My journal literally skips Day Three. It is dated 12/30 and was written on Day Four. It begins, “The reason I did not write about yesterday at all was that this time yesterday I was begging the gods to kill me now.” I’ll try and quote verbatim as much as possible, because I wrote the journal the next night and was watching TV. TV in Japan is endlessly fascinating and I want to share my thoughts as they spontaneously occurred. :-) And I promise that the misery DOES get better, so bear with me!

I woke feeling dizzy and queasy. I ate as much breakfast as I could stand (not enough to cover the cost at the hotel, of course.)

I have to break in here and say that my TV choices tonight include Sound of Music in Japanese and Beat Takeshi hosting a “Medical Horror” show.

We met Emi an hour later than yesterday at the station she switches lines at and headed to Tokyo Big Site. Most of the doujinshi was based on Role Playing Games and historical games or manga, I suppose. We didn’t buy much, and we didn’t recognize any of the cosplay costumes. We stopped for lunch at a different place than the day before (and I do remember the very lovely girl in the exceptionally nice suit at another table. I told Emi I wanted her for my birthday, which confused poor Emi. Her coat was lovely and she looked really good in it, then she took the coat off and the suit underneath was magnificent. She had clearly had it professionally tailored and she looked incredible, as long as she stood still. When she moved she, as with so many otaku, looked like a schlub. But that/s a whole other rant…the pathetic body language of otaku…) But by the time lunch was over, I was so sick and shaky that I really don’t remember the rest of the day.

I know that we went to look at Cosplay, but it was over and I was just trudging along, holding on to Pattie so I didn’t fall down. We walked a lot and *eventually* after a hellish trip, got back to the hotel. I do know that by the time we were done at Comiket that day, we were down to 1/3 the flyers for Yuricon that we had come with, which amazed me. (Especially as we didn�t buy anything Day 2!)

So, I laid down on the hotal bed – it was like 5:30 – and practically died. Pattie wouldn’t let me sleep yet, but I catnapped for a little while anyway. When One Piece came on we got a full hour of it as a New Year’s special, we got to see that last movie, “King Chopper and the Island of Animals” which was really nice. By the time it was over, I was feeling better, but still not good enough to eat anything. Pattie had a sandwich from the AM/PM. I tried to read, but my eyes were jumping and I couldn’t focus. The weirdest thing jet lag did to me, though, was make me feeling that the ground was moving all the time. Laying down I actually got seasick! I finally went to sleep at 9:30, woke up at 4:30 and fell back asleep. It was awful….

Now we’re watching a horrific “Ze Besto Ten” countdown, wherein aged idols are singing their hit songs from a decade ago. The host is a scary crone with the most AWFUL ensemble complete with breast prosthesis dress in hot pink. Sort of Hello Dolly meets lowrider. The idols are drunk off their asses to get through this miserable show…it’s absolutely terrifying. One actually just fell off her seat.

The good news is, the next morning I felt significantly better. The throb in every muscle in my body was much less – that was something right off!

Waaah! Now the idol on TV is singing, while juggling a small yippee dog…while Ultraman looms over her…

Day Four, Part 1

We arrived at Takadanobaba before Emi did again, and had a nice ride to the International Exhibition Center station on the new Rinkai line (by now, Emi had worked out a new, shorter route using the new train line.) Today was the last day of Comiket – hentai day – and the crowd control was stiff. We were walked all the way around the back end of Big Site and came in through the backside of the East Hall. We set off with a mission. I had marked a few things I wanted to check out and Emi had a load of people to visit. I bought *so* much doujinshi and had to carry it around all day!

But Emi had fun handing out our advertisement flyers and talking to people, including a fan of her artwork. (Non-manga…she’s a talented artist among other things.) We wandered around looking for cool yuri doujinshi. I found a ton of well-done Azumanga Daioh DJ, but no hentai that wasn’t just…erm, weird (Sakaki-san and the cat???) and there were so many geeky fanboys at some tables, we avoided them out of self-preservation. (At one point, Pattie saw Emi head towards a table where there was line of fanboys and she thought “she’ll get eaten alive!”)

