I am thankful to the gods of curry for bringing a second Go Go Curry location to Akiba, far more conveniently located to all the action. Maybe now I can actually manage to sit down next to a friend when I go there for lunch?!
So you’ve finally saved up and made your pilgrimage to Japan, and figured you’d go to Kyoto so that you’d at least have something about “culture” to talk to your friends and family at home about. After two straight days of visiting temples, cafes, and shrines, you start to realize that you need a break from all these old things. Well hoo boy, have I got a place for you!
Smack dab in the middle of Kyoto (about 1km west of city hall, North on Karasume and Oike) is the Kyoto International Manga Museum, some of the most fun you can have in Kyoto on just 500 yen, possibly excluding the pair of Idolm@ster machines in Teramachi. While it might be hard for some of you to think of the point of having an entire museum just about manga (to which my counter-argument would probably include something like this link), the place is full of things to do that anyone who is seriously interested in manga or cartooning would likely find interesting. There’s a huge number of manga (all pre-2005, I believe) available for you to read anywhere on the premises, including the huge lawn they have out in front, so if you want to treat it as a cheap manga cafe, then you are more than welcome to. The shelves are separated into shonen on the first floor, shojo on the second, and seinen on the third floor, but there are also machines you can use to figure out where what is. However, there’s also a good number of permanent and special exhibits on topics like manga history (check the giant case of 70s Shonen Jumps and kashibon behind a giant wall of glass!) and artist/series exhibits, like the Takemiya Keiko exhibit that just replaced the giant Anpanman exhibit. They’re into international cartooning as well, and they have a shelf of foreign-language manga near the entrance, as well as a special exhibit on French BDs, complete with Jiro Taniguchi appearance next week! There’s also a huge archive downstairs, but I believe you have to be a member of the research room on the third floor to get access to that stuff, so it doesn’t seem very economical to do if you’re only in the area for a short time. In terms of pictures of the place, this guy has (semi-legally!) posted a good number of them, though some of the exhibits aren’t around anymore. There’s also a fairly standard (food and drink-wise) Japanese cafe attached to the place that’ll give you 10% off with your ticket stub that has big portraits that famous manga-ka have done of their big-name characters, including a really stunning Joe done by Chiba Tetsuya.
Non-Japanese speakers might be a little confused by what to do at the place, since it’s full of those crazy runes, but there is a fair amount of English on the signs (some translated/checked by a native speaker!). Also, I’ve just recently started doing a small bit of volunteer work there, so if you happen to be thinking of going there on a Friday or Sunday afternoon, let me know (comment in the entry) and I can get a break from book preservation work to give you a tour! I bathe nearly daily, I promise! Free awesome guided tour or not, if you’re in the area, I really suggest you check the place out if you’re in any way interested in learning more about manga at an incredibly good price, which you really should be before you even consider calling yourself a true otaku!
Looks like this year’s Winter Comiket paper catalogue is coming out on Dec 6, and the CD-ROM version coming out as usual a week later on the 13th. Toranoana has already announced their purchase bonuses, which don’t require that you preorder to get but are limited in quantity. Actually, they say this, but last time I was at Nippombashi I saw them selling limited edition c69 umbrellas for like 200 yen a piece. Anyway, Tora’s extra this time around is a B5-sized clutch bag with Hashimoto Takashi art for the paper catalogue, Eretto art for the cd catalogue (NYORO~N), or this dude who I’ve never heard of if you’re a girl. Messe Sanoh has announced their bonuses as well, and they’re doing an original Nanao Naru paper bag + postcard set for the paper catalogue for the galgers out there (click the outline of a bag for a better sample picture) and a Takanae Keirei set for all you, um, Ninomiya-kun fans out there. There’s no bonus at all other than 2400 yen of saved but dirty money if you get the catalogue via fileshare, so get buyin’!
