Oct
12
Chiba and Akiba
Filed Under Newspost
Filed Under Newspost
Allright, allright, I’m fucking late with these entries and they’re still not even close to looking the way I’d like them to look, but in order to move on with my life and be able to write on more recent topics I’ll publish all the rest of the Tokyo bullshit as soon as possible. Here goes.
1st Contact
The original plan for day two was to wake up early in the morning and be at the Makuhari Messe exhibition hall when the doors open. The ambitious plan failed miserably. I was too tired to wake up early enough myself, and I didn’t have the heart to wake Lasse up after he had only had a few hours of sleep. Eventually, we got up around 11 and begun making our way to Chiba to the Kaihinmakuhari station next to which the Tokyo Game Show was held. After about an hour of hectic train switching we finally got off at the station in question. It was time for some very late breakfast. Unfortunately, the collective of small restaurants near the station was in heavy use due to an exceptional concentration of avid gamers in the area, so we bought bowls of katsudon from the only shop without a queue, disposed of them swiftly and continued with our holy mission. Finding the right way wasn’t hard, the trick was to follow the constant stream of people heading in a specific direction from the station while dodging the oh-so-kawaii cosplayers who were trying to give out useless flyers to anyone passing through.
Animegurl
The game show itself was awesome, albeit very crowded. It was made out of people, and stuff. Because the people variable was considerably more important in size than the stuff variable, there was a long queue to try out almost any game. I’ll write a more specific report of the game show and put it up as an independent page on the blog in order not to fill the front page with gaming-related topics. Hopefully. Meanwhile in Shinjuku, Christian had also woken up earlier than the rest of the clubbing team and he eventually became bored enough to find his way to the TGS and join us.
We got out of the hall around 5 pm, right after the day was officially over, and met up with some other Kansai Gaidai exchange students by coincidence at the exit. Everyone was wondering what to do and the situation didn’t really seem to be moving anywhere until a passer-by overheard Lasse and me having a conversation in Finnish. The girl, Tuuli, was in Tokyo as an exchange student since March and agreed to show us a bit around Akihabara, a district that thus became our next destination. After a second round of katsudon, our Finno-Swedish party jumped on the Keio Line and rid to the legendary Aki(ha)ba(ra), Mecca of nerds everywhere.
Akiba by Night
Don’t be tricked by the above photo, Akiba is not a place you would want to go to on a family trip. For a standard tourist, it seems to have no redeeming factor whatsoever. In short, it consists of electronics, sexual deviancy (it’s Japan after all), and the people who these two things keep attracting. It is a tough definition, but a relatively accurate one. Of course, there is more to Akiba than just that but for the sake of saving time I won’t bother depicting every single otaku shop there is. Enjoy drowning in oversimplified stereotypes.
Again-again! Again-again!
Essentially, Sunday was a replica of Saturday. There was no way to get enough of the Game show in 4 hours so we unanimously decided to come back on Sunday, this time a bit earlier. Once at Kaihinmakuhari, we ate breakfast at Yoshinoya and attempted to start moving towards the Makuhari messe, when a young Japanese pop band who was playing in the street caught our attention. The band, named nano.RIPE, was apparently relatively new because established bands hardly perform in the middle of the street for no monetary compensation. Nevertheless, they sounded professional, played with good attitude and the singer was really cute. Reason enough to buy one of their albums I guess, because that’s what both Lasse and I did.
nano.RIPE live
The next four or so hours were well spent at the game show again. And in order not to deviate from the nerd way the evening meant a return to Akiba. Not much worth mentioning there. What I realized, though, while venturing a bit deeper into the dark alleys of the otaku-district is that besides hi-tech electronics and anime girls with oversized boobs, Akiba is also made out of kebab. I do not see the connection, but it is indeed the only place I have seen in Japan to have actual kebab shops held by foreigners. And they are in every corner of the street too, with enthusiastic employees trying to hand you coupons of no value. In other news, I have almost no interest at all in continuying this post so I will end it here without any further stalling.
-Antti