We interrupt the much-delayed Comiket coverage to wish you a belated Happy New Year! 新年明けましておめでとうございまãï¼ While saner people were enjoying the company of their family and friends on New Year’s Eve in the comfort of their homes, I was wandering around Sensouji (浅草寺) to have a look at the infamous midnight queue of people hoping to be among the first to perform hatsumoude (first shrine visit of the year) at the shrine.

Rather amusing if you read kanji

Sensouji (浅草寺) is a Buddhist temple that basically defines the entire existence of Asakusa (浅草). Interestingly, I did not notice that the two names share the same kanji pronounced differently until recently. The outermost entrance to the temple is the Kaminarimon (雷門), a mystical gateway to a walkway of tourist traps leading right up to the temple itself.

There are only four kinds of people in this world

In Japan, Buddhism and Shintoism underwent centuries of cross-pollination and are pretty similar to each other, sort of like Linux distros. The Buddhist temples are called tera (寺) while the Shinto shrines are called jinja (神社), and ostensibly they worship different gods, but generally people go to them to do the same things — namely omikuji, throwing coins into donation boxes, and buying omamori. (As far as I can tell anyway; it’s not like I took a course in Japanese Religions or anything.)

So what’s so special about hatsumoude as compared to a normal shrine visit? Well, nothing actually. You still do the same things. The only difference is that the once deserted temple/shrine is now filled with a few thousand other people. It’s awesome.

Okay, it is also a rather festive occasion, with food and handicraft stalls setting up temporary camp around the perimeter of the temple. It’s sort of like natsumatsuri, except in winter. Since people from all over Kantou (and no doubt beyond) come to Sensouji — one of the more prominent places of worship in Japan — for hatsumoude, business is obscenely good for these opportunistic hawkers.

The start of the queue

Around midnight, the hatsumoude queue for Sensouji stretched all the way from the temple to Kaminarimon and continued on for god knows how far down the T-junction road in front of the gate. The roads around the area were closed off by the Metropolitan Police and there were tons of police and fire department officers on the scene to manage the queue.

Somewhere along the queue

A police officer

To be continued…

Police buses and cars

In front of Kaminarimon

Although I did queue overnight for Winter Comiket once back when I was young and foolish, I had since grown saner and wisely decided against queuing for hours in the cold just to throw a few coins into a box.

The money box

My plan was to walk around and take some pictures before returning in the morning when (I thought) the place would be empty. Surprisingly, the queue actually managed to retain the same length right into the afternoon of the 1st, and I only managed to do my hatsumoude at around 7pm. I prayed for world peace, of course.

For the entire day, the area around my hostel in Asakusa was flooded with people who just completed their prayers, and for some inexplicable reason, a large number of them were speaking Chinese. (I actually walked into a Matsuya gyuudon chain store in the morning and discovered that 12 out of the 16 customers were Chinese speakers.)

It is what you think it is

Yup

On a completely serious note, the entire experience was actually just like Comiket. The police officers managed the queue using the exact same techniques that Comiket organizers do. There were regular breaks along the queue which allowed pedestrians to get to the other side, while police officers lined perimeters to prevent cutting. Hell, the temple was even selling a “limited edition” ofuda (お札) that is only available for the New Year period…

There are even collectible figurines!

So yeah, hatsumoude is like Comiket for regular people.

On another note, I got sueshoukichi (末小吉) for my omikuji which, according to Hatena Keyword, is the worst possible level of kichi (good luck) one can get without entering into kyou (bad luck) region… Apparently sueshoukichi is so rare that the chance of getting it is 3% and many shrines do not even include it as one of the possible results. Woot, go me! >_<

Get a number and match it to the corresponding drawer to receive your fortune

Incidentally, the number of the stick that fell out of the omikuji container thingy is the same as the day of my birth date. Coincidence? I think so.

Some guy doing a roadside puppet show. It wasn’t very good

I actually went to Meiji Shrine in Shibuya today. Will blog about that at a (much) later date.

