psipsy

The Japan trip was over a month ago now, and it still weighs on my mind.

I got a lot of plastic model kits of posable figures! Some of them are of catgirl maids, another is Miku Hatsune, others that I didn't recognize but I liked how they look, and a couple that are just in their underwear. There were a few others I thought about getting, then I saw they were also being sold in the US, so I didn't get them.

In my mind, I was still calculating prices as 100 yen = 1 dollar, because it was like that for a long time until recently. So sometimes I'd have to pay via credit card, or use an ATM to withdraw cash, thinking I was pulling $300 out, then I'd check my statement and it was only about $200. Yay?

Something that enables the persistent use of cash in Japan is the cash registers themselves. In many of the larger stores, the cashier never has to count the money itself. They just feed the bills and coins into a collector, then the register does all the counting for them, and then dispenses the correct change, often directly to the customer. Then the register also serves as a safe until it needs emptied.

The absolute first place I went to after getting properly checked in was Melonbooks for some doujinshi. Priorities! I was also hoping they would have had some M3 catalogs but no, sales on those stop about a week before the event.

I had to stay out of Keisokuki Land this time. Too dangerous! I knew that if I went in there, I'd find myself getting a pile of budget-destroying electronics equipment. Maybe next time.

A visit to a maid cafe was a must, of course. The maids were attentive and friendly, and were entertained by some of the model train pictures I had on my phone. Whether their interest was feigned or real is not important. The idea is to sell the illusion of having cute maids serve me, if only for an hour. That's what's important. It's foolish at best and dangerous at worst for me to cling to that illusion after I leave. The American version of that mindset is the old adage "the strippers don't really love you". That said, one of the rules of a maid cafe is the same as that of a strip club: No touching, ever. But I digress.

The best way to describe M3 was like the artist's alley at Otakon, in a bigger room with smaller aisles. It was a bit crowded at times but nothing out of the ordinary for me. The real high point of it all was being able to buy music directly from the people who made it, being able to put faces to the voices. (Well, most of them.) While I stuck to a checklist of who to buy what from, I did find new music from singers I never heard of. I have a lot to say about M3, and that's probably going to be an article on my main site.

What made M3 really different from an American event was that M3 had a strict no-cosplay policy for attendees. A vendor could do cosplay if it was related to what they were selling, and that was it. For attendees, no cosplay at all. I watched someone get stopped by staff for wearing a bat-wing headband. That's much different from US conventions, where someone can get into cosplay at home, drive to the con, stop for lunch, get on a train, walk a few blocks to the convention, spend all day at the con, then go back home, all in cosplay.

I almost bought one of the Touhou games. Almost. For some reason I didn't. I kinda regret that. "Just download it." I know, I could. I just feel silly for having held it in my hand and putting it back. It wasn't really expensive either.

I should probably change up the hotels mid-stay for future trips, especially if I'm going to be there for as long as I was. Ten days was a long time to be in one hotel. By around the seventh or eighth night, the bed mattress started to feel like it was made of granite. Ten days seems to be my upper limit in general. When I start thinking of all the things back home I want to do or need to do, that's when I know it's time to go. A few days after I got home, I went to QSL and had a victory-lap dinner of ribs and wings. And it was good.

My standards of what to get while in Japan have evolved and become more logical. More and more places will ship to the US either directly or via something like Tenso/Buyee, and various manufacturers have made it a point to ensure their product is available globally, so the objective then becomes to conserve the luggage space for things that are much harder to get in the US, international shipping or not. Or if the price on something is so much lower that it can't be ignored. Nevertheless, I didn't waste a single cubic inch of luggage space.

There are more model train stores just in Akihabara than in some entire states in the US. I think I counted about 10 in an area that's walkable even by my standards. If I look at the whole of Tokyo, I don't think it's possible to count them.

One of the model train stores I wanted to visit was Hobby Center Kato, on account of them having some obscure items and some very large layouts on display. How obscure? Well, I could have found the Yamanote Line sets easily somewhere else, but the Tengu figures in HO-scale was a new one on me, and I couldn't pass those up. If I didn't get those I'd be kicking myself.

In the used stores, I found some N-scale engines. A DD51 with a steep price cut because one of the lights didn't work, and an 8620 steam locomotive in almost perfect condition. I got them home, put them on the track, and they ran fine.

Nakano Broadway and Radio Kaikan are the nerdiest malls in the world with anime, manga, doujinshi, toys, and so on throughout them. The original Radio Kaikan had to be torn down after it sustained some damage from the March 2011 earthquake. It didn't collapse, it was more like the building inspectors went through and determined the structure was compromised and wouldn't survive another hit. So it was torn down and another Radio Kaikan was built in its place, bigger than before. What sets Nakano Broadway apart is that much of it is taken up by Mandarake stores, and the vintage of the items being sold skews older, making it very much worth visiting in its own right.

The Animate store in Ikebukuro is the biggest standalone anime store in the world! But inside, things were spread out with wide aisles. They're probably going for being handicapped-accessible and being a place for the claustrophobics. Most of the more longer-established stores in Tokyo are packed so tight I had to walk sideways half of the time.

Another big appeal to Akihabara is the electronics parts. It was known for electronics parts long before the anime stuff and maid cafes. It's wild to be walking down the street, any street, and spot a closet of a store with odds and ends of obscure parts. And then I look at some of the parts and think "y'know, I could use these for a project". If it weren't for what I already got in this trip, I would have bought a lot more electronics parts. (In my 2017 trip, I got a helluva nice multimeter.)

Radio Center (different from Radio Kaikan), is a glorious dungeon full of that stuff. Same with Tokyo Radio Department Store. You want vacuum tubes? Someone there has vacuum tubes. Old/strange/obscure computer parts? That too. I went into the basement of Radio Department and found someone selling computer cases with custom anime artwork, buckets of CPU chips, computer expansion cards of unknown purpose, and so on. Yes, this is the Akihabara I know and love.

