressing Prayer, Capturing Form Buddhist Sculptures by UNKEI from the Northern Round Hall of Kohfukuji Temple. No pictures were allowed, but it was basically a single room set up to show off 7 National Treasure statues created by a sculptor from the mid-12th century, Unkei. The main bronze sculpture of Miroku Nyorai and the scholar monks Mujaku and Seshin were cool but I really liked the Four Heavenly Kings wooden statues. Each felt pretty dynamic and pretty realistic. Although they were made out of wood, they had been painted in a way that made them seem almost metallic to me.

Other than the special exhibit, there were other cool things too. I was really drawn to long picture scrolls and shoji screen doors like usual. The National Treasure Gallery (room 2 on the second floor) had a scroll depicting the Heiji Rebellion of 1159.

Actually, even cooler is that the museum actually provides high quality imagery of this work and many others on its site: "The Illustrated Tale of Heiji".

Another favorite from the main exhibition halls was the ukiyo-e section. Out of the ones on display, I think I liked Mochizuki by Hiroshige the most. It's part of his The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō series and they had multiple woodblock prints from the series.

There was also a cool section of the museum called the "Japanese Culture Plaza" that was a more interactive section. They had an ukiyo-e section where you could try woodblock printmaking yourself. I gave it a shot and was worried it would be really bad but it turned out alright. Definitely I didn't align the paper properly every time (should have been more deliberate), and didn't push the stamps straight down and up, so the colors aren't all in the right places.

You can see in my attempt that colors are spilling over the black inking so my alignment wasn't proper. It really goes to show how talented ukiyo-e carvers and printers are since they do this thousands of times without this kind of error. Just look at the Hiroshige print above! It's way more complex and the colors are all in the proper places. And that's with actual paint, not just stamps like in the exhibit. Wow!

By the time I had seen all of this stuff, the museum was already about to close for the day since it was almost 5 PM. So I didn't even explore all of the rooms in the main building or one of the other wings!

It was basically exactly as I had expected since it's been depicted in otaku-centric anime pretty often. For example, below is how it's shown in Lucky☆Star, one of the absolute GOATs of the anime world.

Lucky Star episode 12, 4:10

Tokyo Big Sight has also been shown in a bunch of other anime as well, but I feel like it's been less and less common these days. Maybe I'm watching the wrong things but otaku-centric shows set in IRL Tokyo seem far and few between compared to a few years ago. It's all isekai now (not that I don't have a soft spot for isekai...)

Speaking of Lucky Star (because it's related to what I did today), you can watch Konata and the gang experience Comiket in the embedded video below. I'm not totally sure how or why it's on YouTube and it's in 360p, but definitely worth a watch (it's also on Crunchyroll). I was looking for the Tokyo Big Sight frame from the anime and got hooked and almost watched the full episode lol I think I will actually rewatch this on my flight back to Seattle and when I get back!! It probably would hit way harder and be more relatable since I had watched it before I had ever been to Japan.

(I know the embed isn't working directly in some locales but it's so good that I am purposefully leaving the basically giant YouTube button to entice you into clicking into the video...)

In the video, which I know everyone has seen, the halls were all packed and there were so many crowds that people were getting swept away. It seems kind of realistic when you consider that Comiket, which gets held twice a year, is pulling in around 500k visitors every time!!

In contrast, the event I went to today, COMIC1's COMIC1☆27, seemed much more relaxed. Only one exhibition hall was taken up in the South hall so I'd say it was much smaller. I don't know the partipation numbers but I'd guess in the thousands or tens of thousands instead of half a million.

"But", I hear you ask, "what even is COMIC1☆27??"

Yes, yes, we're getting to that!

Up close, Big Sight is even more imposing! But it's pretty convenient to get to since it has a dedicated train line stop.

COMIC1, like Comiket, is a doujinshi convention. (oh man prepare to get into the weeds here) Doujinshi can be thought of as self-published printed works produced by groups usually referred to as "circles". The doujin in doujinshi means "self-published", and these doujin circles come to events like Comic1 or Comiket with things like art books, magazines, comics, etc. Some groups are dedicated to creating fan art or parodying existing anime or manga franchies, while others choose to create wholly original works. Definitely read through the links for more well informed information source than me lol

One other thing that people may associate doujin with is NSFW content (ero-manga, R18, etc.). While it is true that a lot of doujinshi is NSFW, not all of it is! You can find plenty of wholesome content a doujinshi convention (unless it's specifically a NSFW I guess lol).

That being said, I didn't take any pictures inside the main hall area because I both wasn't sure if it was allowed and also because even if I did take photos I think I wouldn't be able to use most of them on my blog. I mean technically no one is stopping me from putting NSFW stuff here but let's keep it family friendly haha

While the info dump out of the way, I will talk about my experience a little! COMIC1☆27 has a really short distribution window, the main hall was only open from 11 AM to 3 PM (plus I think 1 hour for a small group of early ticket holders). I had woken up later than I anticipated and the train ride there was an hour long and 2 transfers so by the time I made it there, it was something like 11:45.

Luckily, there was no need to wait in line or anything at that point. To get in, you only need to show that you have a copy of the event catalog. The catalog itself is put up for sale at a couple merchants like a month ahead of time and they also sell some at the door. I am a bit anxious and was worried they would run out so I just opted to buy it ahead of time.

The catalog I purchased at Melonbooks ahead of time

The catalog is pretty handy because it has a map of the event and also a list of all of the doujin circles and which tables they will be stationed at. I had been familiar with a few of the names in the catalog and looked up a few ahead of time to see what they would be distributing so I could bookmark anything I wanted.

Once I actually got into the exhibition hall I was a bit overwhelmed actually. It was a little busy, but I'm used to that kind of thing because I regularly attend large, crowded anime conventions in the US. I think I was probably mostly overwhelmed by being a little anxious that I would have to interact a lot in a language I'm not particularly good at lol Also there was just NSFW stuff everywhere, which probably added to the overall level of stimualtion? L O L

Anyway, I was a bit worried that maybe vendors would call out or hassle me when I walked by or made eye contact, but that wasn't really a problem. It does happen to me kind of often in the states though so I always try not to make eye contact with vendors (of any kind in any country lol) because then I feel obligated to look at their stuff.

But it turned out OK, by the time I arrived, it seemed like the crowds were already thinning a bit, so it was easy to walk through the aisles of tables or directly approach a doujin circle's booth if you wanted something.

A standee photo spot at the event. Not totally sure what Tokimeki Party Sensation really is though

I think a lot of people who were really eager to buy specific things probably showed up right on time or even in the early ticket timeslot. Actually even by/around noon, it seemed to me that some vendors had sold out and were packing up for the day. As time went on, more and more vendors seemed to be selling out or in some cases deciding they had had all the customers they would get for the day and heading out. However, there were still lines at some of the most popular vendors, especially in a few cases where the authors were doing signing events! I saw a few pretty long lines for those.

I had only book-marked a couple of vendors ahead of time that I wanted to visit. The first was sold out with their new thing before I arrived, which was unfortunate, but the second did have the Miku card sleeves and keychain I had wanted. Below is the SFW portion (I'm pretty sure they're all safe lol) of my haul!

Not entirely sure what all of them actually are at this point, but one is clearly a wholesome story about Furina turning into a cat, one is some sort of artsy book, one is recounting a trip (actaully looking now it might be a trip record to an NSFW museum but the cover is safe I think!). The other one (the one with the girl with all the... ribbons...?) is probably my favorite of these and is by an artist (circle?) named melodia (but in cursive lol). I actually snagged the ¥1,500 option because it came with an acrylic, file folder, and signed photo card (plus the regular art book!!)

Actually, talking about that a bit, I felt like the prices for everything was really fair. Like actually too fair. For example, if you go to an artist alley in the states and pick up like a full color 11x17 poster or something you'll often see deals like 1 for $15 or 3 for $40 (it's been a few months I can't remember exactly but something like that). At Comic1, vendors are distributing literally full color books for ¥500!! That's like 5x less than a single print in the US!! And sure, the memoria book is only like 10 pages but still! There were a few circles with more expensive invidual books but I think the majority I got were either ¥500 or ¥1,000 each. (For reference the top item in the picutre above was ¥1,800 I believe)

There were some vendors also selling keychains, small acrylics, etc., but the main focus appeared to be on doujinshi itself for the majority of the circles and the customers. For some circles, the event was also where they premiered new products. For example, the book by melodia that I purchased "memoria19", is now open for pre-order on Melonbooks (a doujin specialty shop operating both online and physical locations). However, I think not all doujin artists are in it for the money, and not all will sell more copies online. The Comiket Wikipedia article kind of talks about this a bit (albeit for a different event).

One that I was interested in but didn't work the courage to go up to, had a giant Miku with him. The book he was distributing looked wordy, more like an essay than a comic so I think it would have been a bit hard for me to understand, but he did look passionate! Looking it up afterwards, the guy at the booth seems like he's pretty famous, since he specifically even has an English Wikipedia page about him becuase he had symbolically married Hatsune Miku in 2018. He was distributing "How to Have a Wedding with a 2D Character, 9th Edition.", which I didn't know at the time but I would have totally picked up if I could actually read Japanese properly.

準備できました！(^o^) お待ちしております。m(_ _)m https://t.co/DJSl6Nhfap pic.twitter.com/TL0psqjGTe

— 近藤 顕彦【⋈🗻🌰】ミクさん大好き (@akihikokondosk) October 13, 2025

He sold out before I left, but I didn't see him leave. I wonder if he uses a wheelchair to take Miku around? Anyway, seems like a cool guy to me. I think its always cool to share what you're passionate about like that, especially since in his case it seems like Miku actually helped him out in a rough spot.

Finally, there was one circle who wasn't present at their booth that was distributing Girls Band Cry stuff so I wanted to take a look. I thought the sign said they would be back in 10 minutes but it must have said something else because I think I walked around another 20 minutes and they never came back lol

By the time I left it was approaching 1 PM (technically only halfway through the event) and the crowd size had already dwindled a lot and decent number of cirlces had already left for the day, as shown in the COMIC1 tweet below

COMIC1☆27の入場は13時よりカタログ『午後割引500円』になります🙋‍♀️
会場は15時まで！
ぜひお越しください！#COMIC1 pic.twitter.com/eYRZ2cZgZb

— COMIC1準備会 (@comic1official) October 13, 2025

If I'd come at this time of day, I could have saved ¥700 on buying the entry catalog, but who knows if I would have been able to get the stuff I had gotten in that case.

