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Japan 2007: The Studio Ghibli Museum & Mitaka

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Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind classic animated films including Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away, has been amongst the most prominent and venerated exports of Japanese culture to the west. The films of Studio Ghibli and it’s head, Hayao Miyazaki, were right there at the beginnings of my own awakenings into Japanese culture; Nth generation fansub VHS tapes passed from University student to University student through “internet”, and they somehow wound up in the hands of a bunch of 13 year olds in Brampton. Through the grainy, fuzzy, poorly-tracked screen we could see into a world that was beautiful and deadly and sad-but-hopeful, visions of our own world: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was a revelation.

What’s that you say? There’s a Ghibli Museum in Japan? And it’s easier for foreigners to get tickets through local Japanese cultural agencies than actual Japanese? Let’s go!

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Japan 2007: Harajuku, Peanuts, Tintin, Moomin, and High Fashion

When last we left Harajuku, we were standing outside of the Peanuts theme store with our Gothloli friend:

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The Peanuts store is pretty damned awesome, what with it being a completely and thoroughly ‘themed’ shopping experience, meant to feel like the historical middle American past of the strip.

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By the way, in Japan it’s not Peanuts, it’s all about the Snoopy. Welcome to Snoopy-Town!

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Japan 2007: Harajuku, Gothic Lolita, Yoyogi Park

Welcome back to the guided tour of my trip to Japan! For those of you just joining me, my husband and I took our first trip to Japan in September 2007, and I’ve been cataloguing the trip here at comics212.net, partly because there’s so much comics content, and partly because it’s my blog and I get to make decisions like that. 🙂

It turns out I took more than 300 pictures in 8 hours on our day-trip to Harajuku, so I’m going to break this day up into a couple of posts just so I don’t crash anyone’s browser.

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First stop? Harajuku station. Looks kind of… Bavarian… doesn’t it? Harajuku is considered the fashion-capital of Japan… or one of the fashion-capitals, anyway. Street style is the name of the game, and the area is divided into what seemed like three pretty distinct areas; the network of main and side-streets filled with fashion boutiques; the Meiji Shrine forest; Yoyogi park, a huge public park. We’re looking at the Takeshita-dora entrance, which lets out into the fashion-district. Before tackling shopping though, we decided to visit the shrine and soak up some (old) culture. You can’t do that, though, without running through a labyrinth of…

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Gothic Lolitas! And their admirers, of course (see bottom-right corner). The bridge over the rail tracks is filled, Saturdays and Sundays, with ‘rebellious youth’ decked out in outre fashions of all stripes, though the ‘gothic lolita’ style (think: creepy babydoll) is the most famous. This wasn’t actually the first costumed person we bumped into, though.

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This was. Yes, those are live goldfish.

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Japan 2007: Asakusa, Odaiba, and Village Vanguard

Impressions of Odaiba: An artificial island set in the Tokyo Bay, Odaiba, to me, felt like a very calculated escape from the rigours and density of areas like Shinjuku (home of Tokyo Municipal City Hall) or Ginza (‘old Tokyo’). It has the feeling of a massive theme-park, incorporating malls, rides, and bonified attractions. While much of our trip to Japan felt very specifically accomodating to tourism, Odaiba felt very much like a place for the locals to hang out and visit, particularly on a weekend. It also had a considerably more Western feel than many of the places we visited, thanks to it’s “box store” archetecture, wide streets, and very deliberate-feeling street layout.

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Our first stop on the way to “Good times island” was Asakusa, a lovely area of town that, again, felt like actual people lived there. Japan’s transit system (as I may have mentioned) is awesome, and there are regular (and quick!) trains that head to Odaiba island regularly. But for our approach, we heard about a special little water-transport that would be worth investigating. Since we had two hours to kill before or trip, I figured we’d investigate the area. Right across from the ferry dock is the golden headquarters of Asahi (they make drinks, but are solely known in the west for their dry beers), and next to it is a building with a golden “flame” on top. Yeah.

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Japan 2007: Akihabara Electric Town

Hey there! Welcome back to my little travelogue of Japan. If you’ve missed the previous entries, they’re now all indexed under the Japan 2007 tag. I’d watch out clicking that, though, as those entries have a lot of photos for those of you on slow connections.

Just a quick note that the entries are going to lose their “Day” tags in the titles from this point on, because after this day (and even during) our trip compressed, doubled back on itself, and in big parts stopped having anything at all to do with comics. As this is a comics-related blog I don’t want to dilute the focus too much, but almost all of my photos will be going up on a public sharing service thingy sooner or later so you won’t miss anything, promise.