Also, I have just about enough money left to survive my remaining stay if I spend on nothing but (cheap) food and transportation. I walked 4km from Akihabara Metro Station to Sakura Hostel in Asakusa today…

The three-day long holy celebration of otakuism that is the Winter Comic Market came to a close yesterday. This is my second Comiket, and probably the last one in a long time. I am still in Japan right now, so I may not have time to blog about the last three days in greater details until I get back, but here are the cosplay photos for now.

I did not take any pictures of the event other than the cosplay this time. However, since Comiket mostly consists of the same old huge crowds and long queues, you can take a look at last year’s pictures for that purpose.

I have to say that with the freshness gone, Comiket is basically one huge shopping experience — extremely chaotic and yet simultaneously subtle compared to a real anime convention loaded with constant entertainment and shiny objects. That said, the cosplay never gets old.

The good thing about Winter Comiket is that the stench of bodily fluids is minimal and queuing for two to three hours to get your hands on a few pages of hardcore pornography is probably a whole lot more bearable than in summer (or so I imagine). The bad thing is that cosplay pictures look like crap because the sun is always at an inconvenient angle.

Of course I could easily solve this problem by investing in a proper external flash for my DSLR, but I prefer to blame the climate and planetary alignments when things go wrong. (Also, solar flares wiped my hard disk.)

Since whining doesn’t solve my problem, mostly due to the unsympathetic laws of physics, you guys will just have to deal with the unfortunate fact that a great number of cosplayers appearing in this post have empty voids of pitch darkness in place of their eyes.

Like

This

And as a bonus, sometimes the entire face is black (not being racist)

I’m sure you are terribly annoyed by my constant monologue interrupting the flow of pictures, so I shall stop. Enjoy.

Actually it’s quite amazing how Japanese girls seem to be immune to the winter chill. Oh right, sorry. I’ll shut up now.

The next post will be out some time next year. In the mean time, you can check out my C73 coverage from last year. It’s about the same.

On another note, during the time it took for me to queue for various reasons during three days of Comiket, I collected all eleven Crystals in Dissidia. Japan is the undisputed global leader when it comes to forming and managing long queues.

Because Japanese are completely asinine about getting their photos taken, and because the Comiket committee has my URL and I don’t want to get blacklisted, I went through the trouble of mosaicking all the faces.

The Queues

Queuing is Japan’s national pastime. In fact, you can say that going to Disneyland in Japan is about the same as going to Comiket. It all boils down to about two hours of queuing for a few seconds of gratification. Unless you go for the rides that no one wants to touch with a 10-metre pole, like “It’s a Small World”.

End of the line for T2 Art Works

Almost there!

The queues for popular booths are so long that the end of the line is generally in a totally different part of Japan from the actual location of the booth. This makes it a huge challenge for people who are rushing to queue for goods that are limited in numbers. Finding the booth itself is easy if you follow the maps, but by the time you get there the queue is already in Hokkaido. You have to anticipate where the queue will be by the time you arrive and head for the queue instead of the booth.

It’s like that Space Invaders episode in Futurama: shoot where he is going to be instead of where he was.

At the end of every queue is a guy holding a sign with the booth number that says 最後尾 to tell you that it’s the end of the line for that circle. Usually the guy holding it is the last person in the queue, so it’s common courtesy for you to take over by saying “mochimasu” if you join the queue.

The Booths

Did I mention how asinine Japanese are about photos? I did? Well I’m going to say it again: Japanese are completely asinine about photos. Despite having a press pass, I have to ask permission from every single booth that I want to take pictures of. This quickly bored me, so I ended up taking very few pictures. I don’t even know why they bother to give out press passes.

Interestingly, most people are more willing to have their pictures taken if you tell them that you are from overseas. According to the two cosplayers above, it’s because they don’t want to be recognized by their friends.

This appears to be some 3D game with characters from CLANNAD, D.C. and SHUFFLE!

Nice boat.

The 0verflow guys asked me for my website before letting me take a picture. I gave them my name card. Woot. 0verflow has my name card now! Anyway their C73 stuff wasn’t very interesting so I didn’t buy anything.

