Shopping, weird stores, and MEAT

Well my third week in Japan is over and it has been another fairly active weekend.

On Saturday me and a group of other international students went to Nakano.

I have become pretty familiar with using the train systems here. Probably because almost all the places we have been to have been along the same train line.

 I had read online that it was kind of like Akihabara, a place full of different toy stores, video game stores, and much more. What I read was kind of true.

The train stations leads right into this long strip of stores. It had a good variety, food, electronics, clothing, etc.

There is apparently a store here called "Card Shop Jesus"

One of the really interesting places in this first strip of stores was the "Junk Store"

It was basically a store that sold old junk electronic parts for really cheap. This included cameras, laptops, and even some video games. everything ranged from 100-1000Yen. So it could be hit or miss what you get.

We also found our first game store fairly quickly.

It was called "Big Mario" an interesting name. Unfortunately this place was only ok, mostly new stuff, and since it was right at the entrance it had fairly high prices. So we kept walking until we came upon Nakano Broadway.

Also known by some people as "Otaku Tower"

It is a very large 4 store shopping mall full of different stores. As Alex put it as we were walking there were to many to see all at once. But we tried, and found some rather interesting shops.

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Like another Junk shop

I was surprised when I saw a Game Workshop here I thought they were only in America and Europe.

A couple different video game stores.

A costume store.

And this is just one of the many different Hobby Stores we saw.

Then we started to find some very weird stores.

One store was selling some kind of weird deformed Troll Doll.

This was a sign we saw outside of one of the stores, we decided not to go look inside.

Then we came upon my favorite store in the entire mall, just because I thought I'd never actually see something like this and that all I heard were just rumors.

We found a store that sold used panties. They sold other things like model kits and anime figurines, but they had a huge section just for these things. Some sold in boxes on a beg board, and for people feeling lucky, they can buy used panties via a Gachapon machine. I had heard that this was a growing industry in Japan, but thought it was kept to the Internet. Then I found this. I even saw some people walk up and buy stuff right out the Gachapon machine, pocket what they found, and just go about their day like it was nothing. But the icing on the cake as this...

 

I won't go into details about what these are so here's a link to the Tenga companies wikipedia page. So just know that this is a Gachapon selling their product.

Tenga Wikipedia page kind of nsfw so be warned.

As for shopping, I bought another Kamen Rider belt

I have it above my bed next to one of the ones I bought earlier. The one on the left is what I bought at Nakano. Buying things like this is hard sometimes because not all store sell them new, but they come in the box and everything. And they write on the price tag if its broken or missing pieces. Unfortunately I can't always read it, so I have to ask. Unfortunately in my Japanese lessons in America I was taught a completely different word for broken then is actually used. The word I was taught is from a text book written in the 80's so some of the vocabulary is out of date.

I also bought a Gundam Themed Slots/Pachinko game for the Wii. Was a purely impulse buy because I've never liked slots or pachinko, but it was brand new, and had been marked down from 6000yen to 500yen. So for basically $6 I decided why not.

This was something I wanted to buy but decided not to for not. It basically turned a Bandai Wonderswan, an old handheld video game system, into a fishing radar. May buy it if I see it next time I go back to Nakano.

After Shopping we walked around the city a bit more. There wasn't really much else to see. All the interesting stuff was around where we were, the rest of the city was just office buildings and restaurants.  Though we did see a Karaoke place.

This guy had to stand outside it shaking a tambourine. Possibly the worst job in the world.

After we all finished in Nakano the group split up. Some people went to Akihabara looking for better video game stores. Some people went to Shinjuku to go shopping there, and some just went home. I was one of the ones to go home.

Then Sunday came around. Woke up fairly early considering I had nothing to do today. Probably because my roommate had his alarm go off around 7am because he had a huge English test today. I slept in till about 9am. Then got up and just sat around with the rest of the people in the dorm watching TV. Then around 1:00 we decide to at least go out. We go check out the big Sega GameCenter that's about a 10 minute walk from the dorms. It was pretty fun. I played quite a few games and registered with some of them.

One is for the MarioKartGundam game they had there. It is a game in a giant pod so it kind of simulates like you are actually piloting a gundam.

I didn't have my camera with me so I had to find a picture from online. It is a really fun game, and it connects with people all over Japan playing in giant robot fighting wars. The card, like the Mario one, keeps track of my in game money, bought Gundams, etc.

Then we we go back to the dorms and prepare for dinner. We made niku yaki tonight.

Basically they are big pan we coat in cooking oil, pile full of meat, cook and then eat. We had all different kinds of meat. Pork Cutlet, Chicken Breasts, Steak Cubes, and Hot dogs. No veggies allowed

It got dangerous pretty quickly for multiple reasons.

