I’m finally back in Singapore. It’s really hot even in my air-conditioned room. Gah. But anyway, here’s my damage report for Comiket 75. I didn’t buy much. Really.

Basically I had only three things on my wishlist for Comiket: Heart Work, Afterschool of the 5th Year (5年目の放課後), and T2 ART WORKS.

Coincidentally, the three circles have their booths on different days, so I ended up queuing for one item a day, a rather relaxed and stress-free arrangement that meant that I did not have to do any overnight queuing or prior planning.

5年目の放課後

Day 1 was Gonenme no Houkago (or as the circle translates it “Afterschool of the 5th Year”). It is a relatively obscure circle probably best known online for its drunken Haruhi illustration. I wrote a post on 5年目の放課後 before.

Their C75 release information can be found on the blog. It’s basically a coloured illustration book, a monochrome ero-sketch book, and a mini poster.

Heart Work

Day 2’s queuing was for Heart Work, Hiro Suzuhira‘s one-person doujin publication. It is a compilation of her recent illustrations and sketches.

Heart Work release for C75

She is probably best known for her character designs in various Navel games such as Shuffle! (Asa, Nerine, Sage) and Soul Link. She often collaborates with her good friend Aoi Nishimata, whose doujin publication is called JOKER TYPE and who designed the other half of the Shuffle! cast (the crappier half that includes Kaede).

Incidentally, the illustrations found in the recently-desecrated Akikan! novel series are among some of Hiro’s older works. They still look better than the anime.

Heart Work phone card

Hiro is my hero(ine).

T2 ART WORKS

The final day of Comiket brought T2 ART WORKS, the awesome release from Tony Taka. His latest release (NSFW) is Clannad-centric with a fulfilling dosage of Tomoyo, hands down the best character in an otherwise overrated generic Key franchise. *Ducks for cover*

Tomoyo megane moe

Tony is probably one of the most successful doujin artists and runs a rather commercialized operation. Personally, I don’t really care about the distinctions between indie and mainstream as long as the art/song is good, but a direct result of Tony’s popularity is that his releases are more costly than most.

Back and front covers of the doujinshi (NSFW but too late)

He also sells his own product sets that change in design every Comiket but are generally the same things. I bought them last year too.

Goodie bag content

In fact, these Comiket-exclusive goods are basically the only reason why you would want to queue for T2. The doujinshi itself is always available brand new from any Toranoana outlet, albeit for 50 yen more due to tax. In fact, I picked up his C74 release (Macross F) at the Akihabara branch. The goodie bags on the other hand can only be found in collector stores at jacked up prices after the event.

Others

Those were my planned purchases. Now for the rest of the random splurges that are the natural consequences of wandering around the Comiket event halls filled with shiny stuff.

Bought for the cover art

Kyonko

Doujin Little Busters! calendar

Rather nice art

Although I’m not really a LB fan

My only purchases from the commercial booths

And some other stuff I won’t go into details about… *cough*

And finally, what might arguably be my most awesome Comiket purchase ever…

IKINOKORITAI!!!

P.S. I have multiple copies of T2 and Heart Work releases… (When you’ve already queued for 2 hours, you might as well.) I wonder what I should do with them.

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 spent less than expected at Comiket, probably because I already bought a ton of random doujinshi from specialty stores. Some pictures are NSFW. (Basically the T2 Art Works stuff.)

T2 Art Works, the famous Tony Taka’s (aka Takayuki Tanaka) doujin circle, was selling goodie bags for ï¿¥3000. It contains a clear file, a calendar and a pencil board.

I also bought four copies of his latest release, Kiteru yo! Takeuchi-kun. (Based on Bamboo Blade.)

Kyoto Animation was selling some goodie bags from their current flagship titles. I will be reselling one Haruhi bag (I have extra) and one Clannad bag (I don’t like it that much).

They both come with a 2008 calendar and a phone card each. In addition, the Haruhi one comes with a A3 clear poster and the Clannad one comes with three bookmarks that are kind of lame when compared to Haruhi’s terrific poster. I will probably be selling them through KKnM, so you will need to be in Singapore to buy them.

This is a bag made by some booth that was selling Miku doujinshi. The doujinshi is pretty bad but the bag is cool. I think it was the only reason why so many people were queuing for that booth.

I got this for ï¿¥3500. It’s a 100% hand-drawn fan art of Yuki. It’s quite awesome, but I would’ve preferred Haruhi. The artist also drew Tomoyo and Kotomi (from Clannad) and Tsukasa and Kagami (from Lucky Star) in the same style, but I decided to pass.

I also bought Arisa Mizuhara’s latest cosplay collection CD-ROM. If you have never heard of her before, you need to check out her gallery. She’s basically my all-time favourite cosplayer.

The best part is that I met her in person at her booth! I managed to get a picture too by waving my press pass around. Huge thanks to Danny Choo and Akihabara News for the pass.

The CD-ROM is somewhat expensive at ï¿¥2000 for eight galleries of photos, but it’s extremely awesome. You can find a list of all her past releases on her website. There was actually a Singaporean trading company selling her photo collections at Cosfest, but I forgot its name.

On hindsight, I should have gotten her to autograph my copy of the CD-ROM… Damn.

I managed to obtain one of the forty copies of Cradle’s Re:frain that were on sale. The press has a seperate queue that is super short and located right beside the entrance to East Hall 1, so I got in quite early. I met and spoke with the duo behind Cradle, but unfortunately they were camera shy and declined my request for a picture. :(

KEI is the artist behind the official art for Crypton’s VOCALOID2 software series. I bought four copies of his new VOCALOID illustration compilation and one copy of his second artwork collection (which I sold to my friend).

