otaku-ness

For this blog I'm going to talk a little about the otaku culture in Japan.

I live in nagata, kobe, it is on the western half of town. In the center of town is a district called sannomiya, sannomiya is the place to shop in Kobe. Right next to the station is a big mall like place, I say mall like because it doesn't have exact enclosures besides the roof and doesn't have a definitive beginning and ending, it kind of blurs together with the rest of town. Anyways I've been there several times and for the first few weeks I couldn't find any anime stores until I stumbleded across Gamers in the basement floor.

Now Gamers is actual very close to a store that I originally mistook for Gamers. I don't know the name of the first store but it is a model speciality store. They have gundams, lots of them. As you enter you see very large glass cases crammed with beautifuly assembled super high end gundam models. They have a good half of the store coverd with display casses of models of all sorts. Mecha, sentai, anime, chibi, disney everything. And again its big I wanna say 4-5 times the size of a normal store in a mall. Gamers itself is slightly bigger then the gundam place, and has a good section of gundam themselves. But Gamers has the regular anime stuff, manga, dvds, wall scrolls, collectable figures, all those nick nacks that you can't get outside of a con.

When I found this place I was pretty blown away, but a few days later a friend showed me on the third floor (well first that there was a third floor) even more anime stores. Enormous ones! Anything you can imagine there is a figure of it. And so many diffrent stores, I think we saw like 10 of them or something.

And along all of these stores are pocket change's worst enemy, capsule toys. We have capsule toys in the US but because no one wants to put in two dollars in coin into a machine and the stigma attechted to fandom (I'll touch more on that later) they are no where near what they are like in Japan. What they do is that there are series produced by various companies and stores buy them from them, put in the label and fill them up themselves. For example there would be an evangelion set 1 and it would have shinji, asuka, rei, gendo ikari, and misato. Now you really can't honestly think "oh well which ever I get is fine I like them all" no everyone has a favorite, you are always thinking "I really want rei, asuka is good too but I would perfer that rei" so when you don't get the one you want, the urge to try again is so strong. You didn't have any eva figures before and now you have asuka but now you really really want that rei. Maybe you finally get that rei but now you have 5 out of 6 of them or something, might as well complete the set. But that last one is espically rare, what do you do? You can just buy the one your missing from a store, for an increased price. Yeah its hard to really understand. Stores buy cases of capsule toys, repackage them with simple bags and price them according to thier rarity. Sounds crazy I know but there are entire stores that do nothing but this.

But that raises the question "why the interest in toys? Just because you like a show why buy toys for it?". Its a good question and I think I am beginning to understand. So as awesome as the stores in Sannomiya are, my freind kou showed me an anime store in Osaka. Wow. The girl at the counter was cosplaying for crying out loud. They had the exact sailor mars costume angie made from scratch and soooooo many toys. I found the japanese voltron! it was called lionbots. I wanted to take a picture but kou said I shouldn't. And I also found the gekiranger toys I specifically wanted to buy in Japan. rinlion, gekibat and gekiwolf. So a year from now when I get home I can form the coolest robot name ever geki-rin-bat-wolf-touja! But when I found it I didn't decide right away. I felt really childish buying these toy robot animals, and I didn't want to be super nerdy infront of kou but when I went to pay I saw two busy men buying some anime figures and paying a lot for them. I guess there really isn't any reason at all to feel nerdy or childish about giving into otaku-ness so much, which is a reason I really love this country.

We then went to yodobashi. Yodobashi is one of the world's largest electronic stores. I say that only because I can't possibly imagine a store being much bigger. Imagine the largest best buy and stack 6 of them on top of each other. On the 5th floor of yodobashi is the video game and toy section. They have a regular kid toy section and they have I guess big kid toy section. The big kid toy section had pallets stacked chest height of gundam models being grabbed left and right. Expensive ones $30, $40!

So my working thesis on to why it is ok to send a weeks paycheck on plastic figurines of fictional robots is that Japan never lets things not be cool. Dragonball is the best example of this. Dragonball Z started in 1992 I believe and ended in like 1997. So Dragonball Z is very old but you still see dragonball z figurines, dolls, posters, dvds everywhere you go. The DBZ opening was even playing on the display TVs at yodobashi, you can't escape it! In the US DBZ was cool for a while but then cartoon network stopped giving it prime time viewing, the toys let up a little bit, there weren't many DBZ games out for a while and the fandom died off and moved on, so when it started back up it just couldn't regain its popularity. Since I'm sure the first episode of DBZ there has been capsule toys and DBZ ads in Japan non stop. The DBZ fandom in Japanese otakus is constantly being reinforced. Gundam is much the same way every year a new gundam with new models to buy and because it never lets up there isn't a stigma against liking it past a certain age. It would be an interesting social experiment to see if you ran toy commercials on pre-teen shows if you could get them to stay interested in toys.

Wow I've typed a lot and I haven't even goten to the most important part, I went to Toei Uzumasa Eiga Mura! This was THE thing I wanted to do in Japan and there were a few things that were really cool I'm glad I got to see but the rest was very disapointing. First the good. I saw a kamen rider show. I'm going to upload the video you might want to skip around I recorded like half of it and some parts have long dialog. The fights were so cheesy I couldn't belive it. But thats what the live shows are all about. Kamen rider is famous for his motorcycle but since this is a live show KR Den-o came in on a bicycle. Oh man so silly. They did do some cool flips and a KR kiva did signature poses. Really check out the video its worth it.

Second awesome part I saw the super sentai museum! Again I took pictures of everything but wow the gods from majirangers, were so freaking cool and well just look at the pictures. I think these were the stunt double costumes because they look a little cheaper then the show. They also had the history of J-hero time line starting from the 50s. I wish I could get a printed copy of that or something. After we were done there I felt like my otaku-ness had reached a whole new level. Really blew me away.

But if you aren't staying in Kyoto I don't recommend making a special trip just for this place. It doesn't have enough content to last all day, maybe 2-3 hours tops. They film samurai tv dramas here so that means that large section of an already small amusement park are cut off. They had little presentations like mock sword fighting and sound effects with this ninja battle but they were rather lame, crowded and we only caught the last half of them. There just wasn't anything to really do. Oh there was the, sfx corner and it was a freaking animatronic dinosaur that would come out of the water and spray a mist out of its mouth. The mouth didn't move just the head rose above the water. It was just retarded. I was really expecting some place that you could get lost in because there were so many houses and having tons of extras walking around. There was an episode of deka rangers where they went here and it was just nothing like that. We didn't really get to see much of kyoto but its much more spread out and open as compared to osaka. Kyoto is more like a regular american city I think.

Wow wow wow, I talked a lot okay I got to study some kanji bye everyone