Took a train trip down town today to take the Not So Small Child to check out Tokyo’s famous anime and manga district. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but what I found was a bastion of useless commercialism. I strongly doubt that even one in ten products available to purchase in this entire district would be what you would call ‘necessities’… maybe the food available in the single supermarket I saw would qualify. The Not So Small Child, however was in seventh heaven and didn’t know where to look first. Meh.

Anyway. The first few stores we went into sold nothing but plastic figurines from various anime and manga series – floors and floors of very expensive plastic. Some of these collectible figurines were priced at hundreds of dollars. I mean, sure, everyone needs a hobby, but I personally can’t see the value in any of this stuff… Oh, and so many of the figurines are what you would call, Rated. Seriously, so many big eyed, skinny, massive boobed, scantily clad figurines of girls/women in ridiculous submissive or sexual positions. Unbelievably, most of the stores make no effort to keep the hard core comics out of sight of children… it’s just all in together.

We went hunting for manga written in English, as it can be very hard to buy online, and found only one store that had an English section. Not so surprising really. English is quite widely understood here from what have seen and what I have been told, but it seems many Japanese study English in schools and they learn to read and write quite well, but from what Atsushi told us the other day, schools do not focus on conversational English – less speaking and listening to English. But we managed to find a few new manga books for the Not So Small Child, and he was pretty chuffed with that.

The place was pretty busy, but strangely for a Friday night everything was starting to close at 8pm – leaving only the bars and restaurants open. There were cosplayers wandering the streets and I am sure there would have been many more as the night wore on. I picked up some cutesy souvenirs for my nieces but was generally unimpressed by all the electronic stuff and comic book stuff… I mean, there was plenty of electronic gizmos and gadgets, but it was mostly the same stuff you can buy at home and roughly the same prices, give or take – it’s just not my thing. Still, was fun to have a look around at all the crazy lights, and noisy Japanese pop videos in shop windows, and to do some quality people watching. 🙂