With that, Akihabara:

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Patrick Macias recounts the history of Tokyo’s Akhiabara district in the excellent Cruising The Anime City: A Guide to Neo-Tokyo and since you should all read that, I’ll spare you the bio and just point out that Akhiabara is a neighborhood that is in the process of evolving from a discount electronics mecca to a hardcore manga and anime Otaku paradise. Shown above is Chuo-dori, the main drag in Akihabara facing towards the train station, I believe. We visited Akihabara twice during the trip, on Day 03, and on Day 11. The photos here are from both trips.

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Japan 2007: Animate, Tekkonkinkreet, and Ikebukuro

I’m actually typing up this entry on the plane ride home from Japan. I have mixed feelings about leaving… I’ve never really been convinced I could actually live in Japan until now, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to getting home and sleeping in my own bed and trying to get back into some kind of routine. I’m also going to try and incorporate some of the things I’ve seen and learned from the retail establishments (particularly the comics ones) into what I do every day. I think there’s a lot to learn from stores that are as well-run—and fucking busy!—as the ones I’ve been visiting. BUT ANYWAY, WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO SEE SOME MORE CRAZY PICTURES?

I don’t know if I made it clear last post, but NAMJATOWN is actually inside a mall. Well, it’s more of a huge city-block shopping complex called SUNSHINE CITY, which also houses another mall (World Import Mart, seen in the bg) and the 60-story skyscraped SUNSHINE 60.

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Japan 2007: Namjatown (Ikebukuro)

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Oh shit… what’s this? Could it be? It is! It’s:

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Yes, it’s NAMJATOWN, a multi-floor themed indoor amusement park. Sort of. While there are three over-riding “games” you can participate in (if you both read and speak perfect Japanese), really, you just go to see one of the most amazing, tacky, fucked-up places you’ve ever been. Seriously. It’s NAMJATOWN. I was first made aware of NAMJATOWN by my buddy Jim Zubkavich of Udon Comics. He, sleep-deprived and in total culture-shock, traversed NAMJATOWN within his first couple of days of being in Japan his first time, and found it thoroughly surreal, and dammit if that wasn’t an experience I wanted for Andrew and I. NAMJATOWN, by NAMCO, makers of Pac Man. Hang on to your hats, kids!

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Sidetracked: Let’s talk about comics shops.

animate-300.jpgMy anger is so fucking righteous.

Seriously though, I’m in Japan, everything’s goddamned awesome. I don’t even have an angry bone in my body at this point, let alone a righteously angry one (and for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, click here).

But… did you see this? http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_editorial_why_comic_shops_still_matter/. Go read that, it’s really good. I wanna give Tom a big hug. Perhaps I will next time I see him, and won’t that be awkward? Anyway, Spurge wants a new direction to the discussion about comic shops, and I think that’s great… Anything to get away from the stuff the folks are saying in THE BEAT’s comments section. So, let’s go: topic starter.

I am in Japan, and there are comic book stores everywhere.

Seriously. Not American Comics, for the most part, but if you blurred your eyes a little you’d recognize many of the places I’ve been visiting as comic book shops. This is in a nation where, as I’ve already blogged, comics are readily (and volumously) available in standard book stores, at the ‘news stand’, at train stations, the 7-11, even in vending machines. Comics are everywhere, and despite that, there are still dedicated comic book stores…! The argument from a number of people is that comic book shops should go the way of the dodo, in favour of mass-market distribution in traditional book stores, and via the internet… But here I am in a country where comics ARE available in the mass-market, in fact, comics make up something like 40% of all published material in the country. And yet, despite that, there is a clear market for comic shops. Even when they have side-lines like used comics, dvds, statues, etc. Even when they don’t, and it’s all about the books… this happens in France too, btw.

The next message in my Japan travelogue is about the end of day 02, where I go to ANIMATE, an eight-floor comic book store. It’s pretty neat, and I was totally inspired. I think you might be too?

In advance of my post, you can find out more about Animate at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animate.

The comic store doesn’t need to go anywhere. We all just need to try a little harder, I think.

– Christopher

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Japan 2007: Ikebukuro Sunshine 60 and Toys R Us

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When last we talked, we had just left the Tokyu Hands store in Ikebukuro. A short walk away from there is the Sunshine 60 mall, which was our next destination. Chances are, if you’re trying to get somewhere, you can just walk down the street to it, or you can look for a department store, head inside, and follow the signage to enter one of the many underground tunnels connecting businesses, offices, etc. If you’re reading this in Toronto, it’s sort of like the PATH, but AWESOME and 1000 times as big. So, since it was 40+ degrees outside with the humidity (that’s like 90 to you filthy imperialists), we ducked into a lovely underground air-conditioned walkway. And what did we come across? A giant Toyota “auto-salon” that was having some sort of amazing SGT. FROG event! Yeah!

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