Cerulean Hart: There's a lot of shopping and not much else today.
Slightly Longer Version: We woke up, we went downtown to look for a job, then we hung out in front of the drug store.
Actually Longer Version:
We started the day by trucking ourselves (well... public transit-ing ourselves) to Shibuya to hit up the SEGA store to grab some Persona merch. Come to find out, there was also a Capcom store, Godzilla store, Pokemon store, and Nintendo store on the same floor. Needless to say, we found many other things to acquire to sate our little weeb hearts.
After that, we planned to go to a revolving sushi restaurant, but all of them were far away. Then, we decided on Ichiran (since it's safe and was right there), but there was like... a lot of people. Minimum of an hour wait. No thanks, I'm hungry now. While we tried to find alternative options, we wandered up to Tower Records (styled TOWER RECORDS everywhere) to try to find some Japan Only albums. Sadly, they only had albums we already owned from previous trips. What a horrible issue to have! Woe are we! (Angie: I was pretty much just checking the Susumu Hirasawa selection. Finding that vinyl last time has me hungry for more!)
In the intervening time, we decided to hit up Pronto to get some pasta. It was down in the basement of a nearby building, so thankfully no lines. The pasta was... eh. It was okay. Angie got a yogurt strawberry drink (which, at the time, she did not know was yogurt related) (But was still pretty tasty! I did use my pasta spoon to spoon out the remaining chunks of strawberry at the bottom. Ice cubes in fancy drinks here really are preventing us from enjoying the good stuff!) and it had a similar problem to the drinks from Caffe Veloce - the milk product stuck to the ice cubes and was hard to extricate.
Now, the bulk of the day. We grabbed the Yamanote line to Shinjuku then transferred to the Chuo line, bound for Nakano.
Nakano Broadway, for the uninitiated, is like 5 (4) floors of random anime nonsense and "completely legitimate" watches.
Very, very few of the shops allowed photography, so we decided to not, ya know, take any photos.
Angie: Now that I'm all showered and soaked, it's Jeff's turn to get clean and relaxed and my turn at the blog!
Yes, this isn't our first time at Nakano Broadway so we know to start at the top, 4th floor and only make left (or right, but pick one) turns. Like a maze, because it is pretty maze-like. The floor plan is almost set up like a ladder with 3 rungs, but not perfect rectangles, the ladder has little dead-end hallways at the tops and bottoms.
Plus, this lets me go to the place I wanted to go here for anyway: anime cels. There are 3-4 cel shops, but two of them have large enough collections you can rifle through binders or bins of labeled and unlabeled misc. anime. Like flipping through records! Right off the bat Jeff found a cell with about 5 douga of Shido! And it was only 1,500 yen! The least I've bought one online was for $30 so this was literally the best deal I've ever had!
Alas, that was the end of any Nightwalker purchases for today, but one is better than none, and with that anime in this day and age, that's pretty lucky!
So we snaked our way through each floor, around every corner, to every nook and cranny, sumimasen-ing and squeezing past other people in the tiny little shops filled to the brim, floor to ceiling, with second-hand anime merch. I feel like there are more anime stores than there were in 2024, but maybe that's because it's nice to have a second set of eyes, or if you need a break, send the other in to scout it out while you wait outside the shop.
In the end I bought a souvenir or two for Christina, a plushie, some cute, little, chibi L asleep (from a gashapon series it looks like), and a Death Note doujinshi. I kept seeing a figure of L in a chair for about $130-$200 but couldn't bring myself to spend that much. I'll sleep on it. If I really care I'll go back for it.
Jeff bought some doujinshi, also some souvenirs, a D&D guide book, and a Fern figurine (it's really cute).
This all took about 4 hours, so about an hour each floor, but once we got to floor 1 there wasn't as many anime stores and we were tired and hungry. There was a Kura Sushi near the Nakano station and since we didn't get it last night I was still craving it. The wait was only about half an hour so we used the facilities and I bought some essentials from the nearby drug store (Lion foot relief pads, more chapstick, and Biore UV sunsecreen for the bike tour tomorrow).
After some confusion because we SWEAR it displayed our waiting # on the screen at Kura sushi, we finally were up for our turn. We got two spots next to each other at the counter, once again in a gaijin corner, but that's okay. Kura sushi has the Janken Pon (I think they called it Bikkura Pon) chance to win a prize for every 5 plates of sushi you eat. Drinks, sides, soups, or desserts don't count, but sushi plates are all the same size, and you slide it into a little plate-sized hole at the top of your counter and it deposits the plate to a waiting dirty dish conveyor below. So after you return 5 plates you get a chance to win a little gashapon prize and right now the prize were little magnets of.... Detective Conan. Have we mentioned that it's everywhere, yet? If not: It's everywhere right now. The 29th Detective Conan movie is in theaters right now and it's being promoted everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Much like Evangelion, they really really love Detective Conan. Anyway, I didn't win and I only had (only, ha) 7 plates of sushi, BUT when I sat down, the person before me forgot their little gashapon prize so I got it and it was a magnet of Conan himself (I think the plot of the story is a famous detective either goes back in time or is accidentally regressed in age to a child again, but he continues detecting?)
I think the best thing I had was a fatty pork (cut real think like ham-thin) sushi. Jeff's favorite was a teriyaki hamburger with mayo sushi. It was great to get off our feet, too, and so when we left, we had the strength to make it back to the hotel.
And so here we are, freshened up, showered, eating snacks from Family Mart, and ready for our bike tour tomorrow morning. Wish us luck!!
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