Overall, I really liked the COMIC1☆27 event and would recommend attending a COMIC1 event in general if you aren't afraid of seeing NSFW things. The circles were all very kind and let me look through sample books before purchasing and language itself wasn't really an issue either. Fun experience! Now I just need to attend Comiket one day, but that's an entirely different beast. If you do go to an event like this, make sure to bring cash because it's the only thing accepted (IDK about corporate booths at big events)

Quick note before moving on. Just some quick context, but you might have noticed that I'd been saying "distributing" for the most part instead of "selling" throughout this post. The reason is just because I think that is the general nomenclature. The wiki mentions there is a preference for this, but doesn't go into more details or explain why. My guess is because "selling" implies the circles are aiming to make a profit, which could be troublesome for those who are making parody content? This COMITIA FAQ post also talks about another reason where "distribution" encompasses when items are given without exchange of money (COMITIA is another doujinshi convention/organizer).

After I was all done, I walked around Big Sight for a bit longer before out. This is what it looks like if you stand right under the inverted pyramid thing and look upward

I wasn't perfectly centered but close enough?

Since I was near Odaiba, I headed over to look around for a bit. I stoped by the Diver City building and saw that they were having a Sweet Potato Fest with a bunch of sweet potato desserts. I got a sweet potato and ice cream cup but the vendor triggered one of my biggest personal pet peeves: touching literally everything with gloves on and then touching food too. He was handling my money, and then a dish rag and grabbing cups and directly touching the sweet potato, etc. So annoying. But I feel like it's gotta be like 80% of all food truck vendors I've ever eaten at have done this. I know kitchens aren't always the cleanliest but at least the cooks in the back generally aren't directly handling money from hundreds of customers. #RantOver

I was having a good day so I didn't let something like that get me down (but I didn't eat the part of the potato I saw him touch LOL). But then it seemed like the world was conspiring against me. I went to use my foldable phone's inner screen and there was a crack right done the middle on the crease. It was toast. I never even dropped it or anything, I wonder if it's a residual effect of when I cracked it the other day? Either way, I'm out of warranty, don't have insurance, and a repair is estimated at like $700, so I'm just gonna buy the latest model and get insurance this time. I'll have to wait til I'm back in the States for that though. Luckily my phone's regular screen still works. But I have to use it like a regular phone??? UGH lol

This put me in a bit of a pouty mood, so I only briefly checked out the other stores in the area before heading to Akihabara for my only place of comfort in this dark, sullen world.

Of course, I'm talking about Sushiro

On the occasion of the Osaka/Kansai Expo 2025, this exhibition brings together 3 national treasure, 16 important cultural properties (eight of them on show for the first time since restoration), and 20-odd pieces that were previously shown at an expo at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as artworks that will surely become national treasures in the future [...]

This is a bit funny since just yesterday I was talking about how I should start documenting Important Cultural Properties that I've personally seen, because I had felt like it was a lot. Well I decided to put together a page to document that but it became really tedious really fast since the names the items are called by individual museums don't usually seem to match what they are called in the national database. I had only included ones I've seen recently (including today!) and then started on ones I had seen in the past but gave up because it was super tedious to remember if I'd seen a specific urn without a picture (for example). So now I'm adding another arbitraty rule that I have to remember seeing something specifically to add it to the list (I make the rules here!). Anyway if you're interested, you can see the list here. TBH, I don't know if I'll commit to updating it in the future when I go to more museums but we'll see.

Getting to the museum was actually an easy and pleasant experience for me since it's right on the Chiyoda Line and even better one of the station exits is directly into the museum's building. Although I was tricked at first into thinking it wasn't because the interior of the building almost looks like an outdoor area

Not sure why this is the only angle I decided to photograph

Fortunately, photos were allowed in this museum but unfortunately, I only took a couple and they also have insane angles/cropping/etc. like the one below

Geisha by Watanabe Kazan

Out of all of the works on display, I think I liked Geisha, one other piece called Swimming Fish by Watanabe Kazan, and The Court Lady Feng Zhaoyi Confronting an Escaped Bear by Kikuchi Yōsai the most.

Above: The Court Lady Feng Zhaoyi Confronting an Escaped Bear by Kikuchi Yōsai. Originally from the museum's website Left: Geisha by Watanabe Kazan. Originally from the museum's Twitter

There was also a national treasure on display: Tea Bowl with Black Glaze, Yōhen Tenmoku Type, Known as “Inaba Tenmoku”. It was pretty small but the design looked cool and it's always surprising to me when objects like this last for nearly 1000 years and still look vibrant. Apparently there are only three bowls of this kind left in the world and they are all designated as Japanese National Treasures.

I left and wandered the area for a bit and then took a bit of an aimless stroll. While passing through the Tokyo International Forum, I looked into the exhibition area and saw that some some of flower arrangement event going on. After a quick check, it turned out that it was a free event so I went in to check it out

It turned out that this was the "Autumn Sun Flowers" Ikenobo Tokyo Bamboo Branch 100th Anniversary and Youth Division 30th Anniversary Flower Exhibition.

I'm not knowledgeable about flowers or flower language at all (spider lilies mean death is my limit), but I do like looking at pretty things so I felt it would be worthwhile to pop in. Actually a tangent before looking at the flowers. Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arrangement and throughout the centuries there have been changes to what style of arrangement has been popular, whether the arrangement should look more natural, etc. I had never considered before now but there are various "schools" that act both as an institution but also that have distinct philosophies on Ikebana. The oldest and largest school is the Ikenobō school, and their Tokyo Bamboo Branch was putting on the exhibit. Interestingly, it seems this school has over 400 domestic branches and over 100 internationally. What a behemoth!! If you're interested, look up a group near you and join the juggernaut!!

Anyway, while I had expected to see 'pretty' or 'serene' arrangements, there were also some that might potentially be described as 'cool' or 'intense' as well. Below are a few of my favorites

The last one was especially interesting to me because I had no idea you could use such blatantly non-natural stuff in Ikebana. Acctually, in the first place, I had assumed it was only about flowers so I dind't really expect the non-flowering plants, sticks, or just plain logs either. I mean it makes sense though, like even though momiji leaves aren't flowers they are pleasant to look at, especially in the fall. I guess if I even thought about it for an instant before hand, I would have realized that things other than the actual flowers are allowed since otherwise they'd all need to have standardized vases or something, right? I digress.

After such a culture-filled day, I headed to Royal Host for a light dinner (and heavy dessert!) and then walked around Akihabara a bit before finally heading home.

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!!!

As a proxy for places that I've visited, this method isn't perfect since I walk all over the place but generally only take photos at individual destinations along the path.

I decided to visit the big green spot to the left of Ueno Park on that map, Koishikawa Botanical Garden. I was a bit confused at first because I was sure that I had visited previously, but it turns out that I had actually been to the Koishikawa Kōrakuen Park previously. The names aren't actually even all that similar except that they include the district name, Koishikawa.

The botanical garden itself is beautiful - mostly, as we'll see in a bit - and is run by the University of Tokyo. The area I thought was the nicest was by the main building of the Former Tokyo Medical School. The building itself it photogenic and is a considered an Important Cultural Property by the nation of Japan. Unfortunately, it's been closed to visitors since 2021 since it's not up to code for seismic activity apparently.

Various gardens had been located on the site since the Tokugawa Shogunate's Koishikawa Oyakuen medical garden was founded in 1684! Overall, my first impression was that the garden was pretty big and relatively empty considering that the entrance fee was similar to smaller parks in Tokyo (¥500). I think part of it is that the area is very residential and didn't seem to have too much going on in the way of major tourist attractions otherwise.

Towards the back of the gardens, there is a more heavily wooded area with very narrow paths. As you walk it begins getting darker, and more damp. The trees seem to be closing in on you and that's when you notice that a spider web is on your right very near your head. And a large spider is in that web. As you walk past, you see another web and another (bigger??) spider existing menancingly on your left. Your pace quickens. The dampness is now giving you the chills? This is the kind of place that makes you feel like something is crawling on you even when it's not.

But then you definitely feel something touch your leg. Tall grass? Maybe, but better not risk it. Your brisk walk turns into a slow jog. Now it's your heartbeat's turn to quicken. You look left, you look right. Spider web, spider. Spider web, spider. You desperately hope to be out in the open soon.

And finally, you break into the sunlight.

Okay, okay. A bit dramatic for simple navigation of a single path that's only like 1/10th of a mile long haha My heart rate did shoot from like sub-100 to nearly 150 as I scurried into the more open area though. I don't remember even being that afraid of spiders but I think it was just a mood/atmosphere thing. I will admit to being a little afraid in general though. Like I like what those guys are doing but would rather not see them lol

In the more open area, I ran into a weird gathering of fruit. Likely the spiders are starting to understand more complex trap design.

Near the medical herb garden, I spotted a little snack stand. Surprisingly, the sign indicated that they sold food (even unagi??). I was hungry, but no one seemed to be around so I decided to just sit and relax for a bit. During my break, a couple showed up wanting to get soft serve at the stand as well. Right when they were about to leave, a little old lady showed up, unlocked the little shack's door, and made them a cone. Since she was back, I decided to get a palte of curry rice.

I had already peered into the shack to look inside earlier and it was very small so I knew that the dish would be re-heated with the microwave but it ended up being pretty good. No major complaints, especially because it was so convenient and in a relaxing atmosphere. I don't think it's worth going to just for the food though haha

Unfortunately, eating caused me to miss out on visiting the Glass House portion of the botancial gardens, since it closes earlier than the overall garden.

One other thing I thought was cool while visitng was that the garden also has a grafted clone of the Isaac Newton tree (the one with the falling apple) and a grapevine derived from the ones used in Gregor Mendel's experiments.

Although when I got back, I was a little less impressed with the Newton tree clone thing since they seem to be everywhere! I think the grapevine might be rarer (unique even??) but I'm not totally sure.

Overall, I'd recommend visiting the park, especially if you are into plants or medicinal herbs (these are also plants) or spiders.

If only, I had left at a reasonable time in the first place...

It all began when I was heading to the Yamatane Museum of Art in Shibuya to see the Nihonga Pilgrimage 2025 special exhibition. But when I started walking over from Omote-Sando Station, I realized another museum was vaguely in a similar direction.

So I headed to Nezu Museum instead. The building itself has a nice aesthetic and I actually found it nice that the exhibits were small. Each exhibit was only one or two small rooms, so it never got to the point where I felt like it was dragging on to see everything. The main exhibit showing today was "Yakishime Ceramics: Feel the Clay". Yakishime ceramics are unglazed and fired at high temperatures. Since I couldn't take photos in the exhibit, my memory is failing me on giving more fun facts but overall I found it cool and interesting as I went through.

One thing I saw that I was taken aback by at first was a blue-ish vase-shaped piece that I thought was super similar to the celadon vase repaired in the first episode of "The Unknown Master of Restoration", an NHK show about [Mayuyama Koji] and his son repairing priceless art in Japan. It used to be on YouTube (a low quality archive exists) but I'd recommend watching the series if you can find somewhere it is available! It's very interesting!

