Pokemon is still Super Effective

And so it was deemed that in December 2014, the biggest shop dedicated to Pokemon ever to grace the planet would be opened. Pokemon Center Mega Tokyo is now up and running in Ikebukuro, and, though it's not the first time I find myself in the center of something Pokemon themed in Tokyo, this here isn't a temporary exhibit or fare. It's kind of the real thing, and it's still real crowded. Word was you could hardly get in without waiting in line for hours when the place first opened.

 As it is, this isn't the first Pokemon Center to exist in Tokyo - as a matter of fact, it's the third, with five others spread out across Japan outside of the metropolis. But it is the biggest.
 Let's let a few facts sink in for a little bit. First off, in Japan, and to some extent, the rest of the world, Pokemon is no longer something only children are interested in, as was mostly the case when the franchise was born. Sure, there are children by the school load who are avid lovers of Pokemon, but a very large part of the demographic to still be enthralled by the Pokemon phenomenon are people in their early to late 20's - the very same generation who saw the franchise begin. Young adults account for a major part of goods sales, mainly through the handheld console games.

  I could rave on and on about the games themselves, but I'll try to keep it brief. They're ingenious in a way - simple enough that an elementary student could finish them with hardly any trouble, but with a complex competitive scene for people who are interested in taking their game online and challenging others. Pokemon is the only series I know that requires some degree of knowledge of algebra to fully perfect online competitive play, a level I myself never quite got too, despite having tried.

 But in and of itself, the longevity of the series is kind of amazing, too. Think about it, though! Disney, for example, is widely known and appreciated enough to have its own store - but Disney is a collection of franchises - with multiple stories for both boys and girls. For Pokemon, a single franchise owned by Nintendo, to have achieved such a level of influence as to have stores dedicated entirely to it still baffles me.

More merchandise than you can shake your noodly otaku arms at.

As for the shop itself, it's a full-force blast of nostalgia to the face. Every collection item imaginable, and even those you couldn't imagine prior to entering the shop, exist here. Be it trading cards, video games, DVD's, music, plushies, or even school note books, tableware, towels - it's all here. Basically anything they can print Pikachu's face on exists in this shop.

And by the way, the place doesn't lack for decoration. I walked in with zero intention to spend any money, walked out without buying anything, and still enjoyed the time I spent surrounded by the merchandise, but moreover, looking at the statues of the Pokemon characters set up beautifully around the shop.
 Moreover, for those who own the games, the shop is a thriving place for players to open up their 3DS consoles and download "gift" Pokemon regular given to players by the shop. But on top of that, there being so many people playing the game in one single place allows for a great chance to meet other players, trade Pokemon in-game, battle and so on. It was kind of nice to see such a diversity in community gathered in one place, be it children, geeky otaku, groups of young girls, or anything in-between. Well done, Nintendo.

5 Reasons Village Vanguard Is My Favorite Shop

1. This gay orgy of Ken dolls.

2. This picture book of pretty girls licking doorknobs.

  3. These erotic bath salts featuring under-aged anime characters.

4. These naked babies making powerful eye contact.

 5. This bowl made specifically for eating curry.

You can read more about Village Vanguard here.

Geekier Than Akihabara

Akihabara is widely known as Tokyo's geek central - or otaku as geeks are known here. But that doesn't mean there's no other places for such special interests. Growing like a weevil on the other side of Tokyo, a competitor has arisen - with many an otaku calling it superior to Akihabara - and the challenger's name is Nakano Broadway. As opposed to Akiba, which lines special interest stores along the side of one main street, Nakano Broadway is a single indoor complex - 4 floors' worth of geekdom. Aala and I delve in.

Would you buy anything like this?

Holy shitting dicks on a stick. The question of the day is how much money are people willing to spend to satisfy their interest. The answer? All their money.

Nakano Broadway is increasing in popularity, and it isn't because things are value-priced. I tend to think they are in Akihabara. But they key to Nakano Broadway's success was in catering to very specific interests and owning a large part of the market when it came to certain target audiences. For example, you'd be hard pressed to find another shop that sells special limited edition train-commuter cards. Or toys of robots dating from the 60's. And yet Nakano Broadway has shops specializing in those.
 But you know, I actually kind of like the place.
 I prefer Akihabara, myself - it's a lot livelier. But the Broadway is quiet and interesting if only to look around in, and has some kick ass deco. Granted, some of the halls are still empty and shop-less, but the place is still young, and I doubt some of the stuff you find here can be found anywhere else in Tokyo.

The Best Shop Award Goes To...

...It's Village Vanguard. And it's gonna be Village Vanguard every time. To me, Village Vanguard screams "Japan" in all the ways I want it to. It's quirky and unpredictable and a little confusing at times, and it's just the kind of thing you're hoping to find in a country that's often also quirky, unpredictable and confusing. If you're looking for something bewildering and strange, you've got to come to Village Vanguard.

Holy shit, is there anything normal on this shelf?