I didn’t really bother to queue for any commercial booths, but HOOK’s HoneyComing merchandises looked pretty, so I spent about one hour queuing to get Asahi’s phone card set and Clarissa’s microfibre towel set (not pictured above). I seem to be the only person that I personally know who actually liked this game, but oh well.

My personal favourite purchase is Hiro Suzuhira’s latest HEART-WORK release. She is one of my favourite illustrators ever because of her works in the SHUFFLE! bishoujo game franchise (SHUFFLE!, Tick! Tack! and Really? Really!), specifically Nerine, Asa and Sage.

It has Hiro’s trademark design and Miku. What more can one ask for?

HEART-WORK’s booth was also selling a very beautiful Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Lin phone card set and a HEART-WORK collaboration calendar.

I queued over two hours for HEART-WORK’s booth. It was worth it. T_T <– Tears of joy.

I’ll talk more about the entire event itself in a later post. Really tired now. And, uh, an early Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございまãï¼ I’m watching Kouhaku on NHK right now.

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.

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.

So anyway, here are some purchases I made this month that I have NOT been regretting. The rare few, that is.

First up, we have a D.C. II Nanaka mouse pad and phone card set that I mentioned before in a previous entry. It cost a bomb. Like the nuclear kind. But Nanaka fanboyism overcomes all, including food and daily necessities.

Mouse pad
Phone card

It’s pretty nice. The phone card is where most of the explosive price tag goes to. People are selling the mouse pad on Yahoo! Auctions for just a few hundred yen without the phone card… Ah, crazy Japanese collecting telephone cards that no one ever uses because every single one of them has a mobile phone surgically attached to his/her hand. No one will even notice the difference if NTT stops putting credits into these cards. (Or maybe they already did?)

Moving on, we have SummerDays & School Days Visual Collection. Despite the huge screw-up that was SummerDays, fanboyism dies hard and sometimes you are rewarded for it. This visual collection is waaaaay superior to the game. Really.

Full cover
Sekai’s mother
SummerDays preorder phone card from Messe Sanoh
SummerDays event-only promotion phone card
New School Days box design
Sekai so hawt
Setsuna V!
Setsuna turning kick!

And a whole bunch of other promotional and game-related art that I shall not post here because they are too… ummm… cool. Yeah. Let’s just say that Kinokuniya wouldn’t bring this in so I had to pay through my nose to get it online. (As opposed to paying through my nose at Kinokuniya, that is)

Next… Caladbolg from T2 Art Works (NSFW). Oh, so much win that I shed tears as I befouled it with my unworthy touch.

Back cover (NSFW!!!)
Saber Saber wai wai!
Rin in swimsuit

I’m sure you all have the complete scans of Tony Taka doujinshi stowed away somewhere on your hard drives, so I shall not bother with more pictures…

And finally, Zero no Tsukaima 1/6 1/8 Louise PVC (I have no idea why I like to type 1/6 these days) from Kotobukiya. This was a pleasant surprise because I was sooooo sure that the final mass production figure will totally suck compared to the pictures. It turned out quite awesome, possibly better than the Alter one.

Frontal close-up
Tsundere power
Right side
It’s moonspeak!!!
Book cover
Pantsu!

Speaking of which, I have a Chinese O’level paper tomorrow. Wow, I should really start working on that or something… Oooo shiny object!…

Anyway, before I go, I just want to say that Happiness! episode 4 has caused me so much mental pain and agony. GAOOOO!

That’s the SOS-dan XL-size T-shirt from COSPA, the School Days Secret Live DVD (which I’ve already released on torrent just two posts down), a Tamaki doujinshi and… the Comiket 70 CD-ROM Catalog!!! Woot.

That said, it just so happens that I bought the exact same doujinshi when I was in Tokyo last month. So now I have two copies of it. Well, twice the Tama-nee I guess. :3 (Or does anyone want to buy it off me? lol)

The worst part is he bought a copy of Tony’s Caladblog for a little over 1000 yen but it wasn’t for me. ;_;

1. Evangelion COSPA T-shirt
2. Gundam SEED Destiny Limited Posters 3 (took me three tries to get Lacus and Cagalli)
3. Sentimental Graffiti Desktop Collection
4. Valkyrie Profile -Lenneth- for PSP (secondhand)
5. To Heart 2 Tamaki Kousaka doujinshi (18+)
6. To Heart 2 Tamaki Kousaka COSPA tea cup
7. Rumbling Angel Version 6 Starter Deck
8. Gundam SEED Lacus Clyne handphone strap
9. Cafe&Kitchen Cos-Cha handphone strap
10. Kamen no Maid Guy Vol.1-3
11. Suzuka Vol. 4-6
12. Negima! Vol. 4, 5, 7
13. Genshiken Vol. 7

Basically, it’s mostly just some manga that I was missing.

I got BahamutSphere to buy the Tama-nee doujinshi for me. I tried to do it yesterday but the Toranoana cashier asked for identification and I had to give up… gao… But justice always wins in the end! Bwahahaha!

I had tea at Cafe Mai:lish today. It’s been more than a year, but I managed to recognize one of the waitresses there. Mai:lish waitresses wear maid costumes in the noon and cosplay after 5pm. One of them was cosplaying in the seifuku from To Heart 2. The costume was quite well-done. :3 There was another uniform that looked like the ones from Kashimashi, but I’m not sure. And there was a waitress in ZAFT pilot uniform too.

I think that might be enough Akiba for some time.

P.S. Here’re some pictures of the Tama-nee tea cup. Tamaki-moe forever!!! :3