One of the other galleries had some ancient Chinese bronze pieces. Some of it was almost 3500 years old!! That's pretty crazy that it's still intact and looking usuable!

Since gallery photos weren't allowed, here's old man Nezu himself, the namesake of the museum

I almost left after viewing the exhibits but realized there was a door to a garden area which turned out to be pretty massive! It was a bit busy but not particularly crazy or anything. If you've already paid for the musuem, it's definitely worth hanging out in the garden for a bit.

After perusing the garden for a bit, I finally decided to head to my actual intended destination and after a bit of a stroll I arrived at the Yamatane Museum of Art. I feel like I'm not the biggest fan of nihonga art, because a lot of what I had been exposed to before were more like portraits, which I'm not the biggest fan of in any style? The Nihonga Pilgrimage exhibit was about places that the artists or others treated as sacred spots, so it was all landscapes. Because of that I thought I might like it better and should give it a chance, and I think it definitely paid off.

Camellia Petals Scattering by Hayami Gyoshū

Unfortunately, this museum also didn't allow photos for any pieces other than the one above, but I did actually make sure to keep track of which art I liked the most. To be fair, Camellia Petals Scattering is a designated as an important cultural property by the government of Japan, so I guess it's generous that were even allowed to photograph that!

My two favorite pieces were End of the Year by Higashiyama Kaii and Itsuku Island by Kobayashi Kokei (definitely follow the first link to check it out).

I basically felt like Higashiyama Kaii was a genius while I was there viewing his works. I had also thought that his paintings seemed like they would be much more recent than they are (e.g. 2010s instead of 1960s-1980s). I'm not sure if it's because they feel 'flat' or something but did feel like they felt newer than other art from similar dates on display. Here's another example that was on display that I felt seemed more modern than it actually was.

Regarding Itsuku Island, I thought this was amazing as well. The scene appears foggy and it almost feels like if you look longer and squint a little, you might actually be able to peer through the mist. It kind of traps you in place waiting to see if you can see more. Unfortunately, I can't find a single high quality photo online so if you want to see what it looks like, take a look at this post by the official museum account (enjoy all 20 pixels!). I guess having a scarcity online really would help to drive people into the museum itself? There weren't even postcards of this one in the gift shop!

Next, I wanted to head to Shibuya to check out the Lycoris Recoil pop up store. By the time I actually got to Shibuya, I was actually pretty hungry so decided to look around for some food. After a while, I ended up in the 13th floor restaurant area of the Shibuya Scramble Square building. I almost chose to eat at an okonomiyaki place but it had one of those policies where everyone that goes has to order a drink which I probably would have done but leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Then, I uncharacteristically decided to look the place up on Google Maps and it had a relatively low score too! Bullet dodged, but I was still hungry!!

Luckily, there was an udon place also on the same floor that looked pretty good! I think being seated as a single person also helped me out since the bar area for individuals and pairs was right at the window facing Shibuya Scramble, so I had a great view for my late lunch

I ordered a curry udon, and didn't expect such a massive bowl to show up!

I felt pretty tired after eating such a large meal but I carried on nonetheless. The mission I am on to hoard anime merch is not one that just anyone can endure, so I must. After a bit of confusion, I properly made it to the Tsutaya collaboration space right at the scramble to peruse various IP merchandise. There was a huge Lycoris Recoil area near the registers with the main promotional artwork, shown below.

Originally from https://lycoris-recoil.com/popup/shibuya/

I ended up picking up a clear file of the main design and a few small things from the Fate franchise. While I was at the shop, I also came face-to-face with the famous, lifesize FUWAMOCO statues!!

My apologies for not taking photos from similar angles or levels of closeness

After all of the excitement that spending money entails, I decided to take a quick look around the main scramble area before heading home. Some promotional graphic at Shibuya 109 caught my eye so I went in. 109 is like a women's fashion destination, especially for various subcultues (not going into it, not an expert lol).

From the Shibuya 109 blog

It turns out that the promotional image I had seen and that had drawn me in (see above) was for "Yamikawa Week", an event to celebrate the Yamikawa aesthetic. I somehow missed the history display but did take a photo in the third floor photo spot.

There was also an event going on where if you spent x amount at participating stores in the building, you would be able to get a free sticker or keychain. Unfortunately, I don't personally need any women's fashion items so if I do want a keychain or something, I guess I'll have to get it off of Mercari or something. I was tempted to stop at a pancake place and have some fluffy pancakes because of more marketing but I was too full unfortunately.

This marketing would work on anyone!

By the time I wrapped up looking around, it was already pretty close to 5:30 so I was terrified about the trains getting packed. Luckily, when I entered Shibuya station via the underground entrance conveniently inside of Shibuya 109 and made it to my train, it was partly empty. However, once I switched trains it did get super packed. I only needed to ride a couple stops at that point though so it wasn't too bad!

If I blogged about every single thing I got up to with my friends in the past week, it would be quite a long post and I am not prepared for a massively long writing session!

I'll break my past week into a couple sections as divided by my ever-changing accomodations (I'm already paying my regular rent and my Japan monthly lease and now...)

Tokyo

I met up with my friends at our shared AirBnb in Ikebukuro, an area I am pretty familiar with (and will be going back to in a few days!). The plan was to hang out for a couple days in Tokyo, then make our way to Hokkaido.

We managed to briefly catch the Owl Festival while we wandered Ikebukuro on the initial night and then got conveyer belt sushi at a non-Sushiro (gasp!!) location!

The next day, we visited the Daikanyama neighborhood in Shibuya. It's like a trendy, upscale shopping area so I didn't buy much personally but it was a fun atmosphere.

I don't have many photos from that day but did take one of the Miffy Cafe. I think it's a permanent location?

I didn't know until now but Miffy is a dutch character and is pretty old?? I guess it's an international cutesy character that has just really caught on in Japan, similar to Snoopy or the Moomins. I'm not sure about Snoopy or Miffy, but cute characters sell well in Japan so it's the number one market for Moomins in the world. I wonder if it's similar for the others.

On our final day in Tokyo together, I showed everyone around my favorite Uneo Park -> Yanaka Ginza -> Suwa Jinja route (similar to what I did the other day or the reverse of this time). We got souffle pancakes, browsed Yanaka Ginza, and walked around some of my favorite places in the area. I cracked my phone screen after dropping it literally less than 3 inches, and then I also saw some cool spider lilies (specifically Lycoris radiata I think; Is that why the supercomputer in Lycoris Recoil is named that?)! I haven't seen them in person before but they are pretty cool!

Sounkyo

We then flew to the New Chitose Airport in the Sapporo area of Hokkaido. We would be hanging out in Sapporo for a few days, but first we drove (not me) a few hours into the interior of Hokkaido. Specifically, into the Daisetsuzan National Park, an area that includes mountainous terrain in the center of Hokkaido. The area also has active volcanos! How nifty!

Oh wait, actually before we drove anywhere, I forced the group to stop in the Snow Miku Museum in the airport!

The museum and gift shop were cool themselves, but I really liked the art by visitors

We stayed in a hot springs resort in Sounkyo. It was pretty relaxing and we had buffet style meals that included traditional Japanese dishes.

The view from my room

In addition to enjoying the hot springs, we made sure to explore the area a little as well. For part of one of the days we were there, we took the cable car and chair lift towards the peak (near Mount Kurodake). I had been worried it would be scary on the chairlift but even though there was no lap-bar it wasn't since it was usually only a foot or two off the ground.

We also visited Kamikawa. Despite being a small town, it seemed pretty hip and had a lot of places to get tasty snacks.

Me in yukata at the resort

Sapporo

After a couple days in Sounkyo, we made the drive to the main Hokkaido metroplis, Sapporo (it's where the beer is from!). On the way, we did some sightseeing. I had the most incredible melon ice cream and yubari melon (a local variety of cantaloupe) at the pyramid observation deck near Biei.

The area around Biei was super nice and had beautiful rolling hills and lots of agricultural fields. The town itself was also really nice, and one highlight for me was the la colline craft shop. They sold all kinds of cute goods and I ended up buying a few magnets shown in the Instagram post below.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by waco ＊ neco わこねこ/やまもと わこ (@wanko_12)

From what I gathered, the lady on register duty was actually one of the artists that made the specific pieces I was buying!! She was the namesake of the waco ＊ neco brand and her and her husband made the crafts! There were also crafts by other artists as well and the group generally liked a lot. In a rare twist outside of restaurants, everyone in the group purchased something here! If anyone is ever in Biei, I vote this as a must-see.

Also on the way to Sapporo, we saw a smoking volcano! I'm pretty sure it's Mount Tokachidake. (Un?)Fortunately, we didn't see any lava.

I don't have any great pictures of things we did in Sapporo, but we did have really good omakase at sushinokura. While I didn't like all of the dishes personally, the ones I did like were incredible. This was quite an experience since the meal took roughly 2 hours and consisted of over 20 courses (although each course is usually only 1 piece of nigiri or a small dish). I was completely stuffed by the end! It was really good, I recommend checking it out. The chef was also really nice and cool!

While we were there, we also explored the 2025 Hokkaido Harvest Festival. There were lots of tasty things and it seemed to be showing off goods from around the prefecture (not just from the Sapporo area). One thing I tried that I don't remember having before was Chinese yam. Apparently it's an invasive species in the US but it tasted pretty good when prepared like french fries. The taste was pretty similar to a potato but the texture is like crisper throughout (not a food word guy!)

Originally from the harvest festival website

Return

After a full week with friends, I made my way back to Tokyo.

As an aside, I had flow both to and from Sapporo from Tokyo and domestic flight in Japan is actually so good. Boarding literally only took like 10 minutes for a huge plane. We're talking like 300 seats, people were streaming onto the plane! I think part of it is that everyone seemingly checks their bags since I didn't see too many carry-ons. Japan Airlines also seemed to board the back of the plane first which helped, and there were also multiple scanner lanes for the boarding passes. I do wonder if it's just because it's like a commuter route or something so only business-people go and so no one has any luggage at all or something?

After returning, I didn't quite feel up to blogging. But that didn't stop me from doing an Evangelion stamp rally!

A few of the stamps were a big wonky but I was happy Asuka turned out good!

Overall, I feel like we did way, way, more than I wrote about here but it's impossible to blog about everything. Either way, I'd definitely recommend visiting both Hokkaido overall and Sapporo itself!!

Once I made it to Kita-Senju, I headed into the local Marui department store to head to Funtos, which is like a cafe and "culture space", which seems to just mean it has a ton of collab events.