There were so *many* fanboys at some of the tables (notably, the ones which had the hardest core hentai…lots of major objectification of women going on there) that there were lines that went outside the halls and wrapped around themselves. The longest had signs that said, “one hour wait from here.” This was the first day when it was actually difficult to get through some parts of the Halls. This was kind of how we thought it would be all weekend.

We stopped at lunch the same place we did the first day. I was feeling a lot better and ate lunch happily. We commented on the bizarre site of Nazis walking around all over the place. There was obviously some manga or other with a major WWII theme. As a lesbian, I was drooling at the hot chicks in black, silver and leather (Gestapo uniforms are really hot. They did that on purpose.) As a Jew, it was freaking me right out. LOL All day Sunday and Monday, we saw WWII German and Japanese uniforms – it was a teeny-weeny bit creepy. The weirdest thing was the Nazis from one series (it was *always* girls and they *always* looked amazingly sexy, which annoyed the hell out of us) had Jewish star armbands on with uniforms. All very bizarre and wrong.

Pattie kept busting me all weekend, because there were plenty of cross-playing women and every time a cute girl in a suit and tie walked by I felt that it would be rude not to at least admire them. She kept kidding me about drooling. But I digress.

Back to Emi and our Yuricon “commercial.” Pattie and I loved the hysterical laughter that trailed the “commercial” and the gambattes that came after the laughter. One guy was so excited at the thought of Yuricon that he *literally* began to jump up and down and scream like a girl. LOL We hit up a row of women who do yuri and I bought scads of doujinshi…amazing the women, as I’d pick one of everything. I finally met Tadeno-san, of the circle Mono, my current favorite mangaka. Her “Office Mono” is an incredible bit of yuri by women for women…good stories, good characters, great sex. I’ve done some translation of a few of those stories. I bought one of everything her circle had done, which was a fair amount – amazing the entire group. One of the women gave me her fanfic book as thanks for my support and for Yuricon. Emi and Tadeno-san spoke for a while and after we left, I went running back, because I remembered I had brought stickers to give them. They put a sticker on their price list, which made me happy. I felt good supporting them. Now I have to get them to Yuricon. :-)

Sometime that day, we had been introduced to one of Emi’s friends, Saiko. After we hit up the yuri manga section, we hooked back up with Saiko and her friend Ishida-san (a very nice, soft-spoken young man, with excellent manners and polite English.) We all went to see the Cosplay.

Next Time: Fanservice, Ferris Wheels and Fuji TV

8 PM

After Comiket, Emi had arranged for us to meet her cousin, who works for an anime company. (They do several well known titles, including a few of my and Pattie’s favorites.) We took the brand new Rinkai line (so new Emi didn�t know it, because when it opened not a month before she hadn’t been in Tokyo.) The trains were all gleaming and new and some of them were automatic, with no conductor) back to Shinjuku.

I was holding on to Pattie, trying not to pass out. I barely spoke, which is not my usual state. I was mostly staring at the ground, staying upright. The train made me really sick, and it was with great relief that I stumbled out into the Shinjuku night.

It was a real shame that I couldn’t appreciate Shinjuku that night. I’d love to go back and spend a lot more time there until I knew the area. It’s got several main streets and a ton of teeny little “snickleways.” (A snickelway is a term from York, England, for a little alley that winds around all over the place with no apparent order.) Shinjuku has a little of the same qualities of Times Square (especially before Mayor Giuliani cleaned it up) and a little Herald Square and a lot of Greenwich Village. (I was about to say just “The Village” but I realized not all of you are from NYC and wouldn’t know what I mean.) Shinjuku is home to the Nichome, the gay and lesbian area of Tokyo, about which I will write more later.

Emi and her cousin were going to take us somewhere, but either they couldn’t find it, or something (I’ll be honest, I was so lost in my self-pity I wasn’t paying attention) so we headed back the way we came and ended up in a magnificent restaurant that I barely noticed. It was really nice, from what I remember – all wood floors and benches that hugged the tables, that snuggled the cooking areas. I’d love to go back …the food was, apparently excellent. I was unable to eat a thing. The slow burn of my last reserves just stopped and I totally, utterly crashed at dinner.