You can find more pictures of the commercial booths over at Danny Choo’s C73 coverage.

The Crowd

For some reason, I took a ton of picture of random crowds. I guess it’s because I was always rushing to my next destination and there wasn’t much else to take on the way.

The Location

See the orange cones? That’s where the Type-Moon queue was

The Cosplay

Canon 400D’s internal flash can only sync at a maximum shutter speed of 1/200, making it way too slow to take anything in direct sunlight without serious overexposure, so I had to make do without flash. The resulting pictures are terrible due to the shadows casted by the the setting sun. Oh well.

Thanks to the uneven lighting, everything is either overexposed or underexposed. I really need to get a proper flash.

You can find much better cosplay pictures from C73 on Moeyo!.

The Misc

The press gets a pink armband; Comiket staff gets a red one

Please rise for the Welsh anthem

It’s Shingo!

A bunch of Australians who were holding Shingo’s book

There were fewer Caucasian foreigners at Comiket than I had expected. I counted three or four groups in total after wandering around for the entire day. I bumped into a group from a Canadian radio station and talked to them for a bit. I think they were quite freaked out by a random Asian boy walking up to them and interrogating them in English. Ops.

There were plenty of Chinese around, in fact, quite a number of doujin circles were Chinese. But since we Asians pretty much look the same it’s kind of hard to keep count.

The Conclusion

Comiket was pretty fun, but I think all that queuing took a few years off my life span. I think I’m going to need a long rest…

This Comiket coverage was made possible by Danny Choo and Akihabara News.

I will be posting a more detailed report only after I return from Japan, mainly because I don’t have a lot of photos yet and I will only be able to take more tomorrow. (Photography is technically prohibited in all areas except the designated cosplay zone.)

Toyosu (豊洲) Station on the Yurikamome Line.

Comiket is held at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center, more commonly known as the Big Sight, or “that pyramid thing”. The nearest train station is Kokusai-tenjij-seimon (国際展示場正門) on the Yurikamome monorail that goes around Odaiba.

On the night before Comiket Day 1, we took the last train to Ariake to camp overnight. According to various online sources, overnight queuing for Comiket is prohibited by the organizers. From Wikipedia:

Lining up for hours before the convention is forbidden, as pre-convention “parties” have drawn complaints from local residents in previous years.

We found out that this is all a huge lie perpetuated to fool the naive. By the time we arrived at Ariake, the queue had already reached there, stretching about 500m from the steps leading up to the Big Sight.

It was frigging cold. The temperature was close to zero, it was windy and on top of that it started to rain too. Many people took shelter in the nearby Family Mart and those guys probably make a ton of money selling gloves and hot food stuff.

People arriving by cars and taxis (after the last train)

Tents set up by the police for logistics

There were already hundreds, if not thousands, of people queuing up at 1am in the morning. The event officially starts at 10am.

After a long wait, the organizers slowly directed the queue onto the clear elevated area in front of the trademark inverted pyramid. This formed the front of the main line for the regular participants.

20-minute queues to buy things from Family Mart or visit the washroom

The people at the start of the queue came well-prepared

This is madness

That’s LianYL standing there in white

It rained through the night

I managed to get some sleep (about 2-3 hours) in a sheltered area under the inverted pyramid. We were not prepared for this at all and didn’t bring any foldable stools or picnic sheets, so I made do with a 500-yen poncho from 7-Eleven. Did I mention that it was fricking cold and the ground was all wet?

The initial rush is crazy, especially for the commercial booths. How crazy? Let’s just say that if you happen to drop your camera, you’ll never see it again.

The main queue is divided into two separate queues, one for the doujinshi halls and one for the cosplay area and the commercial hall. The doujinshi queue is then split into three queues, one for West Halls, one for East Halls 1-3 and one for East Halls 4-6.

Comiket can be basically summed up as one huge queuing event. Popular commercial booths, such as Key and Type-Moon, can stretch to over 3-hours long.