From the Funtos Twitter account

Unfortunately, when I arrived all of the Monica merch was sold out! They only had side character merch left. I found this especially crazy since the collab started only yesterday and there wasn't even anyone else in the store when I went. I wonder if they just had really low stock? Even for the collaboration drinks, they were out of the Monica stirrers. I did get a flyer promo for the event though which almost makes up for it? It's a flat piece of merch that takes up basically no luggage space, has anime characters I like, and works as a souvenir itself anyway? I guess I'll let them off the hook for today.

Next, I stopped into a shop to get some gachapon toys. I only tried 2 bocchi machines, but I pulled Kita both times?? I'm not sure why I always pull the same characters when I do these kinds of things, but it's okay, Kita is cool.

Left is from the stasto sleepy figures (onemutan) line, right is from the Takara Tomy A.R.T.S slippy figure line

I also ran into a Surugaya flash sale event and was pretty sad that my luggage was full because plushes starting from ¥330 is quite a deal in my book! They even had popular characters like Emilia from Re:Zero or Saber Alter from the Fate series

After I left, I planned to check out a few temples and did briefly stop by a couple but didn't stay very long or even pay respects at them and actually accidentally jaywalked right into traffic once because I was confused about the placement of some traffic lights.

The last thing I had planned to see in the area was Rainbow Plaza in Adachi (I think there are multiple plazas in the Tokyo area called this), since I had read that it had a nice grassy area right next to the river and was pretty scenic. Since it was only a few minutes away, I was sure I was going to check it out, get bored pretty quick and head home without having done much of anything at all.

But when I was leaving the last temple I was at to head to the plaza, I started hearing music and wasn't sure if it was like someone blasting from their house or what. As I got closer to the plaza, the music started to get louder and more people were heading in that direction. What was going on in the plaza today?

Imagine my shock when I walk up the stairs to the top of the embankment and saw some sort of concert going on!

At first I wasn't sure what was going on since I hadn't seen anything about this in any of the English sites I usually frequent to find events (or even the Japanese collabo-cafe which I use to find merch collabs lol). I also didn't know if it was free and I could just go in or if it was ticketed or what. So I nervously performed a little recon, sneaking along the walking past back and forth for a minute until I caught a glimpse of one of the event staff's shirt which let me know (in English!) that this was the ADACHI FOOD & MUSIC FESTIVAL!

Originally from the festival's twitter festival's twitter (at least i'm pretty sure it's their account...)

I think I showed up during like an idol music block because I don't think the rest of the perfomers in the lineup were idol groups but all that I stayed for were.

I ended up staying for much longer than anticipated, catching 4 full perfomances and part of 2 more! Recording and taking photos was or wasn't permitted on a per group basis and they let the crowd know before each act.

All the groups I saw seemed really talented and I think the most catchy song I heard was Tokyo Girl by MyDearDarlin', but (I'm gonna dump a ton of songs smh) I also liked トキメキCherry by ChuLa, 恋餃子 by STAiNY, Pa!!!!!!nation by MyDearDarlin', ナノLOVE by MyDearDarlin', MDDSyndrome by MyDearDarlin', and ウノウクノウカノウサノウ by TSUYOGARI SENSATION.

LOL looking at this list I'm like ok we get it, you liked every song in MyDearDarlin's set. I guess if I had to pick, they were my favorite out of the performances I saw. And listening back to all of these now, maybe ナノLOVE is actually the most catchy.

Only slightly related but I keep telling myself I'm not interested in idols or idol culture. But I do apparently like the music, and am drawn to their multimedia projects. If I'm not into idols why did I spend like 2 hours waiting for Sally Amaki from 22/7 (among other things) to sign a shikishi for me when she went to Sakura Con in Seattle this April? (Ok I'm actually just bragging about the last one)

The shikishi she signed while I was probably speaking gibberish

My literal reaction at that time L M A O

All of that to say maybe I should learn wotagei which are like dances that idols fans do (I'm not actually interested in doing that but it is an interesting subculture and cool to learn about). I actually don't know if that actually encompasses what I was seeing today but it seemed like at times a lot of the crowd would know when to do certain dances and self-organized to do more complex things on occassion.

I don't have a long clip of it today, but here is a short clip during TSUYOGARI SENSATION's set

I don't think that all of the guys dancing in the crowd were intimately familar with all of the groups, so I think that at least some of the dances are common and signaled somehow by the idols' choreo or something. (I could be wrong they could all know all of them!) I'll have to research this another time since it's like 3:30 AM as I write this and I need to fix my sleep schedule somewhat. Any wota out there that can fill me in on this?

By the time I left it was already dark

I'm still struggling to take night shots that actually look like they do with my eyes

And I did get to see the sunset

Although it was a bit less vibrant than this IRL

The last thing I did before going home was walk around to bask in the atmosphere (but not like a weirdo) and also because I needed to go to a Hobby Off to see if they had any cool anime figures. On the way, I had a donut at Ikkyu Donuts because it smelled so good when I walked by! For ¥250, it was really tasty, and I was actually a bit confused because at the time I was wondering if it was like a corn donut or something. It was slighty sweet with a super good texture and no glaze or anything. When I got home and looked it up, it turns out that they were donuts made with Soybeans and Soy Milk! I didn't even know that was a thing but I'd recommend trying it!

See ya later

As a quick reminder, I won't be blogging for the next few days. But fret not, I will return and begin blogging again on or around Monday, October 6. I'm meeting with my friends tomorrow but I wonder if I can make a quick pit stop at Day 2 of the Adachi festival before I do?? You can find out this answer and more on the next episode! See you next week!

After I actually got out of bed, I spent the first part of my afternoon going to nearby 7/11s to get buy a bunch of candy to get limited edition ZUTOMAYO clear files lol

Originally from 7/11 Japan's Twitter

I'm not sure if allowed or not but I didn't want to try to get multiple from the same store so I ended up hitting up 3 while going about my other business. Maybe I'll work on getting the other 2 designs soon. You can see what the full collection looks like from the Twitter user below!

#ずとマロッシュ 7軒まわってコンプ pic.twitter.com/jpE1VslTTL

— goby (@PI2T11MOYW5) September 25, 2025

For these types of events, you have to buy some kind of product to get the free item. In this case, 2 packs of candy. So now I have a ton of candy that I don't even necessarily want.

I'm probably going to try to foist it upon a few of my friends that I am meeting up with on Sunday. Actually heads up I won't be blogging from this Sunday (September 28) until probably the following Monday (October 6) while I they are in Japan too. Part of it is logistical since I don't want to take my laptop with me and blogging takes a lot of time usually, but also I don't want to involve people unnecessarily lol

During my clear file gathering spree, I made time to hit up Yushima Tenjin. They had a little bit of light landscaping going on but there were still people hanging out and paying their respects

I didn't check it out last time I was here, but I stopped into the shrine's museum as well while I was there. The museum fee was ¥500. It wasn't very large as it comprised just 2 rooms, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. The first floor had some mikoshi and other larger items and the basement level mainly had art depicting the enshrined deity, Tenjin.

Although photos were permitted on the first level, they weren't in the basement. In addition to images of Tenjin, the collection also had some ukiyo-e prints. I think my favorite was one by Hasegawa Chikuyō depicting Yushima Tenjin in the late 1800s. You can see what it looks like here.

There was also a set of horse armor! (Maybe actually just clothes doesn't seem too protective) How would they put this in Uma Musume??

For lunch, I ended up stopping into "a la campagne" (but in cursive) for lunch, a self-proclaimed patisserie. I don't know about it's qualifications there but it did have a pretty good quiche. I only got the drink set but I regret not getting the dessert set a little, but I've been having too many sweets lately (and I just stocked up on a ton this morning!!). But look at their offerings!!

Well, I'm writing this post pretty late today and didn't do too many other noteworthy things today, so I'm gonna call it here. But as a parting gift, take a look at this absolute unit I saw today. It didn't even seem to need one of those "oversized load" signs and it was in regular traffic lol

My first item on today's agenda was to head to Tokyo Station's Character Street to check out the Hololive Store. I heard there was station-only merchandise so I wanted to see what it looked like. (I could have just looked this up lol)

To start with, I was a little annoyed because I couldn't get a train directly to Tokyo Station, and would instead have ride to Otemachi and then walk around 10 minutes. Once I got to Otemachi, I got a little lost and realized that the exit I was looking for was actually directly inside Tokyo Station itself. Even better was that Exit B8b (crazy exit name, I know) lets you out right inside Tokyo Character street.

But actually, this got me thinking a bit, what's the farthest you can walk in Tokyo and stay inside stations? The walk from Otemachi to Tokyo Character street let me stay in the tunnels and was something like 800 meters.

I took a bunch of pics of Google Maps and stitched them together with panorama software to get a better picture of the Tokyo Station complex (let me know if anyone has better resources for this!).

As you can see, it looks like at least the following stations are interconnected: Tokyo, Otemachi, Nijubashimai, Hibiya, Ginza, Higashi-Ginza and Yurakucho. There are a few, like Ginza-itchome, that are super close.

My quick best guess for this station complex for the longest walk you could do is entering Otemachi at entrance C2b, walking though Nijubashimae, Hibiya, Ginza, and leaving Higashi-Ginza's exit 6. I don't know if this is actually feasible since sometimes some entrances and exits can be on opposite sides of the platform so you'd need to enter and exit the platform (IDK about fare etc.) if that makes sense. This also is the longest path I can think of that makes sense to actually travel, you could travel infinitely long if you just zig-zag through Tokyo Station or allow loops.

The total distance by using that route is ~2.6km (~1.6mi). Pretty far for staying inside a station. If I run out of plans, I'll try it sometime! I'll also research another time about the overall question of farthest you can walk in interconnected stations.

Back from our tangent, I made it to Tokyo Station Character steet and found the Hololive store. There were station-specific goods, but nothing in particular that I needed. I ended up just buying a few stickers. Also a little funny but I also ended up paying the ¥5 or whatever fee for a small bag and it ended up having the Hololive Tokyo Station official shop branding so I was thinking this is the cheapest way to get merch lol

Not pictured: station-specific merchandise lol

I looked around at a few of the other stores but I wasn't super interested in most of them. Things like Snoopy, Miffy, Chikawa, etc. are all super popular and take up a decent number of the shops. I did end up purchasing some more stickers (Apothecary Diaries, Frieren, Himiko Toga) and a Tenya Iida (from MHA) mechanical pencil as well.

After leaving the station, I headed towards the Imperial Palace area. My phone GPS had no idea where I was for like 15 minutes and I had to use my eyes to figure out how to navigate (the horror!). Once I finally made it to the edge of the imperial grounds, I saw a gate and almost decided to go in and check it out.

But then I realized, I've literally already been before! The gate leads to the Imperial Palace East Garden, which is pretty nice, but I felt like I didn't need to go again. I would like to see the Imperial Palace someday, but today is not that day!