I had the opportunity to be in Shibuya on Halloween. I decided to skip that. If I were 20 years younger, I would have went. Alas, I am much older, and I am not fond of the idea of being in a packed crowd of 50000-70000 people. The local police were also not fond of that many people being in Shibuya at once, and closed off important areas to that effect. I made their job easier by not being there. The incident in Seoul last year likely weighed on everyone's minds as well.

Autobacs in Shinonome was... A letdown? Maybe that's being too harsh. It was like a very upscale and up-sized (and much cleaner) Pep Boys. Most of what they had that was of interest to me would either not fit in my luggage, not be allowed on the airplane, or I could find something similar in the US. Not that I left empty-handed, I found some some useful and specialized hand tools and accessories, and a book that was all about the 2nd-generation Integra. I was hoping for one about the 3rd-gen Integra but it was close enough. Not gonna lie, Summit Racing or Eastwood have a lot more going on in terms of car stuff. While walking out of the store, I went by the service bays and there was a GMC Express conversion van. That by itself is no big deal, except that this was in Tokyo, so it looked almost as large as a city bus.

On the last evening I was in Japan, as I walked around Akihabara in the early evening, I saw someone pull up in an Integra Type R. A young man stepped out. I complimented him on his ride. We used Translate on our phones to converse. His car wasn't fully stock, as the back seats and interior trim were removed for a roll cage. We both agreed the backseats in the Integra aren't really useful for passengers. Nevertheless, it was nice. Turns out he bought it two years ago, and he's the same age as the car (25). I envied him for having a Type R, he envied me for having a place for DIY car repairs.

The last few hours of being in Japan were a little melancholy. A plain Monday morning by local standards, with a bit of rain here and there. I was already checked out of my hotel room, and the hotel graciously stored my luggage for me for another few hours. I walked around Akihabara one last time, got in one last stroll through Radio Kaikan and Radio Center, one more serving of katsu curry and bottle of Pocari Sweat. I still had almost another hour before I had to leave for the airport, perhaps I could check out one more place? Nah. It would have just felt forced. It was time to go. I got my luggage, wrestled two loaded suitcases and a carry-on bag through the train stations, took the Skyliner to Narita, and got checked in for the flight home.

I have returned from Japan.

I managed to attend the M3 event I was excited about, and it lived up to the hype. I bought almost 150 CDs in the 4 hours I was there (the event runs for 5 hours). That many CDs weighs about 11kg. I bought from about 60 circles, out of the almost 1500 that were there. If/when I do another M3, there will be a few things I'll do differently.

Things I needed on prior trips but not this time:
-Light jacket. I brought it but didn't need it from the moment I entered the airport to the moment I came back. Tokyo was consistently warm. So were the flights. Getting around the airports meant a lot of walking which in turn meant a lot of calories getting converted to heat.
-T3i camera. This made sense in 2017 and 2018 when I had my old Samsung. The camera in my Pixel 7 is not quite at DSLR levels, but much better than the Galaxy S4. It was good enough for 99% of my picture-taking.

Getting through Customs going into Japan was easy. Getting through US Customs coming back was even easier: Look into a camera for the face-recognition, and that's it. No questions about how much stuff I was bringing back or the value, if I had any contraband, exotic fruits/veggies, animal parts, gold bricks, etc. US Customs has no concern about anime swag. The absolute worst thing about getting through US Customs and TSA when coming back is the walking. So much walking through the airports. I might have spent 5 minutes for customs and security, and about 40 minutes for non-stop walking to and from them. I blame the airports for that. Fortunately, thanks to the amount of walking required to get around Tokyo, I was better prepared for all the airport walking.

My Suica card still works! Sort of. Since it was 5 years since I last used it, it needed a refresh by a station attendant so their systems could recognize it again. Once that was done, I promptly charged it up with about $35 of fare and put that to use.

I needed to get a Japanese wallet to hold my yen bills, which are physically larger than dollars. I checked out Yodobashi Camera's selection of wallets and decided I could not justify $75 for a name-brand wallet. I then went to Don Quixote's (affectionately known to locals as Donki's) and found an $8 wallet that would do the same thing. Japanese wallets come with their own coin pouches, which was handy.

Despite having 2 suitcases and a larger carry-on bag, I still had to ship stuff home. I opted to ship home the large-but-light items such as model kits. That took a little under a week to arrive here.

The hotel I stayed in was the same one as my 2017 trip. They had not changed their wifi network name or password in over 6 years. My laptop remembered it without me needing to do anything.

I ended up not accomplishing a bunch of the things I wanted to do, as after M3, I came down with a cold. I know it was a cold because it only hit my nose and throat, no fever, and was gone on its own after a few days. There are worse things to catch these days. Nevertheless, it prevented me from doing a lot of exploration of Tokyo in general, limiting me to sticking around Akihabara, so I wouldn't be too far from my hotel room. And I was fine with that.

I got some cheap junk cameras! The kinds of cameras where if someone was selling them in the US, they'd put them on ebay, slap the word "vintage" all over the listing, claim it was mintier than a tanker truck of toothpaste, and start the bidding at some crazy price like $200. Instead I picked them up for maybe $20, at most. One of them was more like $2. Sometimes they label them as junk because they already have a bunch of them and can't be bothered to even look at the ones coming in.

There comes a point in a trip like this when I'm feeling two directly conflicting feelings: "I can't wait to get home" and "I can't wait to come back". The next Japan trip is purely hypothetical at this point but the difference between my first two trips was about 20 months, so it'll be more like 2 years. Mainly because I would want to attend an M3 again.