AC in JP: Parting Views

Sky Burger

On my last full day in Tokyo I finally took some time to enjoy the view from my 18th-floor room, with a little help from a local burger chain…

Click here for the official legend of the distant skyline and be sure to check out my other Japan photos in a dedicated Flickr set. You can also watch my own informal 30-second tour below, plus see other videos on my YouTube Channel.

And finally, there’s a slew of micro-blog postings I made while on the trip (Jaiku is currently my favourite service), which I haven’t yet figured out how to integrate into this site. I’m working on it…

AC in JP: My @home café Otaku Maid Bar Review

@home café

There are but five food items on the menu at Akihabara’s famous @home café: 2 variants each of cheesecake & ice cream parfait and “spughetti”. My chocolate parfait was a generous-enough serving but suffered from too much whipped cream and strangely, a bottom layer of corn flakes underneath the two scoops of frozen dairy on top.

What, you wanted more? Oh right, the whole maid thing…

If you don’t know about Akiba’s Maid Bars you should probably read this primer. I first heard of such things while watching Densha Otoko a few years ago and thus yesterday, finding myself pining for ice cream on yet another blisteringly hot day in Tokyo’s “Electric Town”, figured why not?

You first see the girls handing out flyers outside Akihabara Station — how they manage to do it in full costume with the temperature pushing 40 degrees celsius is beyond me. I had actually been given a flyer for a different bar but couldn’t find it, and instead happened upon @home by accident. Good thing, because I think it’s the most popular of them all — each of the top three floors of the building it was in had lineups outside the door!

Like Hooters in the US and A there were both male and female clientele inside; also like Hooters my experience here wasn’t the least bit titillating — maid bars specifically are mostly kitsch, or more accurately kawaii. It’s a bit sad that teenage boys (and men) come to these places just so they can talk to a girl, and this English-speaking tourist must have seemed just as awkward to the servers.

The first maid who served me had some kind of eye infection — either that or there’s some Otaku fetish for eyepatches that I’m not aware of. She was quickly replaced by the closest thing to an English-speaking person that the establishment had. Our conversation went something like this:

Maid: “Where are you from?”
Me: “I’m from Canada.”
Maid: “Canada? I’m going to Cambodia next spring…”

I did find it fascinating watching the other customers interact with the maids. For an extra charge you can have your photo taken with your server (which I asked for but didn’t get) or play a game with them. I watched the kid next to me play a miniature version of Hungry Hungry Hippos with his waitress — er, maid — not seeming to notice that she was logging every round on a piece of paper, presumably to know when her obligation was done and she could get the hell out of there.

Though I didn’t score a photo I did get a souvenir membership card to prove my attendance. It was signed by my server on the back and on the front reads “You are My Master” — which is just, you know… Wrong.

AC in JP: Ghibli Museum

Ghibli's Getting Close

On rare occasions, it pays to be a dumb tourist — or at least look the part…

One of the landmarks I was hoping to visit during this Tokyo trip was the Ghibli Museum. If you didn’t know, Studio Ghibli is the Japanese equivalent of Disney, or more appropriately Pixar. 2003’s Spirited Away won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, in fact.

Anyway, tickets to the museum are sold out for about the next three months because the studio has just released a new film. But on the advice of Q-Taro I made the trek anyway to see if I could scam my way in.

Score!

And it worked! Probably because I was solo, but perhaps also because I was dripping in sweat from the long, hot walk from Mitaka Station, one of the staff members at the gate took pity on me and wrote me up this special voucher — all I had to do was walk across the street to a Lawson Convenience Store and trade it in for a ticket.

Was it ever worth it… The basic premise of the museum is to pull back the curtain on the craft of animation, so everywhere you look there are drawings, storyboards, even filmstrips and stop-motion cameras — and you’re encouraged to actually touch this stuff!

Such a place could never exist in North America; I can’t imagine the exhibits here not getting trashed in about five seconds. Mind you, there was also a room upstairs for the children to get their ya-yas out — with a giant plush scale model of the cat bus from Totoro.

I have no photos of the inside of the museum, as they are strictly prohibited. So you’ll just have to come to Tokyo and see it for yourself!