Japan 2007: The Final Two Days

On Friday, we spent the morning in our hotel room. The typhoon had blown through Tokyo in the early morning hours, leaving both clear skies and a wild wind whipping through the city streets. But because of reports that rail service had been disrupted, we opted to spend our last full day in Ikebukuro.

The effects of the winds (shown in one of my previous posts) were evident on the buildings around our hotel. The first "a" on the "animate" building sign was clearly damaged.



Amy explored "Kinkado By Hand," a crafts store that included quilting patterns and supplies. I, meanwhile, set off for some of the remaining anime/manga stores in the neighborhood (of which there are several) that we hadn't yet visited.

Both Ikebukuro and Akihibara have tons of anime and manga stores. The primary demarcation, according to our guide from Tuesday's tour, is that Akiba mainly appeals to boys, and Ikebukuro to girls. That was evident when I visited Mandarake in Ikebukuro.



Mandarake specializes in doujinshi. Doujinshi are creator-published comics. Some feature original characters; some are based on Western properties, such as Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings; but most are unauthorized manga versions of copyrighted anime and manga characters. Further, many (not all) of them envision romances between the characters. Now, such fan-created fiction also exists in the US, and has flourished on the Internet. But doujinshi are sold for profit. Indeed, some creators make a living from selling them. And they are not sold quietly. Mandarake had racks and racks of them, organized by subject matter; and was stuffed with female fans buying and reselling them by the bushel. Further, Comic Market -- a twice-yearly event in Japan -- is attended by hundreds of thousands of folks who come principally to buy and sell doujinshi. The idea of an unlicensed, fan-produced, adults-only X-Men, Batman, or Star Wars comic book being sold openly in the US, in numbers high enough to be profitable, beggars the imagination. Yet in Japan, it's reality.

As noted, the customers at the Ikebukuro Mandarake were almost entirely female; and the doujinshi tended primarily (according to the covers I saw) toward stuff appealing to those customers. On the other hand, one of the many storefronts of K-Books, a block away, featured doujinshi aimed almost entirely at male customers.

Other K-Books storefronts had tons of remaindered and used anime dvds and premium goods. In one of them, I scored my favorite acquisition of this trip: A complete set of dvds of the first season of CAT'S EYE, packaged with a memo pad set, a mouse pad, and the first part of a paper version of the larcenous ladies' coffee shop. (One apparently gets the second part by buying the second season box set.) As the photos show, the paper coffee shop's interior is quite detailed; they include all of the house's bathrooms.





I got the box for less than half of the retail price. I may never open the box, or put together the paper house; but having it is cool enough.

On Saturday morning, the sky was the clearest it had been during our trip.



We checked out and stored our baggage with the hotel. We then set out on our last Tokyo field trip. We had heard that on weekends (primarily Sundays) teenagers in costumes flocked to Harajuku. We therefore hopped a train over there. Although it was Saturday (with some schools in session), and blazing hot, we managed to find a few dedicated cosplayers in front of the Meiji shrine.





We then took the train back. Our last trip through Ikebukuro confirmed that the Japanese merchandising industry was putting its full, awesome strength behind the Evangelion franchise. Not only did a pachinko parlor, across the street from the theater playing the Evangelion movie, blast the TV series opening theme into the street over and over again (I'm sure the workers there are thoroughly sick of it), but department stores had opened "Evangelion Stores" where they sold models, t-shirts, plastic figures, designer ties, yukatas with Eva prints, and, yes, Evangelion Doritos, coffee and cookies.






After we got back to our hotel, we took the limousine bus to the airport, and winged our way back to the states. As usual, the long flight passed surprisingly fast. I watched the third "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie (which, on a tiny screen, was probably far less impressive than it was meant to be), read half of a GHOST IN THE SHELL manga collection which I had purchased during our last trip to Japan, and edited a chapter of the law book manuscript I'm working on.

We managed to slog our way back to our house, using a hard-of-hearing cabbie. (I told him as we left the airport that I was going to pay by credit card. When we got to our house, and I pulled out the card, he yelled at me, "Why didn't you tell me that at the beginning?") At that point, although we had left Japan at 5:25 pm Saturday, it was 12:30 pm Saturday. We had traveled back in time. We took the extra hours given us to sleep.