The shop claims itself to be an "Exciting Book Store," and truly, it's all that and everything in between. On top of books, one can expect to find trinkets, home deco, toys, games, music albums, DVDs, accessories, magazines and a variety of items with an unusual flavor. From wall-stickers of Jesus to giant plush Gremlins, the shop has some kind of world-class indie appeal going for it. Hell, a lot of what you'll find in Village Vanguard doesn't seem to have any other use or purpose other than being unique.

Just look at all this stuff!

Truth be told, I've never even bought a single thing from Village Vanguard. And maybe I never will. None of the merchandise is actually cheap by any stretch of the imagination. But it's a safe bet that if you ever have 30 minutes or so to kill with a few friends, browsing the shop will feel like time well wasted. It's delightfully refreshing every time. Bring a tourist!
 Village Vanguard is a chain store. You can find one at almost every busy shop-ish corner of Tokyo.

Lake Town

Here's Koshigaya's Aeon Lake Town. Japan's biggest shopping center just won't fit in cramped-ass Tokyo, so it's way out here in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, one hour away from the city. It's not even in the Tokyo prefecture. Hard to miss it, though. The place is 200,000 square meters large  and its own train station.
Speaking only in numbers, Lake Town houses 200 different stores and is the 28th biggest shopping center in the world. It's not exactly the closest to the top, but hell if it isn't big.

Accompanying me are Ken, Erika, and her daughter Maxine. Also, there's Andrew! He's Erika's 15 year old brother. For the sake of introductions, if someone took baby Maxine, made her ten times bigger and gave her the gift of speech, then the resulting life form would probably be a lot like Andrew.
 Here's a picture with both Andrew and Erika looking particularly like goblins. Maybe it runs in the family?

Chilling in a home hardware store.

Back to Koshigaya Lake Town, the mall is split into four sections: Water, Forest, Wind and the Outlet section, which is completely outdoors. The three hours we spent there took us through a little less than half of the place. Today being a national holiday, though, it was impossible to buy anything: lines stretched out even out of the doors of certain stores. As much as I also would've loved to buy some furnishing for my crib, the distance home was also a cumbersome obstacle. 

My highlight? Maybe just watching Maxine play around with the other kids in this lego-themed shop. The name of the shop itself, "clickbrick" looked alarmingly like "dickbrick" due to the poor choice of font for the shop's logo. But this is Japan, so who cares! Hurrah!
 But yeah, in conclusion, Laketown is like a big dog. It's big.

Social Camouflage

See it?

I'm doing quite well with money this month, so I decided it might be time to do a little more shopping for clothes. Clothes don't come cheap in Tokyo, but there is a way to find affordable clothes. Today I went out to get a few t-shirts.

 Japan is quirky shirt central. The country has no rivals. No competitors. It seems to me in the textile industry, the main export is weird. Partly because a lot of these shirts have English sentences written on them that don't make sense. But even then, there are shirts with such things as shit on a stick being mass produced and sold to the youth.

As far as I know, the main hot spot to catch such products is in Harajuku, on Takeshita-dori street. If you're a reader from my hometown of Montreal, call it the "Mont-Royal Street" of Tokyo, if you will. The place is thriving with local small businesses selling their own unique (or sometimes frequently seen) weird clothing and accessories. It doesn't take long to catch a glimpse of something that'll make you smile for all the wrong reasons.

 Thing is, people buy them! People buy this stuff for a decent sum, which isn't something I can see happening back home, where most of what people wear is pretty tame in comparison. But here, it could be that it's considered cute, or trendy, to wear something that beams no sense whatsoever.

 This of course, only holds true for young people. You won't find middle-aged men wearing the stuff on display in hipsterific-Harajuku.

As for myself?
 Yeah, whatever. I caved, too. Where else in the world could you find something like this?

It's Like a Zoo in Here

The other day, after work, I went to a large pet shop just to see if there was much of a difference between the choices in pets and their prices. Turns out there is!

Look at that! It's an honest-to-God stingray! The sheer variety of animals a Canadian like myself would consider "exotic" was nothing short of fascinating, so I easily spent forty minutes to an hour just looking through the aisles. Like I said though, this place was big.

Now, prices were all ass-backwards, too. Things you would expect to be expensive (mostly the reptiles) were actually quite cheap. There was a basilisk lizard for sale for 80$ or so, which I do believe is a little cheaper than they would go for back home (though I may be wrong?)
However, get this; a cat would cut your wallet down at least 1000$. One. Thousand. Dollars. Dogs are even more ludicrous when it comes to pricing. I can think of a lot of things I would rather get with that kind of money.

Post-script; here was the strawberry on the shortcake. Axolotls are awesome.

Sunshine City: Observatory, Cat Lounge

If you get off at Ikebukuro metro station, you're bound to stumble upon a sign like this.
Sunshine City is an enormous complex containing a Planetarium, an Aquarium, and the enormous Sunshine 60 skyscraper. It's a popular destination for young girls and couples.
 Being that I am part of neither of those categories, I only gave Sunshine City a quick tour, not really going into the bigger attractions of the area. Still, what little I saw was worth sharing, I think. Without further a due, let us proceed onward.