The Japanese have basically perfected the art of queue management. Instead of forming long and chaotic queues inside the convention area, blocking everyone’s paths and encouraging queue-cutting, the queues are divided into more manageable segments. Only the front-most segment queues in front of the booth itself. The rest queue outside, where there are additional signboards to indicate where the end of the queue is and what the queue is for. One (or more) staff member will regularly come to bring the first ten or so people in the queue outside to join the small queue inside the convention hall. Popular booths have external queues that are so long that they have to be subdivided into even smaller mini queues.

This is why you’ll often see signs that tell you that it’s not the end of the line, even though it looks like one. Kyo-ani’s line actually stretched one entire round around the commercial booth. Type-Moon and a few other popular studios have special queuing zones in a parking lot nearby.

Popular doujinshi groups can be almost just as bad. I queued two hours for Hiro Suzuhira’s latest releases (pictures when I get home and finish unpacking). I also queued one hour for ５年目の放課後, the artist who drew the blushing Haruhi on my old banner, only to have stocks run out with just seven people left in the queue in front of me. :(

I took a few cosplay shots today, but it started to rain (again) and the cosplayers all left. It’s crazy what these girls wear in near-zero temperature…

Comiket has over half a million participants in three days. I estimate that about 5% of them (including circle participants and event organizers) cosplay while they are there. That’s a lot of cosplayers to take pictures of, and not much time to do so due to all the queuing that needs to be done.

Anyway, I should have some better pictures to show for my next Comiket post. I’m getting a press pass tomorrow that allows me to take pictures anywhere (and enter the venue early via a special express queue to boot). I don’t have to try to hide my DSLR anymore! Yay!

I went there in search of two of the train stations featured in the popular bishoujo game and anime series, School Days. It’s 2D meets 3D!

Kotonoha taking the train at “Haramihama”

The fictional Haramihama Station was actually designed based on the JR Nishi-Kokubunji Station (JR西国分寺駅) on the Chuuou Line (中央線). You can take the line from Shinjuku Station. It’s the same train as the one you would take to go to Nakano. Just make sure you take Rapid and not Local.

Makoto the stalker

This shot required me to step over the yellow line

I hate Kotonoha

Actually, all trains have such advertisements

Why is 0verflow’s version so long?

Kitafuchuu Station

The train station near their school is actually Kita-Fuchuu Station (北府中駅), just one stop away from Nishi-Kokubunji Station on the Musashino Line (武蔵野線). If you do not exit the gate at Nishi-Kokubunji and instead transfer from the Chuuou Line to the Musashino Line, the price of the ticket (from Shinjuku) is the same.

View from inside the station

View from outside the station

The perspective is a little messed up

The sign is different, but note the building behind

Note the house at the left

No snow

Maybe they changed the clock…

It takes 30 minutes to get to Nishi-Kokubunji from Shinjuku. I also tried looking for high schools around Kita-Fuchuu Station to see if any of them match the in-game one, but I couldn’t find any. Oh well. And I wonder if 西国分寺 is the inspiration for Sekai’s family name 西園寺…

Thanks to lolipuni for identifying the stations. You can also take a look at additional photos I took around the two stations in my gallery.

And yeah, today was the first day of Comiket 73. It was chaos beyond imagination. For those of you who know how huge Tokyo Big Sight is, imagine every single square metre of it packed with people. Now I know why they don’t allow photographers to take pictures of cosplayers outside of the cosplay zone: there just isn’t space for it.

I’ll make an overall post on Comiket after all three days are over. Looking forward to visiting Shingo’s booth on Monday.

It’s the fourth day of our little adventure in Tokyo and we took a trip to neighbouring Saitama prefecture to visit Konata’s favourite Gamers and Animate branches. Long story short: Saitama isn’t a very exciting place.

JR Ueno Station

The location is JR Oomiya Station West Exit (大宮駅西口), about five (long) stops away from JR Ueno via the Utsunomiya Line (宇都宮線) or the Takasaki Line (高崎線). The journey takes around 30 minutes and cost 450 yen on an express train. You can also pay 1280 yen for a one-stop ride on the Shinkansen.

JR Oomiya Station

Immediately outside the exit, face left and you will find this:

Head towards the McDonalds and into the streets behind it to find the old location of Animate’s Oomiya Branch.