Emi’s cousin was really nice – she’s been to the US, and speaks very good English, and she was funny, and I wasn’t. My verbal skills dropped down to monosyllabic grunts, and it was everything I could do to not be sick. While Pattie and the rest ate fresh made tofu, chicken a mushroom dish, I could barely keep my eyes open. I sipped at some tea and prayed for the gods to kill me now. I would have paid everything I had to go home at that moment.

Pattie, on the other hand, was snarfing down the food, exclaiming at its excellence all the while. Pattie asked what everything was, when it came out, because the menu was all in handwritten Japanese with no pictures and Emi and her cousin had ordered for us. Emi pointed at things – this is chicken, this is tofu, and this is “something else.” She totally could not remember what she had ordered. Pattie loved the “something else.”

Several times I fell asleep at the table and she had to poke me awake – it did not endear her to me. Aside from just being mortifying in general, I was really feeling worse than I ever had without being genuinely ill.

Ultimately, after I fell asleep about six times in a matter of minutes, we cut the evening short. I felt terrible about it, but I just couldn’t stay awake. I did manage to get a mouthful of food in and I will say that the homemade tofu was excellent. With luck, I’ll get back and be able to enjoy it the next time.

The worst part about all this was that Pattie seemed perfectly fine – I completely resented that. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was shaking so hard that I could barely stand up. It felt like every bone in my body had turned to jelly. When I finally managed to sleep, I had the weirdest dreams of Otakon and having Susan Sarandon as an old schoolmate.

Next time: The Wonders of TV

Going to Comiket

I was sitting at the local Japanese mall this weekend and a kid sat down at the next table with a packaged egg salad sandwich and I became overwhelmingly nostalgic for Tokyo. How bizarre that *that* is what will make me miss Tokyo the most.

6:30 AM

I woke up at about 5AM. It was pretty clear I wasn’t going to sleep more, and then I had a sneezing fit, so I was really up…and so was Pattie.

Now I’m going over the Comiket catalog again, then I’ll shower and get ready for my day. We ate breakfast at the hotel buffet. Bleah. Expensive and uninspired, I barely ate anything.They had a Japanese breakfast, which consisted of rice porridge or rice porridge. Miso, bacon, eggs, salad, fruit. Nothing to inspire paeans of adoration.

Comiket is very faraway – almost the furthest possible point from where we are staying. No problem. Emi met us at our hotel and navigated our way through three trains and two separate train lines, including the very pretty Yurikamome, which took us over the Rainbow Bridge to Tokyo Big Site, where Comiket was held. Unfortunately, jet lagged and discombobulated as I was, I was not in any shape to appreciate it. Tokyo Big Site itself is an enormous convention center – think rooms the size of large airplane hangars.

We got there before noon and started to shop. I guess this is a good place to back up and explain that Comiket is a twice-yearly convention for the sale of self-published or small press published manga, called doujinshi. Comiket is held in winter and summer every year. We attended the 63rd Comiket. Because of Comiket’s popularity, smaller shows are popping up everywhere. Comic City has a different show in different cities around Japan all year round. We were attending Comiket for two reasons: 1) To buy stuff, duh; and 2) to promote Yuricon, also duh.

Comiket goes on for three days. The first day was mostly anime parodies (in doujinshi terms, “parodies” are anything with popular anime/manga characters.) So, there was a *ton* of yaoi (stories with male/male relationships.) Thinking about it, it basically looked like popular anime series in general had a strong presence, though.The biggest section was for a story called Prince of Tennis which we’ll never see over here. It’s got about a dozen boy characters and one girl – so there were a bazillion yaoi doijinshi for it. There was a huge One Piece section (a very popular anime about pirates – it’s amazing, go watch it. The manga, which is *just* as amazing, is being translated for the American Shonen Jump. Get it for One Piece alone – it’s more than worth the price.