I continued on my walk towards the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. I actually didn't realize this until now, but this was fulfilling a checklist item from my 2023 trip (partially, I still didn't get to go to the science musuem)! The area around the Imperial Palace is pretty open so I felt that the sun was being even more oppressive than usual. I didn't want to sunburn so I even whipped out my umbrella for a bit.

You can tell it's a staged photo because I'm not wearing a mask

I actually hadn't know what was on display at the museum, but when I arrived I just got the ticket to see both the main galleries and the special exhibition. The current special exhibition was showcasing art from World War II, including Operation Record Paintings (offical art commissioned by the military), War Record Paintings (battle scenes etc. not commissioned by the military), and general wartime art.

The exhibit was pretty interesting overall and worked to talk about the art while explaining the context and how pieces were used as propaganda.

The greeting at the gallery entrance

I definitely learned a lot here and ended up spending way more time at the museum than expected, which is why I wasn't able to go to the Science Museum as well. There were definitely some striking pieces like the one below. It's also interesting to think about how during war the painting might be depicting heroes doing their part but the other side wouldn't see it that way, since this is depicting soldiers before they launch a surprise attack.

Commander Sano Bidding Farewell to the Ono Volunteer Corps, Konosuke Tamura

Towards the end of the exhibit, there was also art from non-artists that had been solicited in the 1970s (I think, I forgot to photograph the placard) from survivors of the atomic blasts. It was pretty touching and sad. I got teary-eyed looking at a drawing of a girl trying to give water to her dead mother in the aftermath. I think the exhibit did a good job of making people think and also teaching about the history of the era.

After seeing the special exhibit I was actually pretty tuckered out already but decided I should also take a look at the main exhibits since it was included in the ticket price. This exhibit consisted of 12 rooms, generally ordered chronologially, but the first room was titled 'Highlights' and included many of the museum's most highly-treasured pieces of art. The majority were from Japanese artists but there were also a few names I recognized from the West like Georgia O'Keefe or Henri Matisse.

The Highlights room also had a few really eye-catching pieces like Harada Naojiro's Kannon Riding a Dragon, which is also a National Important Cultural Property. My favorite piece of the entire exhibit was also in the Highlights room, Milky Way by Matazo Kayama. Unfortunately, it was one of the pieces for which photos weren't allowed, and there also don't seem to be any good quality pcitures of it online. This blog has was appears to be a scan of a book that has a photo of it? In person it's more striking and since it's comprised of folding screens, I feel like that also adds something to it.

Since I couldn't get a picture of that one, I'll leave you with a photo of the runner-up favorite, Stream in the Evening Glow by Toyosaku Saito. I think my phone camera is doing weird stuff to the photo but alas.

Stream in the Evening Glow, Toyosaku Saito

Wrapping up the rest of the day briefly because a bit tired of writing now (lol), I made my way to Jinbocho to see if there were really bookstores everywhere. And there really were, at least in the small slice I visited. Also seemed to be a lot of cafes and stationary stores as well. Actually, I had seen that one of the cafes was holding a gallery for an artist and the art looked good, but I actually got a little suspicious that it was AI after seeing the hands on one piece on Twitter so I didn't go. I will look up later and really go but didn't have enough information at the time to decide haha

After that I walked home. I actually ordered the places I visited decently reasonbly today to max out my steps. Basically every 1 or 2 km, I had something I wanted to visit, so I was able to push myself to walk everywhere instead of riding the train between places. Not only is this good for health, but you see sights along the way you would have missed otherwise! But I won't do it that way every day or my legs would kill me lol

First, I made my way to Ueno Park along Shinobazu Pond, just as I had yesterday. Today, however, I noticed far fewer pedestrians hanging around and not nearly as many families. There were still people hanging out, but I think that's to be expected at any tourist destination. As I maade it to the main Ueno Park plaza area, I did get a little nervous because it seemed that there were a ton of student field trips going on.

Luckily, most of the student groups seemed to be heading to the zoo. Since I've already been to Ueno Zoo and am not a huge zoo person in the first place, I hoped that this would leave me unimpacted.

Once I made it to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, I was relieved to see that the lines weren't wrapping all over the building like yesterday. There was still a line of like 15 people ahead me getting tickets but that took less than 5 minutes. Thanks to this, I was able to see the Van Gogh’s Home exhibit. Although a lot of exhbits at this museum are free, I don't think special exhibits usually are and this one cost ¥2,300 (~$15.50)

Flyer originally from the exhibition's Twitter: https://x.com/gogh2025_26/status/1966298212811288610/photo/1

The exhibit was in both Japanese and English, although the text on the plaques was really small. Since it was so crowded it was actually a bit hard for me to get close enough to comfortably read them. I can be partly 'blamed' for this since my vision isn't 20/20 even with correction (thanks astigmatism!) but I think also the text was just too small. I felt like maybe the plaques themselves had to be kept small so that they would be smaller than the art in some cases lol

Anyway, the exhibit was cool and started with section that showed some of the context and influences for Van Gogh's work, then went into Van Gogh's work itself. It also talked about the history of his work and places that were important to his art. I actually didn't realize how little I knew about Van Gogh before this! I was a little shocked that he picked up making art at 27 and was so prolific in only 10 years. I also didn't know about the circumstance of his death either. Pretty crazy stuff.

I've said it before, but I'm not super into art and usually don't get it. There were a few pieces that I liked, and I think most of them were more colorful pieces. I also felt like some of his pieces felt lonely. I also saw a Hiroshige ukiyo-e print that was cool, but I forgot to remember it's name! Apparently Van Gogh collected woodblock prints. It's kind of like he was a caveman equivalent of a weeb (just kidding, obviously)

Of Van Gogh's work that was on display, I think I liked "Self-Portrait as a Painter" (partially pictured in the flyer above) the most. It makes sense why it was chosen as the main campaign image. The exhibition didn't allow taking photos so I can't remember the exact wording but near the portrait was an anecdote that his sister-in-law felt that the portrait showed Vincent Van Gogh as resolute (and some other adjectives) but Van Gogh felt that he had captured himself as unkempt and sad (likely the same description as here). It then asked how we felt he was portrayed. Personally, I think I have to agree with Van Gogh on this one, maybe not for the unkempt part but for the sad part. To me in person, it almost looked like the painting's eyes were watering due to the lighting.

After leaving, I decided to have a quick late lunch at the cafe in Ueno Park.

At ¥2,430 for the pancakes and coffee, I think it's probably relatively more expensive than it could be but since it's already so popular due to its location, it could probably charge whatever it wanted. The pancakes were tasty! I ended up downing most of the coffee right before I was leaving which made me a little jittery and nervous

After eating, I decided to make my way to Nishi-Nippori station. For one, this let me recreate previous walks I've done, but in reverse. And secondly, Nishi-Nippori was basically the only station nearby that I knew offhand would let me take the train home without switching lines. Actually, regarding the first thing, historically walking from Yanaka to Uneo to Akihabara is the what I do on the first day of my yearly trip to Japan. Since I didn't do that this time, I wonder if I've somehow cursed myself? But actually maybe you have to do something three times to make it a tradition anyway, so I didn't really break with tradition?

Along the way I saw these cool statues

I also happened upon a vending machine selling my beloved Kochakaden Peach Tea. For some reason, it feels like it's been harder to find this year and only some of the Coca Cola vending machines have it. I haven't seen it in any convenience stores either. Actually I haven't seen my favorite Melon Milk anywhere either???

I walked about the area for a little bit, made my way through Yanaka Cemetary, and finally stopped at Suwa Shrine for a few minutes to watch some trains pass by

From the shrine's vantage point, you can clearly see both Nishi-Nippori and Nippori station. Although the latter is like 500m away. While we are talking about it, I was taking zoomed in pictures to see if I could see the signage on phone. One thing I hate these days is that when you are zoomed in for photos the phone tries to like use AI or some other tool to upscale the photos automatically, so then you end up with weird artifacts in the pciture. I would rather it was just blurry or grainy like phones used to do (or am I crazy???). I think that you can't turn it off directly but can shoot in RAW to get rid of that but shooting in RAW takes a lot of space and I don't ever color grading or anything so also doesn't seem super beneficial normally.

Once I was finished stewing about that, I walked around the Nishi-Nippori area for a bit before catching the train back towards my apartment!

For dinner today, trying out some 7/11 stuff!

Also, I went to Akihabara in the evening to break some larger bills and make change and play some crane games. I ended up blowing like ¥3,400 to try to get the figure in the photo below (I eventually gave up) . Part of it was that GiGO is now making plays ¥200, whereas you can still do ¥100 per play at game centers like Tokyo Leisureland or Akihabara Donki, so it feels a little scammy. But also, I don't have the best claw game skills.

My advice is that if you see a figure you ~really~ want, you should just make a note of where you saw it, check a few secondhand shops to see if it's there, or even order from somewhere like JP Mercari. For example, I was able to find the figure above at a random shop for ¥1,680 (~8 plays at GiGO) and I'm sure I could have found it cheaper at a secondhand shop not in Akihabara. I was able to find it on Mercari for just ¥1,050. Obviously buying online would require delivering while you are still in Japan or paying fees for a proxy service like Buyee, which would eat into the 'savings' (not to mention international shipping if you went that route).

I don't have luggage space anyway, but it would have been a nice surprise if I had won something quickly lol

I headed out a bit later than I wanted to and headed to Ueno Park. I ended up walking along Shinobazu Pond like I did the other day but this time I got a better view of the Bentendo and lotuses

I also got a closer look at the lotuses and the top of the water. I wondered how gross it would feel if you accidentally fell in. SUPER gross I'm sure. Ugh!

Also apparently, the lotuses bloom in mid-July to mid-August and this particular lotus pond is renowned for its beauty. Well based on how it is in September, I'm not sure I'd be coming to Tokyo in July to witness them myself!

Around this time, I was thinking to myself that it seemed particularly busy out but that it might be because people were heading back to work from lunch or something. However, after I topped the stairs near the Kiyomizu Kannon-dō Temple, I started to see a lot more strollers and families walking around as well. It was at this point I looked it up and came to find out that, yes, today was a national public holiday in Japan.

I guess it's cool that they have the Autumnal Equinox Day to celebrate the equinox? I had a bad feeling about the museum though. Partly because the main exhibits at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum are free, but also because the paid exhibit is for Van Gogh (who as I seem to recall is somewhat popular?).

I decided to finish up my walk just in case I was worried for nothing but I kept thinking like oh if the population of the Tokyo metro area is 41 million, if .1% of them deided to go there would be 40k visitors today. Anyway that's ridiculous thinking because a popular exhibit of Klimt in 2019 was getting 7,900 per day and the article called that staggering!