The branch has since moved to a bigger location about 10 metres away.

In fact, it even has a second storefront just next door selling character goods. (There’s also a Melon Books above it.)

And a few hundred metres away from Animate lies Gamers. It’s kind of hard to describe its location. In fact, I had to ask a guy in Sofmap for it. Then I asked for the directions to Animate from a Gamers employee. It seems that they do hire real otaku in such places.

The East Exit of the station also happens to be one of the setting locations for School Days, specifically Sakakino-chou (榊野町).

Well that’s about it. We didn’t wander too far from the station because it was already getting dark (at 4pm). We split up and I ended up wandering around some familiar places in Ikebukuro to take pictures and busk in nostalgia.

And by popular demand, here’s a soapland:

And here’s Odex:

Most of the other pictures suck, so I’m not going to bother posting them here. Go look at today’s gallery for more.

By the way, today’s doujinshi haul is as follows:

• Yousei Mangasha – Kaiketsu Ma-ryan (okay)
• Arestica – Sweet Folk Music
• Essentia – Giga Drill Break
• CRIMsON – CRIMsON plus (awesome)
• Rei’s Room & Spread-Pink – Double Again (decent)
• Amekazesyokudou – Clannad (nice cover)
• Arestica – Baby talk (nice)
• Matsumoto Drill Ladoratory – Tamakin (interesting…)

One more day till Comiket.

A fire engine just drove by. I wonder where it’s heading to. But anyway, read on for photos from Kaminarimon, Nakano Broadway, Shinjuku and nighttime Akihabara.

Asakusa

We went to Sensouji near Asakusa Station in the morning. I tried the omikuji. It took forever for a stick to fall out, but my fortune is apparently good.

Tourist traps

Spot the odd one out

Tsuruya-san’s family business

Ruined symmetry

Small boat town

Kanji

Paying for protection

Shake, pull and match

Roses are red, violets are blue. All my base are belong to you

They need to add a foliage-penetration mode on cameras

I want one

Nakano

Next stop, Nakano Broadway. I already covered this place in a previous entry so I shall save the explanations. More pictures!

Still in the mood for X’mas

Fraulein Revoltech Rei for 1485 yen

The only other picture I took inside Nakano Broadway

In the back alleys

Japanglish

Reminds me of FLCL

Shinjuku

I spent the afternoon alone wandering around Shinjuku. I walked around 4km. I bought a light novel called Bungaku Shoujo to Shinitagari no Piero (“文学少女”と死にたがりの道化). I have no idea what it is about, but I bought it anyway because I liked the little prose in the page before the prologue, and because it’s in some kind of “Top 10” list so it has to be somewhat decent.

Pink flowers added just in case you miss the message

Outside the Shinjuku Station’s New South Exit

New South Exit

Shinjuku Station is about the size of a small city with exits that are hundreds of metres apart. It’s a hell load of walking.

I don’t know where this place is but whatever

Shinjuku Station serves a few dozen lines

Takashimaya used to be a cloth shop

One line

Two lines

Three lines

Shinjuku Station is the busiest train station in the world with over 3.3 million passengers a day.

Compensation

Random building

Kinokuniya South Shinjuku Branch

My membership card doesn’t work here…

Walkway connecting Kinokuniya to Takashimaya

Kinokuniya is actually a grocery store in Japan!

Walking towards the Metropolitan Government Office (800m away)

Hey, is that…?

Yeah it is.

Bureaucratic zone

One of Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s buildings

Taxpayer yen at work

Fuji News Network news truck

Push the button for audio signals

Akihabara

Finally, I met with Don777 in Akihabara. He’s a pretty nice guy, especially since he likes Maaya too. He brought me to @home cafe and Cafe with Cat (Toranoana’s new cafe). Cafe with Cat seems to be a pretty standard maid cafe deal except with cat-inspired uniforms instead of maid costumes, whereas @home is definitely on the manic side of things. The waitress who brought us our drinks actually did this heart-sign action to inject a “moé” flavour.

