A Long Day Full of Way Too Much Stuff (11-24-2023)
Friday was super busy. We are running out of time and have been trying to jam as many important things into our trip as possible. For me, that included making a visit out to some old stomping grounds of mine; the area around my old dormitory in Mizunokuchi, Kawasaki.
The trip to Mizunokuchi took just under an hour, and as a pretty perfect example of how difficult my commute to and from school was many years ago. The morning ride in the direction is fairly painless (aside from transferring in Shibuya because it's such a crowded station). But nobody at that time of the day is really trying to leave Tokyo to go to Mizonokuchi. They're leaving the area around Mizonokuchi to go to commute into Tokyo, so it's the other direction where the trains are packed.
Getting to Mizonokuchi was a flood of memories. I could remember which exit at the train station was the right one, what direction to walk towards my dormitory, where the 7 Eleven was where I would buy my bread, yogurt, and milk in the morning, and the hill to walk all the way up to finally get to my dormitory. On the way back down, I walked around the outside of the train station to see the main city of Mizonokuchi itself. You can see the OIOI mall in the distance, which is featured in the opening of the series Tentai Senshi Sunred, which aired the same year I was in school. On the other side of the view from the station was where I once stayed in a manga cafe overnight when I came home too late and was locked out of my dormitory. Further down the street was the arcade I frequented, and the place where I watched a guy drive an Escalade down a street that was far too small for it, crash it into a lamp post, and then have a very angry man who may or may not have been yakuza come out of a nearby building and scream at him. I missed this place. If I ever needed to move back to Japan, I would love to live here again.
Returning into the city was difficult. The rush back to Tokyo was hard to manage. We briefly made a dip into Nagano and took a look at the TMS building, an anime studio making many of the TV shows and movies I have working on localizing before. After this, we did our best to scramble to catch up with the rest of our group.
It was a little unscheduled, but our group ended up meeting up in Akihabara. I think the original plan was to do Akihabara the following day, but it just sort of ended up this way. As always, I could have spent all day in the district, but we just sadly didn't have that kind of time, so we had to try to make the best of it and fit in as much as we could. We found the others in the Taito Station arcade on the main street. This was actually the same arcade where, during my time in school, I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Dance Dance Revolution. The music game floor was still there, there were fewer DDR machines, and they were on the opposite side of the room now, but DDR was still there, now upgraded to a gold cabinet A3 machine. I luckily still have a working eAmusement card that works on the machine so I could keep record of my scores.
After the arcade we ate at a Mos Burger. I don't know if any of us necessarily thought their meal was great, but I felt especially bad for the limited selection available to Stacy. The one thing I genuinely thought was really good was their shake, with vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate syrup, and seemingly with a small dusting of gold flakes at the top. It seemed weird at first that the vanilla and the chocolate were separated into two separate layers, but using the straw to mix it together made for a very normal, very rich chocolate shake, and that was really good. Otherwise, I guess I've just never had luck with Mos Burger. I really thought this time I could find something, and it was me leaning into the idea of Mos Burger, so I feel bad that it ended up this way, but I don't know that anybody was super thrilled with what they ended up with from there.
We visited a couple other stores in the area, which included Super Potato, and the Tamashii Nations store by Akihabara Station. There are a lot of things that would have been nice to get, but the only thing I personally walked away with was a small figure of Mash, the main character from Mashle, in the Tamashii Nations store, since I wrote closed captions on the English dub of that particular TV series, so it was personally special to me.
After getting in some brief time in Akihabara, we moved onto Odaiba where we started by visiting SEGA Joypolis. Josh and I had visited once several years ago, but some of the selection of things to do inside were different now. Some things we did including a group game of a recent House of the Dead entry, where we were buckled into moving seats and could feel wind blowing. The game only took us up to the first boss, but it was an entertaining competition with everyone else in the group. Nando ended up being wildly better than everybody else we competed against, including others outside our group. Afterwards we did 4D-style rides like Wild Flight. I can only compare Wild Flight to, say, Disney's Star Tours (especially older Star Tours, pre-upgrade). We sat in a car that was simulated to be dragged around in the sky by an airplane and getting into all kinds of trouble. Another attraction we did featured sitting on bucking barrels that weren't too dissimilar to electric bull riding while trying to shoot a bunch of skeleton pirates on the screen in front of us. It was less difficult because of the rocking barrel we sat on, and more difficult because the laser on some of our guns were definitely off-center. My gun in specific leaned a little bit to the left and was difficult to compensate for.
When we were done inside Joypolis, it was then just a short walk over to see Gundam Diver City. This is another spot Josh and I had seen before, but when we had last visited, the large Gundam statue featured was an RX-78. Now, the statue is the Gundam Unicorn, and has lighting themed around Christmas. It was a short time spent by the statue, and we didn't wait around for it to start moving, but it was still a great sight to see.
Feeling bad about the let-down of Mos Burger, we definitely wanted to make sure that Stacy could get some curry she'd been craving. Back in Asakusa, there was a location of the popular chain CoCo's Curry House. It's a chain that was well known around the greater Los Angeles area as well, but a year or two ago all of the locations closed down and everybody who ever swore by it was extremely vocally disappointed. Getting to visit a location again was appreciated, and honestly I probably could have just eaten an entire huge bowl of rice with no problem by that point. But the plate was good and everyone ate well.
After dinner, this seemed like the one and only chance to do karaoke as a group. There was a karaoke establishment directly next to the others' hotel, and we ended up spending three hours in our own private booth. I wish we could have shared footage of us singing together, but the establishment requested no video recordings, which I understand. Copyright is far more strict in Japan than it is in the US, and the concept of "fair use" simply isn't a thing. But everyone had a really good time, so I'm glad we all got to experience that together. We wouldn't have gone for three hours if we weren't having a good time!
More to come, and my feet get more and more swollen every day!