Regardless, the museum was too busy for me lol There was a huge line on both the left and ride sides when entering and rather than figuring out what the lines were even for I just noped right on out of there.

It was also interesting to me that the main plaza area of Ueno Park didn't have anything going on. Usually, every time I visit I notice and go to some event here. During one of my visits last year I had even soliloquized

I actually am beginning to wonder if there's ever not an event there?

It turns out the answer is yes!

I basically gave up on doing any touristy things today and decided to just wander around and window shop a bit.

I went to Bic Camera to get a cheap router (tl;dr room wifi spotty when connecting local devices and local network might be shared between apartments? Unsure) and ran into this lego display. Guess whoever set it up hates R2-D2 lol Like it seems pretty unusual to me to see C3P0 without R2? But I'm not a huge Star Wars fan so maybe it's more normal than I'd guess lol

I also stopped in Muji to get a lint roller. One thing I hadn't really considered (IDK why I didn't notice last year either) is that if you wash you laundry and then hang it up to dry, the lint doesn't like automatically come off like if you did it in a regular dryer in the US. So anyway, my laundry ended up especially linty, which wouldn't really matter to me that much if so much of it wasn't like black things and the lint wasn't pure white. I guess that's also my fault though since I was the one that washed the clothes and towels at the same time.

Anyway, while we are talking about laundry, my unit has a clothes washer but no dryer (at least not the kind I would personally expect in like the US). Luckily, the compartment bathroom can function as a clothes dryer. So basically, you can hang up your clothes in the bathroom like in the photo above. Then, you can use the panel right outside of the bathroom to use the dryer function. It's basically built into the ventilation system of the bathroom section.

You can set the dry duration and afterwards it will automatically turn off. The ventilation system itself is pretty cool, I guess it ensures that the bathroom fully dries out and doesn't get moldy, even if you don't dry clothes in there. Also take this info with a grain of salt in case I am misusing it somehow LOL If you are more interested, here is a Bloomberg article talking more about the phenomenon. Apparently, it's called "yokushitsu kansouki" (bathroom dryer) and interestingly, the article mentions that it is more energy efficient than tumble dryers. I don't see a source for that claim though but did see various HackerNews threads arguing about it. I think mainly the claim stems from these using heat pumps (IDK if true) whereas some dryers use resistive heating which is less efficient.

Anyway, not an expert on that. Let's wrap up this blog post with (one of) today's snack(s)!

For lunch I ended up eating at the Ueno Marui (department store) food court area and had another omurice. The one from the other day was better though!

I also rushed a bit to finish an event in a gacha game.

Finally, I went to get to some food for dinner and take some night time photos but I feel like phone cameras these days are always super over brightening things, even if you turn down the brightness level. Anyway, a quick and easy day! In fact, I'm sitting at a paltry 7,500 steps today. The least so far by quite a bit!

I made my way to Nezu Shrine early in the afternoon to check out the Nezu Shrine Festival. It's actually maybe a good thing that I was too tired to go yesterday since I think that the mikoshi parade is only today.

On the way, I walked through Shinobazu Pond which is on the south end of Ueno Park. Most of the pond is covered by plants (lotus according to wiki) but there is a section of that pond for riding in duck (?) shaped boats

There is also a temple in the center of the pond, Shinobazu Pond Bentendo. I went to check it out and was surprised because it was insanely busy. There was actually like a 100 person (at least) line to go into the temple to make offerings. It turns out that today is Minarukane Taisai (also potentially known as the Shinobazu Pond Bentendo Grand Festival), which is held on the day of the snake every September. I'm having a bit of a hard time finding English info about how to figure out when snake day is (巳の日 minohi) but apparently it's a very auspicious day!

Anyway, I made my way to Nezu Shrine and found all of the usual fesstival excitement, but also a new trend? A labubu stall??

I also managed to embarass myself a bit because I was walking from one area of stalls to another and was looking to my left thinking wow that's quite a line of people as I was walking through a little empty area. But then I looked to my right and realized I was walking right in front of a stage area where they were about to have a performance. I kept my head down and increased my pace but luckily it was only like 20 feet wide so it wasn't too long. And they hadn't started playing yet but I guess I would have noticed ahead of time in that case lol I'll work on my situational awareness!

You can just imagine me walking between the people and the stage in the photo below lol

I also got some of my beloved mitarashi dango

classic bite out of it before I took a photo

When I left, I got a little caught up in the mikoshi parade as it passed by.

After the parade went by and I left, I explored the area a bit and almost encountered an awful fate. I was standing at a crosswalk with like 20 other people and somehow we all narrowly missed being pooped on by a bird. I literally saw the poop flying through the air and heard it splatter on the ground in front of me. Gross! No one go hit but a dad and daughter were laughing about it. Everyone else was playing it stragnely cool. I looked over at the guy next to me with wide open eyes and he didn't even reciprocate SMH

With that on my mind I also thought about the potential for bad luck with this vending machine I used

Imagine accidentally scooping the coins from coin return right into the drain below. I guess you could consider it an offering to the city and maybe that would make you less irritated?

Also a couple quick things I have been meaning to mention but keep forgetting. 1. compartment bathrooms are awesome, maybe I'll write about them one of these days 2. the amount of people wearing masks here is way down from last year (anecdotally obviously). I think that even on the train I'm seeing less that 10% of people wearing masks. Maybe it's because we aren't super far into flu season now but I was expecting the rate to be similar to when I visited in October of last year. Not good or bad either way but something I felt that had changed

Since one was in the Shibuya area and there were a few other limited-time events going on in the area, I decided to make my way over there for the day. My first stop was a popup shop by an artist I follow on Twitter, Hoshimiya Toto. They are multitalented and seem to have a widespread interest in creative activies so they do singing, illustration, etc. They were holding a 2-day popup shop event for yesterday and today so I decided to go check it out.

I had seen on Twitter that some things were sold out already so I was a bit worried everything would be sold out by the time I got there. Lukcily, it wasn't and they still had the acrylic keychain I had wanted. It is a miniature acrylic CD case and inside has a mini acrylic CD that you can even pop out! It's really cool because it has NFC so if you touch your phone to the the mini CD, it automatically opens up so that you can play or download the music!! Even cooler, they signed it!

It was cool to interact with the artist in their popup shop, although there were some communication issues because I don't practice enoguh and get confused even for phrases that I actually know the meaning of lol Their English was definitely better than my Japanese!

After leaving the popup, I visited a couple other stores in the area that I had on my list to visit. The area seemed pretty hip and cool, which makes sense since it's basically in or right next to Harajuku. Around this time it started pouring rain, which was pretty unfortunate because for some reason I had taken the umbrella that I keep in my bag out of my bag. Why?? I was considering waiting it out but ended up popping into 7/11 to buy another one. Actually I saw a few people do the same. I wonder what percentage of umbrella sales happen when it's already raining? That's something people don't generally buy ahead of time right?

While I was in the area, I stopped by Togo Shrine. Unfortunately I was under the impressions that you couldn't take pictures inside but they had Sanrio Character goshuin. I actually didn't even notice until after I had purchased the regular kind and was a little embarrassed to get another one then and there so maybe I'll have to go back to get one later

I then made my way to Miyashita Park for the ABEMA Anime Festival. As far as I can tell, ABEMA is an online streaming service so this was bascially a way to promote the service as well as upcoming anime. Around the rooftop of the park, there were various standee exhibits to take photos of and some of them had special custom voice recordings for the event by the voice actors.

Also girls were basically only taking photos with Bakugo wtf

There was also a stage area and small area with vendors and food. When you went in they gave a small bag of like promotional flyers and some gummy snacks. I think some of the vendors were giving out free plushies if you signed up for a credit card or something but I didn't want to stand around trying to read the Japanese while the salesperson looked at me (if that's what it was lol)

Not sure if I'm personally even hyped about Chainsaw Man anymore

I then headed to Hikawa Shrine which was holding a festival today. On the way, I first stopped at Konnoh Hachimangu Shrine. I didn't know at the time because I basically just stopped because I saw it, but they even have an English website and gave me a few pamplets about it in English as well.

According to their website I just missed a festival here the day I arrived in Japan

Once I made it to Hikawa Shrine, I realized I was at the wrong Hikawa Shrine LOL At least I had gotten the time right this time though! I had made my way to Shibuya Hikawa Shrine but actually was meant to go to Akasaka Hikawa Shrine which was a 30 minute train ride or 40 minute walk away. At least it was still in Tokyo and relatively close!

For some reason this is the only photo I got of Shibuya Hikawa Shrine

Since it was still relatively early and I wasn't completely exhausted yet, I made my way to Akasaka. For some reason, there was an mural with an English pun along the way

Once I made it to the Akasaka Hikawa Shrine, I was able to quickly verify that there was indeed an event today. I only took one photo from outside because I didn't want to snap too many photos of people but there were a lot of food stalls and tons of games and knick knacks too.

I was hungry so I ended up getting some really good karaage. I also saw it being made fresh and still bit into it right away. I'm sorry to the roof of my mouth for burning you, please forgive me!

I almost bought some mini castellas too but figured it was probably not a super great idea to eat a whole bag of them by myself.

By this time I was feeling pretty worn out and decided to go home. It was time to stop being outside for the day.

Or that would have been the case if I didn't see this post from McDonaldsJapan (warning: catchy). The song and video are a remix (parody?) of Tententengokujigokugoku (actually 天天天国地獄国) by the same artist, Aiobahn +81. I'd actually been really into this song and a few of his other tracks after discovering them recently. After watching this how could I not try whatever they were selling? This blueberry yogurt McFlurry?

The McFlurry was pretty good but I don't think personally a flavor I would get usually. In addition to the blueberry and yogurt flavors, it also had oreos or something similar.

Oh and it was a collab for My Melody & Kuromi lol It's like a collab within a collab

Originally from the Sanrio website: https://www.sanrio.co.jp/news/goods/mu-mcdonalds-20250917/

Tomorrow, I will see if I can get to the other things I originally had on my list before my legs had decided to get super sore. I think it should only be a one festival I didn't make it to today, but you'll just have to find out on tomorrow's episode!

But I decided to visit a few other things in the area first to make my routing more ✨efficient✨

I started off slightly annoyed because Google Maps gave me directions to get to Zojoji and told me to exit out of one subway exit but then on my walk over, I passed another closer exit from the same subway station. Why did I walk up all of those stairs to use the pedestrian bridge???

Zojoji itself was nice and not busy at all. I think I visit this temple every time I go to Tokyo Tower and I think every time I also very similar photos of it

It's pretty cool seeing this super old temple and then behind it the iconic tower from the 1950s and then further back the Mori Tower (I think), which was completed just into the new millenium. It's like a family photo symbolizing passing generations - or something!

