Japan 2012 Travel Diary, Day 2

japan2012logo-day02

Wednesday was officially nerd day, where Wifey was happy to indulge the crazy nerd adventures I’ve been wanting to do in Japan for many years. After a slight sleep-in and a nice buffet brekky, we hit the subway station to make our way out to Mitaka to visit the Studio Ghibli Museum.

Being a long-time anime fan who jumped on the bandwagon around ’94 when Siren started distributing the classy Manga Entertainment label of anime locally, over the years I developed an incredible love of Studio Ghibli’s work. The first Ghibli movie I saw was Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, thanks to SBS screening it around ’96. In 2001 Princess Mononoke had a limited screen at the Palace Nova in July that year, and around the same time I bought my first DVD player (a multiregion Pioneer DV-344) and started importing all the Studio Ghibli releases direct from Japan.

The trip to the museum was amazing for two reasons. The obvious one is the museum itself – I had never contemplated that a physical structure could in any way capture the whimsy, charm and nostalgia typical of Studio Ghibli productions, but somehow it had. This is the kind of experience that is difficult to put into words, because it was at once tangible but yet ephemeral at the same time. There was a screening of a specially-produced short movie in the small theatre, a big Nekobus that the kids were going crazy over, rotating exhibitions (which I think was looking at the history of folk tales in the West), the giant from Laputa on the roof, a cafe, book store, gift store (named after the Mama Aiutto from Porco Rosso) and a recreation of the working space of Miyazaki or Ghibli staff (I believe), with some amazing memorabilia all over the place, including lots of sketches, cells and production gear from various Ghibli movies. There was a particularly big emphasis on Kiki’s Delivery Service, which being my favourite Ghibli movie, was great to see.

After making a modest deposit at the gift and book stores (I had to resist the temptation of spending around $500 on getting a framed cell from Princess Mononoke or Kiki’s Delivery Service), we jumped back on the shuttle bus that went from the museum to Mitaka Station. Now this is where the second part of this experience came into its own – whereas the original bus between the station and the museum was pretty direct, this time we wound through all the back streets on the way back to the train station. This was a mind-blowing experience – Mitaka is a really pretty city, with residential houses, busy main streets and bikes everywhere. It evokes the same qualities that many of the nostalgia-infused moments in Ghibli movies set in more contemporary circumstances, like Whisper of the Heart or From Up On Poppy Hill (despite the discrepancy in time periods).

Next up was the sacred pilgrimage that is, in many ways, one of the other important things from this journey – visiting the Sega headquarters in Ohta. To get there was an exercise in patience on behalf of Wifey, is it was a little convoluted! We took one of the JR lines to Shinagawa Station from Shinjuku, and from there we transferred to one of the private lines to get to Otorii. Things got tricky because we used the wrong entrance/exit (we should have exited out of the main JR gate using our JR pass, then used our Pasmo card to get to the Otorii line), and then we weren’t sure which train to catch to get to Otorii since there were a handful of options. We took one of the local lines on the Haneda route to get off at Otorii. After exiting Otorii we started walking the wrong way, then turned around and realised that if we looked both ways when we exited the station originally, we would have noticed the great big Sega logos on top of two buildings down the street.

We stopped at a neighbourhood soba place to eat an amazing (and cheap) meal of plain soba with dipping sauce and spring onion and wasabi paste (around ¥280 each!), then walked down to the Sega building, where I was finally, after years of obsessive fanboy passion, able to step on hallowed ground. And it was awesome 🙂

Unfortunately the building was closed for some reason, but Wifey indulged my nerd spirit by peering through the windows and trying to take picture of things, including some people who must have come out of a meeting and walked through the lobby.

At some stage I think we had started attracting the attention of the police nearby and we promptly left while trying to look unsuspicious (which probably didn’t work – a gaijin with a limp and a hat to protect his thinning ranga hair don’t exactly blend in over there). As we were walking down the street I saw the people from the lobby in front of us, and being excitable, took their picture while walking quickly down the street in a fit of nerdy giggles. In my mind I imagine they had just come out of an amazing meeting at Sega, but I lacked the Japanese skills (and balls) to ask them anything.