1. It was basically a free for all. We pack the meat on and everyone flips it as they see fit. Then one a piece is done its basically a battle to see who gets it. we had two pans, about 5 person to a pan, but people would be reaching over to the other one at times to steal their meat. Some people even stole directly off the plates of others while they weren't looking. But it is all in good fun as there was never a shortage of meat, and if you lost a piece it was easy to get another one fairly soon.

2. It was very hard to tell if some of the meat was cooked all the way at times. especially the chicken and the steak cubes, because you cannot easily cut them open and look inside with chopsticks. So it was either trial and error, basically take a bite and hope it is cooked, if not you put it back on to cook more. Or you can wait for one to basically start to burn, but then it doesn't taste good.

3. After the first patch has been put on the pan there is a ton of grease. Which has a tendency to splash when adding more meat to the pan, or when flipping the pieces of meat over. So anyone wearing short sleeves got theirs wrists burnt sometimes. I was one of those people. Nothing major, more just a shock.

This is basically the end result. You fill your plate with the sauce you want, and once the things are finished cooking you put them in the sauce to marinate a little bit. Then eat. It doesn't look like much but it is pretty tasty. Hopefully I didn't consume to much raw meat, but if I did luckily I only have one class tomorrow.

All in all a good weekend. Probably could have studied a bit more, but I'll be fine, I only have one class on Mondays.  Besides having to talk Japanese with the people in the dorms while eating, or asking them to help me read the instructions for a game is studying right?

 

Typhoon problems, ATM issues

Well its Typhoon season here in Hachioji. Which means a bunch of rain and wind. No umbrella is safe. It started raining really lightly in the morning when I woke up for class, then about half way through my second class it started getting crazy. Then then announced that all classes after 1:00 have been canceled. Lucky for the people who have later in the day classes. Doesn't really matter to me because my last class ends at 12:30. They canceled because the main part of the storm was going to hit us around 2:00 and it would be unsafe for people coming to and leaving the school. So a bunch of us walk home, umbrellas inverting every 5 minutes from sudden gusts of wind. I get back to the dorm around 2:00 and am told the entire dorm building is kind of on lock down. No one is allowed to leave without permission, and keep our electricity use to a minimum just in case there is a power surge. The storming continues until about 7:00. There wasn't much to do at the dorms. Today would have been a good day to have the Wii hooked up for everyone to play but oh well. So I did my homework just in case tomorrows classes weren't canceled, and then napped until dinner. Now the storming has calmed down around 9:00 but it is expected to be happening again tomorrow which we are all looking forward to.

Other than that a couple other things have happened. The biggest issue I have been having here is keeping my cash flow up. Before coming here I heard from people and read that I wouldn't have to worry about having cash on me to much because everywhere will accept credit cards. All lies. about 90% of food stores and restaurants do not take any credit cards, American or Japanese. It is about the same percentage for most other places unless it is a huge electronic store like Yodobashi Camera. So I have to have cash wherever I go if I want to buy anything. This isn't so much the problem I have. The issue I have is actually getting my hands on cash. I have my ATM card from America activated for international use, but unfortunately in all of Hachioji there are 2 ATM's that I can actually use. One on campus of Soka University, and one in down town in a post office near the train station. Then when I am out traveling around Japan, like to Tokyo Game Show or Akihabara I have to go hunting for a post office if I don't have cash on me. But! also when I find the ATM it is not always a guarantee that I can get cash out. It is weird, sometimes I can take out like 25000 yen at a time, and other times on completely different days and times it will not let me withdraw as large an amount, and I have to do like 3 or 4 smaller transactions which ends up costing me a bunch extra because my bank charges me per transaction/ATM withdrawal. It is weird and seems to be completely random. I may buy an international phone card and call the banks from the international phone booth on campus to see if they know why its happening.

Other than those two things I haven't done much else. We plan on making another trip to Akihabara this weekend to check out everything we weren't able to see the first time, weather permitting of course. I plan on going back to the Kyudo club tomorrow night also weather permitting. So we will see what happens.

A Partially Active Weekend

I had a fairly active past weekend. On Saturday I went to Tokyo Game Show, and it was ok. We left around about 7am to get on the train, got to the city around 10, and then waited in line in the hot sun for about 2 hours until we were able to go inside.

It was fairly easy finding our way there by train. We basically followed the crowd, about 99% of the people on the train were all going to TGS.

Once we finally got inside there was quite a bit to see.

Unfortunately the main things I had originally wanted to see while at TGS weren't there. Specifically Nintendo and the Wii U and the new 3DS stuff they were releasing. They had only shown it to the press, but didn't have anything showing on the public days.

