Wow, the last couple of days have been a crazy whirlwind, in part because they included peopling.

We did Akihabara and found that the Shosen Book Tower’s Yuribu has, if anything, expanded. My wife, who had not seen it before, was very impressed.  We followed that up with the Gamers, Animate and Toranoana, which still has a Yuri corner, but has shifted to all doujinshi.

Note please, the red sign. You will see it repeated here as a Valentine’s collaboration between all the different  Yuribu. 

So, notice that the Animate Yuribu is now in both Ikebukuro and Akihabara.  (This is the back side of the Yuribu table, so ignore the comics. The front side had Yuri. You can check out this picture set on Facebook.) I hit up Comic Zin and Melonbooks and scored Strawberry Shake Sweet 4 by Jesus Drug! Yay!

On Saturday, we spent most of the day with manga artist Nakamura Kiyo and her manager Hsu, two women for whom I have such tremendous respect. I had the hurdle of this ridiculous sandwich to eat. We dubbed it the bacon steak sandwich. How big are other people’s mouths? I had to eat this with fork and knife. Hsu was more successful than I.

After discussing important topics like manga and pie, we headed out to Harajuku to shop. At Kiddyland I found something I cannot *believe* I got. I cannot wait to show you, and a bunch of stuff at the Sailor Moon shop…but not the Sailor Moon frying pan, try as I might, the wife just didn’t want it.

We were going to go see the view at Sky Tree, but were so leisurely about dinner, we missed our chance. Why does Sky Tree close so early on Saturday night? The Empire State Building has last elevator up at 1:15 AM. Sky Tree tickets close at 9 PM? Ugh. other cities…people stay up later than 9 PM.

Sunday was Comitia. I know I’ve talked about it a lot here, because it’s so interesting. Comitia is for original work only. So your favorite circles who have made their name in parody get a chance to showcase their own stuff.  This year was an absolute delight, as we saw that Comitia was shifting way more towards design and art, along with original work and, as a result, slipping a little bit away from porn. (Because, let’s face it, most porn is pretty low on artistic skill and design. Not all…but most.)

Thanks to James, we were able to connect with Grace Ting, who is doing postdoctoral work on Japanese women’s lit, with a queer / feminist perspective and who is, an all-around super person to talk to! We walked through the larger-than-I-have-ever-seen-it Yuri section which took up almost all of ち and た rows. Then we wandered through some gobsmackingly great art. My wife and I bought a stunning Tarot deck and I bought a copy book from Aoki Mitsue, who was sitting in a row we called the “classics” section, as all the artists were older and I recognized some from 20 years ago. I did manage to tell her how much I liked her work.

We made people laugh every time we came to a screeching halt and said “Wow.”

This table, KSDB, got our award for best presentation of the show. They were so kind to let us take a picture. Check out their work on Tumblr.

We just stopped in our tracks and gaped at the presentation. The ladies behind the counter were excited that we liked it. We were excited that they did it. It was lots of smiles all around. 

My wife reminds me that every time we paid with a 2000 yen bill people just freak out. Our bank just acts like its normal, but no one here uses them and every single time we pay with one, people go nuts. It like “holy heck, its a legendary 2000 yen bill!”

Here’s a picture of the back of my head, doing some shopping.

We ended our day with some really lovely food at a local restaurant. I had soba and duck, which was amazing.

We have one last full day here and will be in full shopping mode. 

Be back soon with the Tokyo: The Unbagging!