But I shall not go into that because I am falling asleep anytime now… A few more pictures and we are done.

Fortune Arterial is the latest game by August, the makers of Yoake Mae yori Ruri-iro na. Basically it’s the exact same game except the hair colours get shuffled around a bit and the Feena-lookalike is a loli. It’s also the most anticipated upcoming game according to Comptiq magazine, so expect it to sell a gazillion copies and be turned into a cabbage an anime.

Eva coffee

The second Kara no Kyoukai movie will be out on Saturday

Well, that’s it for today. I need sleep.

By the way, in case you didn’t know yet, all the photos (and more) can be found in my photo gallery.

We overslept and missed Tsukiji, and ended up spending the whole day in Ikebukuro. (Otome Road in particular.) This is what happens when you don’t plan your itinerary in advance.

This is the fourth time I’ve been to Japan, but it’s the first time I’ve stayed in any place other than Ikebukuro. I have stayed in Sunshine City Prince (east Ikebukuro), Hotel Metropolitan (central Ikebukuro) and Grand House Chang Tee (west Ikebukuro) on three separate occasions, so you can say that Ikebukuro’s the place that I am most familiar with in the whole of Japan.

Ikebukuro

Bleach movie

I really want to watch this

This is a small cinema

Tokyu Hands

Sakura Cafe

Entrance to Sunshine City

Fire hydrant

Pepsi

Waiting for Tokyu Hand to open

hikoukigumo

Arcade opposite Tokyo Hand

Gundam P.O.D.

I realize that I suck at taking pictures for introducing a place. But it’s okay because these parts of Ikebukuro are unimportant. By the way, Tokyu Hand is a really cool franchise store that sells all sorts of awesome things from ant farms to plamo to DIY supplies to marble Rube Goldberg kits. Some examples:

Amuro!

I cannot comprehend people’s obsession with Zeon

Tape fixes everything, even broken holy lances

Otome Road

The most important area in Ikebukuro is the Otome Road. It has tons of BL and yaoi (hence the nickname), but don’t let that deter you from visiting this awesome place. (Unless you are a fujoshi, in which case further convincing is not needed.) The shops along Otome Road have awesome deals for secondhand item and limited edition collectibles.

Here’s a map of Otome Road. I will include the locational names in Japanese below so you can compare.

Walking from the south, the first place that you’ll probably see is the main branch of Animate (アニメイト本店), the biggest anime chain store in Japan, and probably the world.

Animate main branch

The main branch had a renovation since the last time I visited over a year ago. They shifted the position of the main entrance for some reason.

Bleach movie ad again

Too many

Way too many

The old main entrance

A few steps further down the road from Animate lies an inconspicuous stairway to Lashinbang (らしんばん). This is a secondhand store that sells doujinshi, event-limited collectibles and various other rare character goods. You can find some good deals here, but it’s hard to say for sure as prices are often set quite arbitrarily and can vary greatly from store to store.

Moving on, we find K-Books’ anime section (K-BOOKS　アニメ館). This is similar to Lashinbang, except that it does not sell doujinshi. The last time I was here, I bought an episode script for Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. (The kind that seiyuu use.) You can get some really rare stuff here if you can afford the premium. If not, look for cheap deals and enjoy the secondhand savings.

K-Books panders quite a bit to the fujoshi crowd, so it’s wise to stay out of any area with suspiciously-pink decor. The next store is K-Books too, this one with more doujin-related items.

Mandarake (the shop is in the basement)

Next we have Mandarake (まんだらけ), a famous franchise store for doujin products. Their Ikebukuro branch deals exclusively with BL, so proceed with caution.

Finally, K-Books has two additional outlets farther down the street. The doujinshi section (K-BOOKS　同人館) deals with BL and yaoi doujinshi (K-BOOKS　コミック館), while the comics section has awesome deals for secondhand manga, often with entire sets up for sale.

Cheap as they may be, manga are absolutely the worst thing you can get in Japan as a tourist due to the weight limit placed on your check-in luggage.

But still, the price is tempting.

Well, that’s about it for Otome Road.