(via Katoyuu)
I’m sure most of the readers of this blog have already been exposed to Akiba Days, the illustrated guide to Akiba featuring the cast of School Days. I didn’t pick it up at first since I figured that knowing about where stores are and which places are interesting was one of those things you could just do on the internet. I was humbled a few weeks later as I got embarrassingly lost trying to find an out of the way maid cafe and the guy I was with whipped out Akiba Days, flipped to the index and found the place in about 15 seconds. I ended up buying a copy later that day, though for full disclosure, half of the reason I bought it was so that I could hit 6000 Toranoana points so I could get some Touhou vinyl figures.
So anyway, Akiba Days is a fairly comprehensive index of all the various stores in Akiba. Each store entry has a short, generally 2-4 sentence entry describing the place, a sentence commenting on the place by someone from School Days, maybe a few pictures, and address/map/hours/phone#. The stores are broken down into 4 categories, Eat, Play, Relax, and Buy, and they’re each broken down into subsections (ie curry, ramen, maids; video games, karaoke, maids; net cafes, massage parlors, maids; pc parts, video games, maid outfits, respectively). There’s also a 15-page map section in the front with an index of all the stores in the back, which is really handy when you’re trying to find stores hidden in the basement of a back street alley software store. There’s also a few small articles and infoboxes spread out through the book, like where the cheapest net cafe to spend the night at is in Akiba (1080jpy for 6 hours!), where to park your car (hah), or good date courses (HAH), though the book gives fairly ridiculous advice on these date courses like “Cure Maid Cafe -> Cos-Cha -> Mailish”.
Of course there’s the issue of stores lasting for an average of like 18 months in Akiba, especially with the mass maid cafe extinction thats going on right now, so I’m hoping for periodical revisions, since this thing is honestly a great guide to have, even if you do fancy yourself as somewhat of an Akiba vet. However, the book has only been out for a little more than 3 months now, so I think it still has quite a bit of time left on its shelf life, and after that it’ll always be a nice reference to have to see what Akiba looked like in its early post-Kato days. I’m not sure if this is much of a must-buy if you’re a School Days fan, since the characters really do seem to be not a whole lot more than semi-bland window dressing, but I’m not terribly familiar with the game’s characters, so for all I know it’s chock full of hilarious School Days jokes. All I noticed was the part where Sekai seems a little too interested in Akiba’s various sword shops. :x Anyway, it’s pretty reasonably priced at a little over 1300 yen, subsidized I’m sure in part by the back cover Toranoana ad, so if you’re planning on doing Tokyo and Akiba this winter or even as late as next Summer, pick a copy up if you can do the Japanese thing and impress all your other gaijin friends with your newly-found encyclopedic knowledge of Akiba!
So yeah, all in all,
So basically forever ago, we got permission from the author of this clever webcomic, Morimura Yuji, to translate NERV COMIC STRIP, or as we have been calling it, Evanuts. After various delays that basically every fansub group run by college students runs into, it has finally been released. If you’re too lazy to click that first link, the comic is basically Evangelion but written like Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. While I don’t have the utterly encyclopedic knowledge of Eva scripts which is required to do the comic complete justice in terms of translation, I tried my hardest to find English analogues for various quoted lines, though I’m sure I missed a large number. Anyway, just thought it’d be nice to let you folks on the internet web-log-o-sphere know about more (semi-)legit translation projects out there.
I’d just like to note that I have just now put my money where my mouth is.
Or as one of the circle cuts put it, “doesn’t it feel like we were just here?” 85. Comitia opened its doors this time around just one week after C74, on the upper level of Big Sight, so basically it was just a big ol’ PTSD-inducing funfest for me. I decided I’d only get there an hour early and brave out the line, and pick out whatever circles I wanted to hit up on the trip to the event. Actually, I had already decided on one circle to visit. In fact, the main reason I was making the trek out to Odaiba yet again was primarily to pick up huke’s Black Rock Shooter Visual Works, which apparently sold out in a matter of minutes at c74.
