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A birthday spent in Tokyo Station’s basement

Last week, the three of us went to Tokyo to submit a passport application at the US Embassy for Ulan. It was Mayu’s birthday too. Because I could pay for the passport in advance through PayPal, it sped up the process. An appointment is required, which I did online. We were only there for about an hour. We finished there around 10:30 am, then took the subway back to Tokyo Station.

The rest of the time we spent in Tokyo was in the underground shopping area beneath Tokyo Station. There they have Tokyo Character Street, which you can see in the picture above. I covered this place on my site 12 years ago, when I did a photo journal of our trip to Tokyo Sky tree in 2013. Tokyo Character Street is a collection of speciality shops, for Studio Ghibli, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, Rilakkuma, One Piece (I hate that show), etc. It’s changed a lot since then. The Gundam Cafe is gone, and now there is a Harry Potter store, etc.

So these characters are from a comic/anime called Chiikawa. They’re like these adorable RPG characters who supposedly go on quests, but most of the time they are eating bento and drinking tea and doing cute stuff. Ulan loves these characters. 

We had lunch at a grilled fish restaurant since the “Ramen Street” area had long lines waiting for those restaurants. It was Mayu’s birthday, so I let her decide where to go. We also had 1,300 yen parfaits after we did more shopping. Tokyo can be a bit expensive!

There were actually two Ghibli-themed stores there. These Porco Rosso punch puppets were at the one featuring high-end merchandise. I ended up buying more stuff for Ulan’s upcoming birthday than for Mayu’s birthday.

There was a Shonen Jump pop-up store where I bought a deck of Spy Family Uno cards.

One store had these neat-looking Evangelion-themed storage containers.

Ulan likes Kirby, although she’s never played a Kirby game before. I got her a pocket towel at the Kirby store.

There is a whole underground shopping mall down there too, which we only barely entered. We went to the Can Do 100 yen shop, Kaldi Coffee, and the Don Quixote snack shop. Looking at the map online, I realize that it is bigger than I thought. 

Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay long in Tokyo as it was a weekday and we had to go back to work and school the next day. We took the 2:40pm shinkansen back home. We had a nice time.

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“Macross: Do You Remember Love?” movie re-released in movie theaters!

To commemorate the release of “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” on 4k bluray, the movie has been simultaneously re-released on the big screen, shown exclusively at Toho Theaters. From where I live, the two closest Toho theaters are either in Fujimi, Saitama Prefecture or Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture.

My friend Adrian and I went to see the movie at the Toho Cinema in Utsunomiya. My friend was only familiar with Plus and Frontier, but had never seen the original. It was shown on screen 6 and there was this mini poster outside of the entrance in the picture above. It was an incredible experience to see this in a theater for the first time.

It was fully surround sound, too. In 2020, during the beginning of the madness of the era of Corona-chan when every other theater seat was taped off for the purposes of the “social distancing” nonsense (junk science), several Studio Ghibli movies were being shown in theaters to keep their revenue going. I took the opportunity to see Nausicaa at the cinema. It was in stereo only, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but only the front two left/right speakers were active. If they would have just had all of the left speakers duplicated for the left channel and all of the right speakers active for the right channel it wouldn’t have been so noticeable, but only the front two speakers by the screen were active and it took a while to get used to that. It was a cool experience to see Nausicaa on the big screen, but with the sound the way it was, it felt like I was watching it on a very big TV screen, far away. Seeing DYRL really dwarfed that experience.

The beginning of the credits with the song “Tenshi no Enogu” featured the animation from Flashback, which has been the standard since the second laserdisc release. The decapitation scenes were not edited, so this was the original movie experience (plus the Flashback concert animation). I’m gonna buy this release.

I’m glad my friend could go with me. My daughter calls this the “uaki (“cheating”) movie” because she was on Team Minmay when she first saw it, and was offended when Hikaru kissed Misa in the underwater city. I have this same movie poster on my wall, so I guess she was expecting the movie to be a love story between Hikaru and Minmay and she got pissed. So whenever I’d play this laserdisc movie, she’d gripe a bit. Now I wanna get it on bluray and make her gripe more!

We both had popcorn in the theater, but after the movie we were hungry for dinner. Since we were in Utsunomiya and it was Adrian’s first time visiting the city, we found a gyoza restaurant in front of Utsunomiya Station. Utsunomiya is famous for gyoza, after all.

There were many types of gyoza to choose from. This is “pakchi gyoza.” “Pakchi” is the Thai word for coriander, or “cilantro” as it’s known by in the USA where we use the Spanish word for the herb. Many people in Japan hate pakchi because to them it smells like stinkbugs. I’ve heard that said often. I really do not think it smells like stinkbugs at all. It has such a fresh, green smell that I find refreshing. Fortunately, my wife likes pakchi. It’s amusing because most Japanese people love eating natto, which stinks and its taste triggers my puking instinct. I can’t describe its stench, but it really smells bad. So in the same way many Japanese people cannot eat pakchi, I cannot eat natto. I could taste spicy nampla (fish sauce), giving the gyoza a Thai-style taste. Garnished with cilantro on top, it was very good. The restaurant also had “negi mayo” (green onion and mayonnaise) as well as cheese gyoza. Fantastic food. I didn’t have any alcohol because I had to drive us back home to Gunma Prefecture.

We listened to a lot of Ramones and The Clash in the car there and back. It was a great evening.