More Pictures

Trees

Tree

We ate at this underground (literally) Chinese restaurant

The waitress spoke Chinese

Spot the Bleach movie ad!

His Master’s Voice

Wendy’s

Real movies that are not Bleach

Denny’s

Pachinko parlour

Toranoana’s Ikebukuro Branch

“Christ’s blood will save the world!”

McPork

On a closing note, for those of you who are wondering about the doujinshi…

From left to right, top down:

• Paper Crown – Blade Works (crap)
• T2 Art Works – Entangle
• Kagi No-do – HowTo Hatsune Miku (okay)
• Lost Rarities – Industial (decent)
• Kohakutei & Sakai-Hamachi – EDEN -Rei7- (frigging awesome)
• T2 Art Works – Nekomimi Batoraa
• T2 Art Works – Watashi wa Kyozetsu suru!
• Hiro Suzuhira – Heart-Work 2005
• Hiro Suzuhira – Heart-Work 2007 Summer
• Hiro Suzuhira – Heart-Work 2006 Summer

Total expenditure (food and transport included) today: ï¿¥7,367.

After leaving our luggage at the hostel, the group of us proceeded to take a long walk (longer than it should be due to various detours) to Akihabara. Pictures after the break.

Photos are in chronological order. (More or less.)

Airport to Hostel

Train to Tokyo from Narita Airport

Miscellaneous buildings near our hostel

More miscellaneous buildings

Fallen leaves

Look, it’s sakura!

The source of the fallen leaves

The twilight zone — or when I forgot to set white balance

Train tracks

Camera over shoulder

Camera is heavy

Kitties!

Coffee

Nice boats

Traffic accident tallies for yesterday

Akihabara

Robots in disguise!

Lost hope

Akihabara main street closed to traffic due to holiday

But not many cosplayers as it’s not Sunday

Sofmap; new Yamigawa building to be photoshopped in soon

The Akiba wanderers

Animate — now in orange!

The pathway to heaven

Child abuse

aipoddo

Flesh sin and general decadence abound

The giants of Akiba

I want to catch this in cinemas

Konata is big

It’s 4pm and the sun is setting

Nyo~

Those signs are each about three-floors tall

toki wo kakeru konata

Back in Asakusa

JR Asakusa-bashi Station

Anpanman

Doraemon

Ultraman

Kamen Mask Rider

SD Gundam

Nighttime

Bandai’s headquarters used to be in Asakusa and they still maintain a presence here in the form of two office buildings. We happened to pass by them during our after-dinner stoll. May drop by again later during office hours to look at their showcases.

As for the title of this post: we lost our way for 15 minutes or so during our little night stroll. It was an interesting experience…

Heading to Tsukiji fish market in the morning tomorrow.

Pictured above is the best cosplay of the whole event, according to me. Rei does exist in real-life.

I arrived at the Expo quite late and didn’t stay for very long, but I still had to pay the $12 entrance fee. I really should have applied for the media pass, but I wasn’t sure if I was going and also I’m lazy.

I did get even by paying them with a $5 Brunei note which is actually legal tender in Singapore due to the fixed one-one exchange rate, but the plan backfired on me because I had to wait while they confirm the validity of the note.

Costumes I liked

First picture of the day

How long did it take?

Nice ass. o_o

Gives off the right vibes

Best costume if not for Rei

It’s really Rei

Random stuff

Who’s that lurking at the back?

It’s Bj0rn the worm!

Backlash is a bitch

“In the name of the Moon, I shall punish you!”

I want one :(

Dangerous bunch

The real GN-004

“I thought you were supposed to be Mikuru?” “No, you!”

Too many

Maybe next year some kind-hearted person will give me a media pass. *hint hint*

You can see the rest of my pictures in my gallery as usual. I didn’t take a lot of pictures because I was there for less than two hours.

I’m using Canon EOS 400D with a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. As you can see from some of the Dynames cosplay pictures (taken with the internal flash), I really need a Speedlite.

You can contact me if you want the original 10-megapixel JPGs. I distribute them under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License.