I also popped into the Zojoji sub-temple "Hoshuin" to get one of their cool goshuin. They offer desings that are more colorful than more traditional ones and it doesn't even take them that long to do it!

The goshuin I got was a limited one for this month called "Libra ~ Moon Viewing ~". I think it looks really nice!

After paying my respects there, I headed performed the arduous 1 minute walk to Tokyo Tower to check out what was going on. I had considered buying a collab ticket to go up to the top if there was an anime girl collab going on like when I went last time. There was a ticket collab going on but it was for Sakamoto Days, which is a distinctly anime boy collab in my mind so. I remember reading some of Sakamoto Days a while back but I don't really remember why I never got into it, so when the anime started airing I also didn't watch. Plus I've already been up the tower a bunch of times.

I also managed to not buy any merch. There are always new collabs going on at Tokyo Tower for some reason and today was no different. I was almost tricked into checking out the merch but luckily even though I liked the designs of the characters, it was for something I've never even heard of before

Definitely an anime girl collab though

Ok wait, actually looking it up now and this is from a Visual Novel that released this summer called "Magical Girl Witch Trials" and apparently it's super good but only released recently with only Japanese and Simplified Chinese language support. The reviews on steam currently have it at 95% favorable (overwhelmingly positive) and those rascals over on Reddit seem pretty hyped about it. The premise seems interesting too. I'm not really into visual novels (only really finished Fate) but maybe I'd play it if it ever comes out in English or I get nihongo jouzu for real.

Dang, maybe I should have bought some merch lol At least it's a proper game and not a gacha game?? We should support that kind of positive influence on the world??

After leaving Tokyo Tower, I made my way to my intended main destination, Shiba Daijingu. The Dara Dara Festival is an 11-day festival that occurs every year in September and the name comes from an onomatopoeia that implies sluggishness or dragging on. It's apparently also called the Lazy Festival. I didn't know exactly what to expect from such a long duration event but I think I had expected there to be food stalls or some kind of excitement but I couldn't sense anything out of the ordinary

I might have expected some food stalls or something here

In fact, it looked like a normal day at a shrine to me. It didn't seem particularly busy or anything. One website I had looked at mentioned that the main festivities were on September 16 and that's when the parade and stuff would be. Also the main website mentions Respect for the Aged Day directly as well so maybe there were more things going on then?

Not complaining though, the relaxed atmosphere in middle of the bustling city is a quite nice change of pace when you visit places like this. Since I was there and it wasn't particularly busy, I also made sure to get a goshuin here as well.

The priest that did the caligraphy has great hand-writing

While I was waiting for the goshuin to be finished, which can take a while depending on how much caligraphy there is, a foreign couple approached and asked if I spoke English. They asked me about my goshuincho since they saw that it was getting signed. They mentioned they had wanted to buy a goshuincho (the book itself) so that they could actually begin collecting goshuin as well but that the person at the counter here wouldn't sell them one. I don't know if there was just communication issues or if this shrine didn't sell them (I'm pretty sure they don't sell them because I didn't see any on display), but I mentioned that not every shrine or temple sells them. After that we talked about where I got mine. I actually thought the one I've been using was from Sensoji BUT after re-reading my blog I realized that this one is actually the one I got on the first day of my trip last year from Yushima Tenjin. (Interstingly, this shrine is super close to where I am staying right now).

I also mentioned they could head to Hoshuin since it not only has the cool designs like the one I showcased earlier but I know they sell goshuincho as well. After that I bid them good luck and watched as the strolled off into the distance. Some say these are still out there, searching for a goshuincho to this day. I hope they managed to find what they were looking for.

I had gone on Twitter to see if anyone else was musing about it and ended up finding an illustrator (I think) mentioning the heat and when I checked their personal blog/diary site, they had posted a few times this summer about the heat along with their illustrations and their most recent post from yesterday was actually like "I'm sick of writing “it's hot” in my diary lol" (thanks DeepL!). I apologize for complaining!! The people actually living here giving it their best have been suffering all summer I can handle it for a few days! Please forgive me for my insolence! Unrelated but this person has been blogging pretty consistently it seems like on their online blog since 2005! That's amazing! If I'm still doing the blog in 20 years I will be pretty impressed with myself so hopefully they are proud of themselves too.

I decided I would rather not ride on the train in the heat because it would be even worse when the train was packed. Tht limited my options a bit but Akihabara is a walkable distance for me. Oh no spending another day in Akiba, what a tragedy

I made my way over and stopped by Kanda Myojin, which was pretty much empty compared to how it's been when I've visited in the past. To its credit though, I almost always somehow manage to visit during a festival.

For me, I personally feel like Akihabara is basically a place to go to absorb the otaku atmosphere and buy things. Technically there is the scary maid cafe side too but the maids intimidate me and maid cafes seem like they would give me crazy secondhand embarassment (not their fault) so we'll ignore that. The reason I bring this all up to put it out there that I actually only intended to buy 1 specific thing on my outing (we'll get to that later) and that it was only supposed to be one small item.

With that in mind, I figured I would basically be window shopping all day. Luckily that's easy when you have rock steady willpower like me. It also helps if you impulsively buy everything you want already so there are no anime figure wants left to fulfill, but I digress.

At the first store I went to I browsed for a while and then actually found an unoped Girls Band Cry figure that I wanted. The original MSRP was like ¥9,900 compared to the current price of ¥16,800 so I decided I would wait and see if any other stores had it cheaper. Amazing! Perfect behavior!

But unfortunately, not everything can last. I stopped by the AmiAmi Figure Tower, a behemoth with 7 floors of anime figures. A true paradise for a very specific type of individual LOL Although it was not the specific item I wanted to buy today, I did want to see if they had the Anby Demara 1/7 Scale Figure in stock. This had been advertised pretty heavily when I was here last year but I somehow missed the preorder window or forgot or something

My poor attempt to capture an image of the poster while on the escalator last year

So obviously when I saw them brand new and in stock at basically MSRP, of course I had to buy it! And then another (cheap at least) prize figure for good measure. I actually don't even know why I got the prize figure since it's for a character I'm not mega familiar with. I think the character (Kotone Fujita) is pretty popular but she's from an Idolmaster mobile game. I actually don't even think the game is available outside of Japan either! But somehow I have a ton of her merch because I think her character design is good but luckily it's not on the level of Miku or something

After making my purchase at AmiAmi, I actually felt like I had enough stuff that it would be annoying walking through crowded aisles in stores or anything so I popped in for a quick bit of Sushi (you know where) before walking home to drop off my stuff. Imagine my surprise when I got my collab item and it was Mizuki again!! I know she's the main visual's primary character, but there are 3 other characters in the collab!

The collab sushi was good! I also took the chance to get the rerun collab items (from last year I think) since there was a Kokomi-specific parfait (C6 BTW).

I just realized my entire blog is basically turning into some weird food blog with only pictures from Sushiro

The parfait was also good, especially considering it was only ¥400 (like $2.75). Something like that would be $10 easy in Seattle lol Also all the smaller collab Genshin goods that came with little pictures (instead of like figures etc.) came with codes that I was able to redeem in Genshin for some samll rewards. I already had all of the food items before but any primogems are nice. I also found out that if you redeem the code while the redeem page is set to a different language, the in-game mail will also be in a different language

After eating, I walked home, deposited my goods and sat down to cool off for a bit. By the time I made it back, it was already getting dark and I still hadn't bought the item I had intended to!! Actually in the first place, I wasn't sure where I could get it specifically.

Ok I'll stop being cryptic lol It's just the new Frieren Daily Planner that was released today. Big shoutout to the Frieren PR Twitter Account that you can follow for daily goofy posts of the Frieren plush (you'll recognize my code review helper from the other day) but also for notifications for when it's time to open your wallet for new merch!

In this case, I saw this post a while back and recently they made another that reminded me so I figured I could just go grab it. I wasn't sure if it was limited to a few bookstore chains that would have it so I figured there had to be somewhere in Akihabara with it in stock.

I ended up going to the Shosen Book Tower which has 8 or 9 levels of books to peruse through. And I did eventually find the planner (on floor 7 IIRC) after asking for help locating it (twice lol)! Surprisingly, I think I witnessed a crime too while I was there (˶°ㅁ°)!!

I was riding the escalator back down to the first floor to checkout and at this particular store, the escalator is the pretty narrow so people couldn't really easily pass you side-by-side like on the bigger ones. As I was halfway down one of the levels, I heard some like yell behind me and steps rushing down the stairs so I instictively moved to the side and looked back and the dude ran past me and then started down the next escalator. I had quickly noticed that a staff had been chasing him but I wonder if I should have tried to stop him or anything. I'm not sure I could have reacted fast enough to know what was happening anyway but it really was a shock. The staff didn't pass me on the escalator and I was a bit shocked so I think I was in her way but another staff on the level below began following the guy anyway.

I didn't see anything weird on the bottom floor so I guess he got away? Or maybe he was just being weird and didn't steal anything but running down the stairs made people think he did? I'll probably never know lol

The planner is nice because it lets me write down my hopes and plans for the next 1000 years as if I were going to live as long as Frieren

The pages have illustrations throughout so you'd get to see Frieren, Fern, Stark, and everyone else as you make your plans. So maybe that would keep people motivated to actually plan properly!

It's a 2026 planner so I won't get to make use of it right away but I am glad to be prepared (not that I used a planner previously!)

Once I got home I actually realized it was looking like I actually had quite a lot of stuff. I decided to pre-emptively re-pack everything that would potentially go into my luggage (all my clothes and daily stuff can go into my carry-on) and wow that was a great idea. It turns out I'm literally out of space. Once I fit in all the figures I bought today and a few crane game ones from the other day and a few books and collab merch and my backpack and things I can't fit in my carry-on, it's basically the exact volume of my luggage

Well this is a little problematic since I literally have 30 more days of being here. Maybe having no space will prevent me from making frivolous purchases? I did think of one possible solution though. If I buy a home here in the next 30 days I can just store all of this stuff there?? On the bright side I've packed one month early.

But now I definitely can't buy the figure in the first picture. Or this other cool figure I saw today

But at 1/4 scale I'm doubtful there is any luggage that could contain such magesty

With the decision made to not do my original plan, I decided I would go to the aquarium since it was having a collab with a VTuber I like called Yuuki Sakuna.

Promotional graphic originally from the Sunshine Aquarium Twitter

When I got to the aquarium, I didn't see any collaboration decorations or anything which I thought was strange but figured maybe it was just a merch collab or something (I am dumb). So I bought my ticket and headed right in.

I've actually been to this aquarium before and it was nice like the last time I visted. Because it was the weekday, it wasn't super busy and they had the relaxing aquarium vibe. Actually, do all aquariums use dim lighting where possible and play the calming ambient music? Not like ocean sounds or whatever but some synth-y thing? Know what I am talking about?

