OK.. so.. Japan..
Ok.. things have been a bit sketchy of late - Unazukin got confiscated by AG and to be fair that was the lightest punishment i could have possibly received. After all - at almost a moments notice - i upped and went to Japan and stayed with a random girl who emailed me via the site. The Vaio blowing up was probably kharma for my selfish decision. I say my decision - although as always I did put the question to Unazukin and.. anyway i’m getting a little bit ahead of myself.
A while back I got an email from a girl called Akiko (or Akichan to her friends). She told me that she was a huge Unazukin fan and told me that if I was ever in Tokyo I should pop by her Unazukin themed cafe for an ice cream. I wrote back saying that Tokyo is top of my list of “must visits” but that it’s a little bit out of my price range. We corresponded for a while and it turned out that any friend of Unazukin is a friend of hers and if I could get the flight - she would sort me out with somewhere to stay. No funny business like - just a place to crash.
I casually checked the prices of flights. I wasn’t seriously entertaining the notion, but was surprised to see that Air France were doing a special for £400 quid.. Now with my accomodation sorted - that is no more expensive than a week away in a B+B in Torquay (and probably cheaper than a trip to Scotland if my previous journey was any kind of indication). Given that I work freelance, I figured could probably still work on the plane and in Tokyo whilst enjoying the city in my down time (thanks again Sony).
I consulted Una and given that she would be going with me at no extra charge - she jumped at the chance to visit her homeland. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject with AG. I thought of loads of different ways of trying to dress it up - but there was no reasonable way to say “A random girl wants me to visit her on the other side of the world and I have consulted my toy who says that i have to”. So I just came out with it.
She wasn’t thrilled but to be honest she knows me well enough to know that when I want to do something I cannot be talked out of it. I don’t mean to say that in a way that makes me come across as a “mans man who knows his own mind and does what he wants when he wants” sort of guy. I’m not. I’m not proud of being so stubborn but there is something mildly obsessive compulsive about my make up that eats away at me if I am not doing something that I have set out to do. Really, I get quite odd about it. Not quite rocking backwards and forwards muttering.. but not a million miles from that either.
So Japan then.
I’ll be brief about the place in general. A million people have probably been there, had a proper look round and explained it better than I ever could. I on the otherhand spent most of my time trying to buy and fit a new hard drive into this erratic laptop. My work got behind and i’m still catching up - this combined with the confiscation of Una are the two main reasons for my equally erratic blogging.
Akichan was a lot of fun. Her cafe (if I were to be a little more accurate i’d probably call it a booth or stand - probably got lost in translation) is in Nakano district and is very cute. It is resplendant with it’s Unazukin banners and Unazukin cutouts surrounded by fairly lights riding in a wheelbarrow being pulled by a squid on top of it all. It sold what we would probably term as an eclectic mix of delicious foodstuffs. The three main items where Ice Cream, Crepes (french style) and Squid balls (balls of squid - it wasnt that odd)
What do you know - i have a pic..
And let’s just see a close up of the Squid nonchalantly pulling a wheelbarrow filled with fairylit Unazukins..
The crepes and ice cream are amazing. God alone knows how the good people of Nakano stay so damned thin. Nakano is an interesting place - the jewel in its crown for sat Otaku’s like me has to be Nakano Broadway which has an infinite number of comic and toy stores. I was hoping they might have rare limited edition Unazukins there (although buying one would have put my Una’s nose out of joint) but the toys in Nakano Broadway were, in general, of the more adult variety. Granted, some of them were fairies but they were a little more anatomically correct. Well correct for somebody who has had some serious breast augmentation.
So as I said at the start of this ramble, Una was taken from me on arrival into the UK. Not by customs and excise attmepting to see if i had tried to exceed my allocation of school girl underwear by trying to force a used gymslip inside of Una’s delicate shell. She was confiscated by an angry AG who gets annoyed enough by my bizarre life choices without having a plastic scapegoat to pin the blame on.