Once the pilgrimage was over, we grabbed a couple of yummy pastries from Peter’s Deli (I think that’s what it was called) at the entrance of the Otorii Station, then made the trek back to Shinagawa, then we hit one of the JR Lines to visit the final nerd stop for the day – Akihabara!

As much as it’s a clich&eaccend;, Akihabara still put an amazing smile on my face. The first stop was the Tokyo Anime Centre in the UDX building to grab an English language version of the Akihabara map (thanks to Orochinagi for the tip!), then off we went to explore.

Despite getting lost a few times, it was good fun – we hit up Super Potato, Trader 2, Mandarake and Sofmap before stopping off at Club Sega. I didn’t play stacks of games since it was getting late, but I had a whirl at Parodius: Fantastic Journey in honour of my brothers Miguel and Tank, and my mate McAdam in honour of the amount of hours we sunk into this game on the Saturn. I managed to get about three or four stages in on a single credit which I was pretty happy with, and Wifey noticed a couple of the locals stopped to watch me play, so maybe I wasn’t doing too badly 🙂

We then checked out the other floors, and the top floor showcased the most amazing Gundam team battle game I’d ever seen, resembling a fusion of Virtual On and the Gundam universe with an awesome team-based mechanic.

Part way up we came upon a floor of SSF4AE (Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition) machines, and I had the balls to Ken scrub on a machine against a Japanese player with a massive score card playing as Fei Long. I got owned without landing a hit on the first round, won the second round, then lost the subsequent rounds without being able to put up much of a fight.

We were about to exit when I noticed there was a basement floor, so down we went and I was greeted by one of the most amazing sights ever – a floor dedicated to only Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown. Once again I plonked in ¥100 and took on another player with Sarah, the only character I’ve invested much time in over the years since getting hooked on the series since the VF2 days. The outcome was similar to SSF4AE – was annihilated in the first round as Akira juggled me with some amazing techniques, held my own in the second round, then lost the next two without being too much of a challenge. With my VF dreams complete (playing VF in Japanese arcade, regardless of winning or losing), I had a crack at a crane game (and lost!), then off we went to Book Off for some final nerding before finding a nearby place to grab a bite.

We found a place near the Akihabara Station that promised casual dining and enjoyed some awesome Japanese beer, edamame, an amazing pot of gyoza and a selection of skewered awesomeness (including vegetarian skewers, chicken thighs, chicken liver, tendons and gizzards – the kind of thing encouraged by Bourdain and Zimmern when traveling!). Bellies full, it was time to go home after a massive day.

To view all posts on the Japan 2012 Travel Diary, just use the 2012 Japan Trip tag, as the whole series will be added to it over time.

Japan 2012 Travel Diary, Day 1

japan2012logo-day01

We arrived at around 6am in Tokyo via Narita after a pretty reasonable 9 hour flight out of Sydney. By the time we got through customs and were ready to hit the airport limousine bus it was a little after 7am. The toilets here are weird, but in a cool way. At this stage I wasn’t game enough to use the bidet and shower functions yet 🙂 I tried speaking Japanese to the customs agent, but had to ask him to repeat everything in English because I got confused 🙂

The bus ride into Tokyo from Narita to Shinjuku station was amazing. We passed through rural areas and towns that we could see from the highway that immediately made me think of Shenmue, perhaps even more so because of the cloudy, rainy weather. Soon we found ourselves hitting Tokyo’s urban sprawl – it’s an amazing amalgamation of concrete, steel and insane yet orderly traffic. We drove past massive office buildings and apartment complexes intertwined with inner-city rivers that reminded me of, wait for it, the apartment complexes in Digimon Adventure 🙂

Soon enough we hit Shinjuku station, in itself a pulsing centre of activity. Thankfully we disembarked, picked up our luggage and turned our heads to spot our hotel, the Sunroute Plaza Shibuya (even though it’s more accessible from Shinjuku). We wandered down and checked in and asked the friendly staff to look after our baggage since we weren’t able to jump into our room until after 2pm. A few doors down from the hotel was a Segafredo coffee place (which we would later discover to be a readily accessible franchise around the traps), so we headed there to grab a morning set – combos/meal deals in Japan, we quickly found out, are called sets. A quick bite and some people watching later (and an induction to Japan’s prevalent indoor smoking allowances, something that’s generally been outlawed back home), we were ready to head off. So, fighting a crappy night’s sleep we decided to hit the Oedo subway line to head out to the Tsukiji fish markets.