Some people (especially those who have read about the event elsewhere) may realize that this is a really rotten reason to go to Comitia, since the point of the event is that it’s all original (as opposed to parody/derivative) comics, and you’d have a very tough time convincing me that the girl in the BRS video is not Hatsune Miku. Anyway, I got to Big Sight a little less than an hour before doors and was greeted by big signs for… the JAPAN HAM FAIR 2008. I was actually more excited at the prospect of an all-you-can-ham lunch than buying some comic books, but quickly realized that the event was not about the delicious kind of ham, but rather about the “60 year old nerds fiddling with radios walking around aimlessly” kind of ham. This was a fairly disappointing turn of events, but I did not let that deter me.
I got up to the top floor where all the folks with dollies of boxes of comics were going, and suddenly realized that the line that I had planned on sitting in didn’t actually exist in any form beyond “a small handful of folks playing ds on the benches outside the halls.” Turns out that the trend of original works tending towards higher quality but lower sales continues in this case as well! A modest line formed without me noticing, a whopping 100 people or so, and I made my way in and realized that there were already multiple thousand people inside buying things. (circle tickets!! :argh:) Compared to basically any other doujin event I have been to, the feeling of the place was incredibly laid-back. No shoving, no running, no screams of pain. I spent a good hour or so just browsing, especially around the area that huke was located, since that was more illustration gallery-style doujins, since I don’t trust doujin narratives.
Ended up with a very modest haul, especially since I skipped out on Range Murata’s offerings. BRS Visual Works is every bit as excellent as I hoped it would be, and moe zombie/amputee gag manga is always an added bonus. Interestingly enough, Pop Japan Travel had a presence there in the form of an industry booth, and I believe they had also unleashed one of their very well-mannered tours onto the convention. I have to say that they are definitely doing the smart thing taking a tour to Comitia over Comiket, since doing otherwise would seem akin to dropping a group of tourists interested in Korea into Pyongyang. I tried to make small talk to them while frantically looking for the best oel manga but unfortunately I did not see it for sale at the table.
All in all, Comitia was a very enjoyable event, and I’m definitely going back if I’m in the area, though I can’t say I’ll be making any comiket-style pilgrimages there. It’s probably also a great event to show to friends what a doujin convention is like, since that way they won’t think that you’re insane.
This review is a horrible idea because it will probably brand me as a pedophile for the rest of my life, but I cannot help but love Shimada Humikane. I’ve been following his stuff since early 2004 right before the moe tidal wave broke, and finally with the advent of Strike Witches coming out, he at long last has his own artbook. I have to admit that since I only buy artbooks done by guys that I really love (ABe, Okama, Nihei Tsutomu, basically everything that triples in price a year after it gets released) I am apt to give gushing reviews of basically any artbook I own, but “cool indifference” or “critical distance” are phrases unknown to the brave new blogosphere!
Anyway, the book is fairly evenly split down the middle between Strike Witches-related images and non-SW related stuff, which consists of some licensed works but mostly original works. There aren’t really many new images in here, but there’s an interview and a “how I draw this heavily-armed girl wearing panties” how-to photoshop section to be read if you can decipher moon runes. It’s printed on big ol’ A3 pages and the illustrations all stand up to being both large and professionally printed, shockingly enough. The SW stuff is split between promo art (magazine covers, etc) and other official art (eyecatches, character design sheets, chichikurabe), and the non-SW part of it is either “official fanwork”-ish stuff (Rider?? but her breasts are so large!!) and doujin/hp illusts. Of course, all the artwork for the Mechamusume figure series is found in here, so plenty of girls who are presumably not embarrassed by their not panties for you guys out there into that kind of stuff.
I have some poorly-taken digital camera pictures of the book, which in a perfect world would make you want to go out there and give Humikane-san your money, but 1) anime fans don’t spend money and 2) joke’s on you, this shit sold out in less than half a week! I am assuming that Kadokawa will do another printing, since the companies seem to have slowly realized that creating more supply to meet demand = more money, so when they do, make sure to throw your money at them! akibablog also has better pictures than I do, so make sure to click those too!
