Day 2 & 3 :

Yvon Chang

Day 2 : God is sad for the bleak future of the baka gaijin otaku

This will be 2 days in one post as I don’t really want to start to clutter things in here. I’m a bit late compared to the French blog but that’s my main audience, please understand!

My friend Jeremy and I are still not too used to the rhythm here. We’re still going to bed a bit too early and thus waking up too early as well. I guess we’ll have to shift our sleeping schedule a bit each day until it’s good.

So yeah, the day began a bit early. Despite this, it doesn’t mean we’re starting with a plan in mind… With a Mac about to die (well, the battery) and no really stable access to the Internet outside of our host’s house well… It’s a bit hard to establish clear plans. And it’s especially hard to wing it when you know nothing about Tokyo and its suburb.

We (I, really) still had some goal in mind though for today : I had to find a goddamn charger for my Mac and fix drunk me’s mistake(s). So we just used this as an excuse to go and wander around Akihabara, the Electric Town. Although to be honest, it feels more like it devolved into a tourist trap with all its free-duty shops, and a perfect place for the baka gaijin otaku to gather because Akihabara and because ANIMUUUU, and MANGOEEESSSSS.

And we’re part of them with Jeremy! HAH.

So that’s the reason why we arrived at Akihabara quite early, maybe around 9am… To fucking drink coffee?! Because yeah, did I forget to tell you? The weather totally sucks right now in Japan. It’s still hot and rather humid but the sky is clouded gray almost all day long and you get something like a 50/50 chance for it to rain when you open your eyes in the morning. And today was the worst 50% chance we got.

As if it wasn’t enough, we’ve also learned by roaming the streets of Akihabara under the rain that most shops open at 10am at best, 11am at worst, and it’s completely normal! What a bunch of lazy bums! I wonder if they make enough for a living ; I kinda guess that’s why so many young people prefer to just shut in and become hikikomori or just go from part-time job to another part-time job.

So yeah, we just ended up drinking some coffee and waiting for time to pass so shops open… And when it finally opened.. Well… The Animate across the street was glaring at me for the longest time since we got there. So when it started open, we just got in there and lost ourselves in the shop for a good 2 hours. The end result was the first volume of Re:Zero Kara Hajimaru Isekai Seikatsu for Jeremy (because some friend recommended him the anime before) and the first volume of Violet Evergarden for me. As a fan of Kyoto Animation, I couldn’t let the chance of reading the source material of their next adaptation (after Koe no Katachi that is)!

Well… “Reading” is a big word as I mostly try to decipher things as best as I can rather than read the thing, but hey, my inner weeb is satisfied, so I am satisfied as well.

Another intriguing thing was the horrible images on the BR boxes in the Animate. It was enough to make the worst Chinese bootleg appear like the real thing… Truly mystifying.

And then after that… Oh yeah, the charger? Well, those thieves at Apple can go ahead and buy it themselves. Ain’t got money to spend on a 60 euro charger. It’s so over priced…

More importantly, we were hungry, so we decided to pick a random curry shop in Akihabara and eat there. I guess it wasn’t the best curry in Japan but it wasn’t bad at all. It was good and did it’s job just perfectly.

Actually, we thought for a moment it was so good it gave us flatulences enough to shake the whole house. Turns out it was just our first earthquake experience. No one in the house moved even a finger, so we just did the same and dive right into our sweet dreams.

Day 3 : What’s your name, you goddamn train station?!

So after the little trip to Akihabara ruined my shoes, I had to go buy another pair.

Our host, Keitaro-san suggested me to go to the Ame-whatever-the-name-is in Ueno. So that’s what we did, and how surprising, there were lots of tourists and many stands that didn’t give a Japanese vibe. Pretty damn disappointing, I think, but that’s just my opinion. And we also got to taste our very first Kebab in Japan. And what a Kebab that was… Pretty damn disappointing when you tasted even a mediocre one in France. It was bad per se, definitely different, but it’s mostly that the size was laughable (despite them having a “Jumbo Doner Kebab” sign…) and the meat not quite there… But whatever, we didn’t come to Japan for kebab anyway!

So yeah, I bought some new shoes and then we just kinda visited a bit the town and the park for a little while. While it’s choke full of tourists, it’s still rather pretty and nice. We took this as a chance to also check if there were any rooms left in a ryokan that my brother wanted to book for when he comes in Japan in a week or so. Too bad there weren’t any when we got there… All this for nothing…

At least we got the visit a bit around the town and that was nice.

Another remarkable feat is my inability to even begin to understand how the goddamn railway network works after 3 days spent there, basically. I don’t understand shit and while it doesn’t bother me to just wander around the stations for a while, it’s quite unnerving to just get nowhere.

The true highlight of today though was our very first outing to the cinema in Japan. Nothing extraordinary, sure, but when you’re in a country where English (nor French) is the main language, you start to wonder if spending money on a ticket for a movie you might not understand is the best thing to do.

Fortunately enough, things went rather smoothly and in the end, we got out of the room with pride and satisfaction in the fact that we got to see Shinkai Makoto’s newest movie Kimi no na wa before many other fans AND that we understood most of it outside of some very specific words and phrases, without the need of subtitles. As someone who’s studying Japanese, that felt pretty good.

I’ll give a more detailed impression of Kimi no na wa and a small reflection on it afterwards. This is an absolutely beautiful movie, and I can’t recommend it enough if you’re an anime fan or just a fan of anything involving animation in general. Definitely go watch it once it gets released in your country, it’s totally worth it.

The next step is Koe no Katachi which will be released this Saturday in Japan. Being a fan of the source material and a fan of Kyoto Animation, the studio which is making the adaptation, I’m totally excited to see what Yamada Naoko and her team at Kyoto Animation have in store for us. I don’t think there is anything to worry about since they’ve been doing pretty great up until now though. I’m really hopeful about this movie.

So yeah, I guess that’s pretty much it for now. I’ll see you later in the reflection post!



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