Comiket

Elbert and I wanted to go to Comiket—one of the world’s biggest fan conventions, focusing on publishing amateur work—just to check it out, but naturally we got out of the house pretty late at 1330, even though it closed at 1600. Luckily, this also meant that we didn’t need to line up or pay the small fee for entry, since it was beginning to empty as we arrived. This is a good summary of Comiket with an associated gif of how insane the crowds are.

Having never been to an anime/manga/comic/whatever convention, and having not done any reading about Comiket beforehand, I was caught entirely offguard by what I saw. There were a few large halls where all the stalls were located; the two that we visited were purely filled with adult fan art and cosplay modelling. It was surreal seeing how business-as-usual everything was; most stalls had large provocative posters stood up, matching the covers of the books/magazines/albums on sale. Thousands of patrons walked the rows of stalls, like a busy fresh food market. Just like the fan art stalls were staff by their own artists, so too were the cosplay stalls mostly staffed by their own models.

Unfortunately, we didn’t catch any particularly extravagant or amazing cosplayers walking around—they may have been taking pictures outside, or we came on the wrong day or at the wrong time. It was still a worthwhile experience to see how Japan can be progressive in some ways yet quite traditional in others. The perspective amongst the patrons at Comiket is that art is still art regardless of genre and should be respected in its own right.

I wanted to do some shopping for climate appropriate t-shirts and a small bag for my action camera, so we headed to Ginza to shop at Uniqlo’s twelve floor flagship store. I had forgotten how nice it was around the area, and how they close road traffic on the main strip in the afternoon on weekends and public holidays (today was “Mountain Day”). Some combination of the buildings blocking the sun and copious amounts of cold air coming out of shops actually made it pretty bearable to walk around and just enjoy the view and ambiance. The Uniqlo itself was as cool as I remembered, and I probably spent an hour or two in there. Some of the collaboration t-shirts were amazing, including a really cute Hello Kitty one (I’m not even into Hello Kitty whatsoever) and a Pocky one which unfortunately was out of the sizes that I wanted to buy.

Since we were in the area, we tried to find Sukiyabashi Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi just so that I could take a photo. We went down a set of stairs towards the subway (which I had been down before in February for the same reason) but then somehow got lost for ten minutes, but then eventually figured out that that particular underground section containing the restaurant was closed off 😑.

After eating dinner at a restaurant inside Tokyu (sic) Plaza¹, we went home and got back just before 11. I unsuccessfully attempted to write two blog posts in one night, as well as learning some kanji.

I also found out that one of the plugins that I’m using to build this site automatically optimises images so I can just upload and link the full 5MB image in my content and it will generate a significantly compressed (<1MB, but configurable) image for the actual page. Yay!

Waking hours

1200–2900