The enormous Sunshine 60 (the number a reference to the number of floors) houses an observatory at the top, allowing one to take in a 360 degree panoramic view of Tokyo as seen from the top of Sunshine City. It's almost surreal. The elevator travels the 60 floors in just a little over 15 seconds. It's fast as hell. My ears popped. But here's what you get once you're at the top!


 You can click on any of the pictures to make them bigger. Clockwise, starting from the left of this text, is East, South, North and West. The weather condition wasn't the best, but you do get a sense of the size of the city. There's no end in sight!

 On the East picture you can see the Sky Tree! It's the world's current tallest tower. To the South is Shinjuku, that small amassing of gigantic skyscrapers near the center of the pic. To the North, just barely visible, is the Nikko Mountain Range.

So that was quite nice. But my visiting of Sunshine City didn't end here. On my way out of the complex, something caught my eye. It was an ad for a "Cat Lounge" called Nekobukuro. I just had to visit.
 As the name "Cat Lounge" would imply, it was basically a place where you could just sit down or stand around while surrounded by something like 25 cats going in and out of the various rooms. There was a system of catwalks and ramps and bridges and holes in the walls that allowed the felines to flow from one place to another. So I basically paid 6$ to go in and pat twenty cats in twenty minutes.

Technically, there's no limit as to how long you can stay inside (their advertising even mentions this) so you really can just sit down and stay there for hours, if you so choose. As a matter of fact, I did stumble upon a few people sleeping on the chairs. The cats themselves are extremely chilled out, and I'm pretty sure they handpicked the most relaxed and non-aggressive cats they could find.
All in all, Sunshine City was pretty cool even though my visit was brief. I'll probably come back when I'm done being single or whatever.

We're dorks (together)

Today, Julian, Devin, Clement and I decided to go walk around in Shinjuku and go wherever the wind would take us. Thus, we strolled into Shinjuku-goen park. Though the wind is getting chillier with every passing week, Tokyo's parks are particularly nice at this time of the year, since the leaves have mostly turned but have not yet fallen. The great variety of trees in this area make it so that the colors are quite diverse. With so much city around us, it's kinda easy to forget that Japan is kind of a tropical island, and houses an expansive flora.


Having visited the park, we then ventured downtown to purchase prepaid cellphones. I have to give credit to Clement where it's due, since we wouldn't have been able to figure it all out without his knowledge of the language. Unfortunately, it took shamefully long for them to prepare the phone for us (Julian bought one too), so we decided to kill some time at an arcade.

I told him to pose like this.

 Now, arcades in Tokyo aren't like the measly ones back home. Here, they're megalithic spires with up to five floors, packed with a decent amount of people at any time of the day. We walked around the floors with all the cool games and shit, and were quite frankly intimidated. I was watching a girl play, and decided to opt out of playing with her because she would kick my ass and wipe the floor with me. Then I watched a child play, and decided the same thing. I'm pretty sure if there was a dog in there it'd have also kicked my ass. So instead we went back to the first floor and played the UFO catcher games. I spent 200Y (3$) before quitting. Julian spent 8$. Devin spent 28$.
Julian won this weird fucking thing. It's an action-figure doll with airplane propellers for legs. I won't even comment on that, but I will say it's pretty Japanese, alright.




So after one hour, we headed back to the cellphone place to see if our orders were ready. They weren't. So we waited another 20 minutes so that the crab-people could finish and give us our purchase, by the end of which they did. It turns out what took so long was charging the phone. Why this was so important, I don't know. My phone comes with useless features such as a daily fortune and, if I understood corectly, an earthquake-warning app, which is kind of weird, seeing as I'm pretty sure I'd feel it if there was an earthquake that posed any danger to me. Of course, I didn't pay anything extra for any of that shit.

 All in all, my phone cost me 30$, plus 30$ for two months of unlimited received calls and text messaging. It's a good deal, I think, and one that's been recommended to me many times.

And then there were three

Yesterday (or today for people in Montreal?) went to Ueno so that I could register for a Gaijin card (Alien Registration Card) and not have to carry my passport around at all times. Though I may have a visa, I can't work without the damn card, so yeah.
 The upside of it all was that we later got to walk around the market district and see some pretty neat Japanese stores. I gave in and bought a yukata and a headband.
The headband says "kamikaze." It appeals to both the Japanese and Iranian sides of my heritage, if you know what I mean. Heheheh.

That aside, today Anton left us to go back to England, having run out of money. He gave me deodorant and toothpaste as he left. Hopefully that wasn't a remark on my hygiene. Having extended an invitation for me to come to England one day, he took that faithful last train, McDonald's cheeseburger in hand, and left for the journey home. Now we are three, and short one dominican-irish-korean british b-boy optician fox-guy.