As usual I took a ton of pictures of jellyfish, indistinguishable from any I've taken in the past. I also snapped a picture of this rolly polly looking thing.

I think it was like 3 or 4 inches long, which would be pretty creepy if the terrestrial ones were always that size lol

Another exhibit that I feel like I hadn't seen before was this one about aquaponics

And for all my frog lovers out there, saw some cool poison dart frogs. There were other ones in a different tank but the blue ones are the coolest ones in my opinion!

In the outside area, it turned out that collab decorations had been set up - for Demon Slayer!

The final thing I'll share from the aquarium is this exhibit showing that otters can be vicious. The signage seems to indicate that the otters are given old rags or clothes to wipe off and stuff but sometimes they rip them up. The bottom one mentions that this wasn't caused by an attack on the staff lol Otters have more going on than just their cute appearance!

In the end, it turned out that even the gift shop also didn't have any Yuuki Sakuna merch! After reading the details again later, I realized that the collab was only for the evening sessions! This could have been easily prevented if I had read a little more carefully! You live and you learn, I guess. But I will make this mistake again!

After leaving the aquarium, I wandered around for a while looking for lunch and doing general shopping. During that time, I stopped into a capsule toy store and got some random little trinkets that I don't need!

Eventually, I did end up having a super late lunch. I had been craving omurice and luckily I was able to find a place that I thought was pretty good!

As a bit of a side tangent, I got a bit of 'content brain' while eating lunch. I won't go into the details because then I actually got content out of the situation anyway but basically it involved a potential social faux paus by not me (actually not me this time). And at that time I was like oh man I should wait to see what happens so I can put it in my blog. But that is crazy!! I was done with my lunch why would I wait on something stupid like that??

Anyway if even I am getting content brain for a blog with like 5 readers, I can almost understand why streamers or youtubers turn everything into content when they have tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers. It's like psychological.

By the time I left it was pretty close to rush hour and I somehow already had 14k steps (I didn't even do anything!) and my back was hurting like some sort of old man so I decided to call it a day. This is a wake up call to not neglect my streching just because I'm not at home. It's a wake up call for you to be vigilant about stretching too!

Bonus Line Friends display I ran into today

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

Preparations

Before I go into what I did today for real (fr fr), I might as well talk a little about my preparations. It's not like a super rigid routine or anything (but it probably should be), but I generally make sure to do all of my chores before I leave so that when I come back seeing my apartment doesn't put me in a bad mood. These aren't like normal chores like 'doing the dishes', 'laundry', 'whatever' but more like 'living room deep clean', 'dissassemble the ac for practice', 'etc.' (kidding a little) so it was a bit time consuming,

Because I was doing all of my chores in the week leading up to packing, I procrastinated on actually packing and what had been intended to be a 'finish packing on Wednesday' preamble to my trip turned into 'finish packing on Friday?'. In the end, I did manage to finish packing on time for my 11 AM flight on Saturday.

While packing I realized how much I take my desk setup for granted at home since I'm only packing my laptops and a mouse, which I probably won't end up using since my rental doesn't have a proper desk. Working without any monitors will really hone my skills though maybe.

I'll miss my code review team

I also had really been trying to remember what I even needed to pack but I don't think I've ever even mentioned in previous blogs. For my own personal use later this is the general list.

• Clothes (like 10 shirts, whatever amount of socks and underwear, 2 pairs of jogger shorts, 1 pair of jeans) - amount that fits into my packing cubes
• Shampoo & Body wash (not even generally needed but I like knowing what I'm gonna smell like and sometimes other shampoo can make me dandruff-y)
• Beard trimmer & razor
• Toiletry stuff (qtips, toothpaste, toothbrush, contacts, etc.)
• My glasses, just in case
• Goshuincho (temple seal book)
• Day backpack (I carry this everywhere, might as well be a purse)
• Handkerchiefs
• Laptops, chargers
• Extra luggage (I pack my carry on inside the big luggage since it's empty, then I fill it up with anime merch)
• Steam deck (but I never actually end up using it SMH)

I feel like tht's everything but if it causes me to forget something next year, oh well lol

Flying out

So I spent an ungodly amount of credit card miles (and more than my normal fare) to buy business class ticket to Japan (round-trip at least) so the least I can do is gloat about it to my eager audience. I was flying Delta One so that I could try out the lay-down seats and hoping I could just sleep the entire flight and be not jet-lagged at all.

The benefits to this stated almost immediatley and in an unexpected way (to me), since when I arrived at the airport on Saturday morning, it was PACKED and the line for checking a bag seemed like it was at least an hour long. But Delta One has a private check-in counter and I was the only one there. Sometimes when I do something like that I wonder if anyone is glaring at me for the longer line but I am never able to check because if I looked up and made eye contact with someone that was I might literally combust on the spot. No thanks!

The newly built Delta One lounge in Seattle was also very nice. I chose to sit out on the patio area and they come out and you order food like you are at a restaurant. I had some crab cake eggs benedict thing that was really good. No photo of that, but here is what my view looked like sans food

It was nice because I could get a light does of train spotting in before I get to the trainspotting heaven that is Tokyo (unsubstatiated, I just made that up)

Get it? Because it's the LIGHT rail??

I then made the STUPID decision to leave the top-tier lounge and check out the regular lounge for the plebs with only premium class seats. The lounge itself was nice and had a nice selection of food in the food area but it was way busier and hard to find a seat. I could have gone back to the fancy lounge but obviously I didn't because it would have been awkward to talk to the people at the entrance who I had just told goodbye.

Soon after, I made my way to the gate and got situated in my home for the next 10 hours.

I was actually taking a picture of my seat/cubicle thing but one of the flight attendants noticed and told me that I had to have them take a photo of me. Who am I to say no? So I said yes and then she bought out prop orange juice because it would look better for the photo (her opinion), even though I had just declined a drink.

I had a pretty crazy amount of leg root and the seat was comfy overall. I had the Japanese-style dinner and it was really good and I finally watched the latest Mission Impossible movie as I chowed down. Big fan of the movie.

I tried to sleep but felt like I only slept for an hour, which is less than usual for this kind of flight for me. I think part of it was because I had a crazy headache for the majority of the flight. I kept downing bottles of water hoping it would help but it only helped earn frequent bathroom platinum status.

It's pretty crazy that rich people are just laying down on airplanes like all the time

Breakfast was also really good and I thought I hated ricotta cheese but apparently I don't. So that's good to know!

Once we got into the Tokyo area, I also got a good view of Mt. Fuji. I'm pretty sure that this portends good fortune on my trip!

Haneda airport was insanely busy but luckily I did all the immigration/customs paperwork early on the VisitJapanWeb site and the whole process was only like an hour, which I honestly thought was crazy considering how many people there were. But to be fair, it seemed like over 50 customs booths was open so they were going through a lot of people. Actually when it was my turn, the agent just put the little sticker in my booklet, scanned my fingerprints, and waved me on without basically saying anything to me. It was like 15 seconds total haha

I actually was able to get through customs so much more quickly than expected that by the time I got to my rental, I actually needed to wait another 20 minutes before I could check in.

Half Day

After checking in, it was only 4 PM and I knew I needed to stay up longer than that. I decided to walk to Akihabara since I'm staying about 15 minutes away by walking. There were a few anime collab events ending today so I wanted to go early just in case.

Akihabara was doing well as usual and was as busy as you might expect.

Actually more important than that though, the weather in Tokyo right now is awful. I'd heard it's pretty bad in the summer but even now it's like 90 and pretty humid. It may have just been because I had been hauling around my luggage but I almost felt more miserable and gross walking around in Tokyo yesterday and today than I did when I last visited Texas in August. Reminder to myself to never visit Japan in the summertime (unless I move here???).

After I wrapped things up, I made it back home, showered and was pretty tuckered out by like 830. I thought I had done a good job staying up but looking at last year's blog I didn't even make it as long as I had then so maybe I should have tried harder. I woke up a few times in the night but forced myself to stay asleep until 830 this morning. A full 12 hours of sleep, good job me!

Of course it's a holiday

Today I waited until like 11 AM to leave because I didn't want to get trapped in rush hour commuter-jammed trains. However, I immediately noticed that the trains were still packed and that the mall I went (Sunshine City in Ikebukuro) was crazy packed. I felt pretty big-brained because I realized it was a national holiday before I even looked it up (the other option would have been Tokyo somehow just got busier since I visited last).

Anyway, today was Respect for the Aged Day in Japan. The only thing it really impeded for me was that I had planned to visit the aquarium while I was at Sunshine City since it was also having a collab but it's super busy on weekends and holidays so I'll have to go another day.

Either way, I was still able to enjoy the Secrets of the Silent Witch collab with Kimura Coffee. Silent Witch is kind of like "Bocchi the Witch" so it's basically an anime about a socially awkward witch. It's airing now and pretty good so I'd recommened watching it. I'm actually an episode behind right now, so maybe you could argue I'm not a big enough fan to even deserve collaboration goods.

A witch anyone can relate to

I'm not really sure why I didn't take a photo of it but I got the collaboration set which was a slice of cheesecake and a coffee for ¥1500. I think it's pretty common, but the collaboration item I got from this was a coaster and a small paper thing with the characters on it. Nothing super fancy, but realistically I'm just glad it doesn't take up that much space. Not even luggage space but my apartment itself can't handle much more anime merch at this point.

Considering that, I left to go to my next destination. Specifically to buy more anime merch LOL

The next place was near Tokyo Station (basically across town) and was actually the other half of the Silent Witch collab, a merch popup shop. I ended up just getting a clear file and a small acrylic stand of the main character, Monica.

We meet again...

For dinner, I made my way to Sushiro for Genshin Impact collab merch. I know I shouldn't be filling up my luggage so soon but I figure now that I'm getting out of my system, maybe everything will be ok?

Actually while I was wandering around I found a ton of anime pop ups and collab stores that I didn't know about (mainly in Ikebukuro and Akihabara, which makes sense). It's been nice seeing that Girls Band Cry is staying popular after a bit of a rough start (in the West) last year. I also wonder how much merchandising is making for the anime industry. Surely it's got to be more than the anime themselves but I wonder if it's also more than like light novel sales? Not so interested that I'll look it up now but maybe later.

Also OMG I literally just now realized that the Genshin collab merch changes after tomorrow so I guess if there's anything else I want for the current stuff I have to go again tomorrow and then if there's stuff I want in the second phase I have to go again. Oh no more conveyer belt sushi, the humanity! Speaking of which, I think my goal for this trip is to have one non-Sushiro, non-konbini meal per day. Doable?

One final blog thing before I go, look at this! They put tenji blocks on the manhole cover thing! I didn't even know they could do that. Wow, the modern world sure is something, huh?