Tokyo’s public transport system looks like a rat’s nest to the uninitiated, but it’s not too tricky to navigate once you start using it. After a short subway ride and a quick walk we arrived at the fish markets. This was an awesome way to start out, though it was a shame that we weren’t hungry as the seafood there looked amazing. After managing to not get in anyone’s way, we then proceeded to get lost while trying to find our way to visit Ginza. We’ll call it the scenic tour, as it sounds better. We ended up at a place with a big sailing mast sticking out the ground, and eventually found an Oedo subway station and managed to get to Ginza, while at the same time finding a Pasmo vending machine so we could use a pre-paid IC card to take care of getting through any non-JR lines without having to worry about tickets (individual fare tickets confuse my brain).

Ginza looks and feels like the luxury end of town, even down to the subway station. Very fancy. Apart from a bit of window shopping, we were down here to check out the Sony building. Since the building is nice and big, it’s hard to miss, so off we went. The main reason for dropping by was to check out the recently-installed 4K Experience show.

Being a bit of a technophile, I was keen to see how much of a jump the move to 4K would be. The session began with a dramatic unveiling of an 85″ display showing off some unbelievable high resolution photography, and my gawd, the future of video is spectacular. Next I got to sit down in a fancy-pants driving setup to play Gran Turismo Concept on a massive projector display running natively in 4K (not sure what hardware it was on – the rumour mill online suggests Polyphony Digital are running a few PS3s in parallel), which was also delightful. The final interactive display involved sitting in a fancy wicker seat and watching some 4K footage of provincial Italy.

After that we picked up some amazing lunch from a Japanese family restaurant, which was also my first attempt at ordering a proper meal since we arrived. The waitress did a great job deciphering my poor Japanese, and Wifey enjoyed a deconstructed burger (meat pattie, rice, chips, steamed veg and a crumbed/fried prawn), while I had a sizzling stone bowl of something yum. After finishing eating, it was time to hit the public transport system again as we went to Harajuku.

Even though it was only a weekday afternoon, Harajuku was alive and well. After gushing over something as mundane as pedestrian bridges over main streets (blame it on Jet Set Radio), we wandered around the place, being amused and entertained in relatively equal amounts.

The typical gaijin assumption and assertion about contemporary Japan is that it is a country of contrasts. While I don’t necessarily agree with this as a standard maxim (I prefer the anthropological assertion that it is a harmonious melting pot that is happy to blend history and contemporary values much alike any developed country with a rich history of societal growth [and in many ways parallels its development towards modernism with the way it blends different religious belief within the traditional Japanese lifecycle], but that’s my wanky undergrad side so let’s not dwell on this too much), the juxtaposition of having the Meiji Shrine sitting at the tip of Harajuku’s shopping district is entirely palpable.

Utter tranquility hits once you get off the streets and the shrine is beautiful and peaceful. We did the usual tropes – cleaning yourself prior to entering (which you do by rinsing your hands and mouth at a well at the entrance, with Wifey helping to fill the blanks since I missed that part of my etiquette research!), offering a gift and prayer at the shrine, and behaved ourselves by not taking any photos inside the main part of the shrine (unfortunately not all the gaijin present were being similarly respectful).

We ended up heading out the way we came in to avoid a repeat of getting lost as per the morning’s Ginza incident, jumped onto the Yamanote JR Line in what was becoming peak time, then proceeded to become utterly lost when exiting Shinjuku Station. It wasn’t all for nought as we picked up something for dinner at the Takashimaya department store during this latest misadventure – a selection of sushi and sashimi, apples, cinnamon buns and Snoopy Water – props to the checkout staff as the service was better than anything I’d ever experienced in Australia.

We finally got back to our hotel around 6pm, finished the check-in process and headed up to our room. With the first day sorted, things seemed a lot less intimidating after a decent shower, something to eat and watching a movie on the iPad before going to bed at 9pm. While a whirlwind, the first day went well and we managed to get everything done that we wanted to.

To view all posts on the Japan 2012 Travel Diary, just use the 2012 Japan Trip tag, as the whole series will be added to it over time.