Plus everything had an extremely long wait time to be able to see anything. We got in around 12:00, and they closed around 5:00 so if I had waited in some of these lines I'd only be able to see and play maybe 2 different games. If Nintendo's stuff had been there it might have been worth it, but I didn't see the point of waiting for many other things.

The one company that I enjoyed looking at their stuff and was also surprised that they had shown up at all was Behemoth Studios.

I wasn't expecting them to be here because they I was pretty sure they were primarily an American developer, and didn't know much of what they did overseas. They were showing off their new game Battle Block Theater. Which they allowed me to take some video of (unlike almost every other company who wouldn't let you take pictures of any of their games)

This is a video of two little kids playing the game and not doing very well. They couldn't seem to figure it out. One of the people working at the booth was trying to help them but she didn't really seem to know how to play the game either.

This is of a different set of people playing. They were doing slightly better and actually completed the full demo they had available.

Then I got a turn to play it, but since it was co-op I needed a partner. No one else was around so I got to play with one of the workers at the booth explaining the game. She didn't seem like she had ever played the game before. I had to at one point explain to her how to climb up a wall, and how to throw an item. It kind of caught me off guard since she was there to basically show the game, yet she couldn't play it very well. But I still enjoyed myself playing the game, and look forward to its release soon as I have bought all of Behemoth's other games that have come out, and this one looks to be just as good.

Soon after that I walked around and took quite a few pictures of booth babes and cosplayers.

Booth Babes are basically women hired to dress scantily and be eye candy to attract people to the booths.  I took pictures of about 50 different ones and wont upload them all here so here is a link to an online album with all of the photos. I'll just post some that stuck out to me.

Not all booth babes are the same, one was a giant Hatsune Miku.

I think this was some kind of Booth Ninja

I was pretty sure this was a guy at first.

One booth just had dolls in school girl uniforms standing there. Kind of lazy if you ask me.

Here is the link to an online album with the rest of the Booth Babes 

TGS Booth Babes Gallery

Also I took a bunch of pictures of cosplayers. Basically people dressing up like video game characters.  Took tons of these pictures as well, so I'll just post some and a link to the online album.

First cosplayers I took a picture on. Pretty sure the one on the right is a guy dressing as a girl character.

There was a really bad Master Chief cosplayer there. Up close the costume just looked kind of bad.

Also probably a dude.

This one as well.

She gave up wearing the costume probably because it was so hot.

Here is the link to the rest of the photos.

TGS Cosplay Gallery

Other than that, since I wasn't willing to wait in line for 2 hours, I spent a lot of my time around the Indie/ College student area. This was an area were independent developers, and college students can show off their art work, and games that had made.

There were tons of colleges there.

This was my favorite part of TGS. Mostly because there were no lines, and they had some fairly interesting and unique games. Some did have issues with like control and the camera angles, but other than that they were good all around. I filled out tons of surveys telling them about what I thought about the games. I also took some videos of 3 of them

These are just some AR cards. Nothing really special, but AR has always been pretty cool, and from what I saw they were the only people to have anything AR related at the show.

This was an interesting block throwing game. You had to take your environment apart to fight, if you did to much you would fall off. Was very fun to play.

This one is self explanatory just watch. You won't see anything like this coming from major developers.

Also there was I think a birth giving game.

That's a guy wearing some kind of dress, and he has to I think "push" the baby out or something. I dunno it was weird.

Here's a link to the rest of the pictures from these booths.

TGS Indie/ College Booths

The only other place worth noting was the Family Corner.

They seemed to be showing more of the types of games I would want to see, specifically the new Kamen Rider Fourze game. Unfortunately I was not allowed to enter. Only children and their parents.

Then 5:00 came around and Stephanie and I headed back. Alex and Quick, the other two who came, left early without telling us, apparently because Alex was sick. On the way back we stopped by Akihabara for a bit because it was on the way. Found a couple more video game stores. Stephanie was looking for a Gameboy Advanced SP, and I had seen one in a store for cheap the first time I went to Akihabara, but since it was night I couldn't find the store again. Then we got back on the train to Hachioji but were delayed for about an hour. On the little TV screen on the trains the thing said "train delayed due to human entering" We were pretty sure this meant that someone had killed themselves by throwing themselves onto the train tracks, but we were not entirely sure. Unfortunately this caused us to get back very late around 11:00 which is past curfew for the girls living at the dorms. But Stephanie didn't get in trouble for it luckily.

Then on Sunday I was lazy all day. The other people in my dorm block all went to Tokyo Tower and the shopping areas around there, but I choose to sleep in and rest a bit.

All in all TGS was kind of average, nothing really would make me want to go back next year. Unless I can somehow get a press pass. The press go on separate days from everyone else, and probably don't have to wait in a bunch of lines to see the stuff.