(Thinking about the arrangement of Comiket gives me a headache, but I *think* it boils down to Day 1 – anime/manga parodies; Day 2 – RPG/Historical parodies; Day 3 – Other. Under “other” is hentai, yuri, um, other…

Unfortunately for me, most of the One Piece stuff I saw was yaoi. I mean, that’s fine. I like the boys plenty, but I just don’t see Zoro and Sanji together, sorry. The best of the bunch was Shanks x Ben – there were several circles putting together lovely doujinshi of the two of them…but I just don’t care. Actually, one of the things I like best about OP is the *complete* lack of sexual tension between the characters. And all the chicks are sexy, competent and strong. A very cool thing in my book, but I digress. I did manage to see on Nami x Bibi implied doujinshi, but they don’t get together and I was still disoriented, so I didn’t buy it. I’ll just have to write one.

Pattie, however, was in heaven. She has conceived an unnatural passion for Yu-Gi-Oh yaoi doujinshi. She was scoffing up Y-G-O yaoi with both arms. Every time we bought something, Emi would hand the vendors the Yuricon flyers we had brought and do a little commercial for the con. At one table where Pattie had just bought a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh doujinshi, the people selling it listened to the commercial and kind of stared, confused. After it was over they asked, “But…why Yu-Gi-Oh?” Pattie was hysterical at that.

I bought some gorgeous Rose of Versailles stuff and two Uranus/Neptune coloring books Pattie found. I wish I had bought more. I also bought a doujinshi called “Ogata-4” that was stories just of Ogata Megumi roles – this one had Yukito/Yue from Cardcaptor Sakura, Haruka from Sailormoon (a really funny story,) Kurama from Yu Yu Hakusho and a little Shinji from Evangelion piece.For the fangirly-ness of it all, I loved it.

We were so busy trudging around behind Emi, I didn’t really get to shop for myself, but I knew that Monday I’d be buying a lot more.

My first impressions of Comiket were: 1) It was far more enormous than I could have possibly have anticipated. Pattie figured out that there were roughly 4600 vendors a day – each circle had a little 3′ table to themselves. 2) There was much less cosplay walking around than I expected. At American cons, you see a ton of cosplay just walking around the con space. Here, a lot of people selling were dressed up, but few just walking around. Or maybe it was because there were so many people, the cosplayers sort of seemed less in comparison to the total. You can’t take pictures in the main areas, either, like you can in an American con – you have to go to the cosplay area during the designated time to do that. 3) The shoes looked painful. I stared downwards a lot, because I was severely jetlagged and because I was carrying the ten pounds of doujinshi Pattie bought. Every time I looked, I saw shoes that hurt me to even look at!

The costumes, as expected, were good, but even so I barely recognized anything. I kept coming across the conundrum of “Is it wacky fashion sense or cosplay?” Half the time I wasn’t able to figure out the answer.

Used to American conventions as I am, I’m fascinated by the differences. Because we do *not* have manga culture as Japan does, I explained to Emi, our Artist’s Alleys are full of people who draw single pictures, not whole manga. I genuinely think that will change, as manga becomes more mainstream here.

For instance, Emi wanted to know why we don�t use screentones in American art. (Don’t email me and ask what this is…just look it up. You’re on the Internet already. Use Google.) I said that I thought that, with American comics’ emphasis on the realistic, and on action over narration, there wasn’t usually a place for screentones. Again, I imagine things will change as more manga infiltrates the American comic market.

As we left Comiket, Emi pointed out that no one was reading their doujinshi on the train – even though we all knew that was where we all came from. (Tokyo Big Site was at a terminus, so there was nowhere else to have come from for that train.) I asked why that was and she said that she thought they were all ashamed. We agreed that was sad. Emi asked for my bag and she pulled out some doujinshi and began to read it openly. *This* is the kind of thing that makes Emi a special person in our minds. I tried to read too, but it made me sick. From that point on, the day (now evening) became torture.

Next time: Falling Asleep at the Dinner Table

A friend has just sent me this haiku he wrote for me:
You are my hero,
Now an anime icon
Gently gone insane

I like it. :-)

Once we were settled into our hotel room, I went out for a protracted walk – mostly to identify the local combi, that is, 7-11 type store. There was an AM/PM right across the street about a block away. (Later, it turned out that there was an *actual*7-11 around the corner in the opposite direction. We alternated.) I picked up drinks and a raisin bread from the bakery in the hotel lobby and we had a snack.

My travel karma had extended to having taken the wrong notebook when we left the house, so I didn’t have Emi’s phone number. Duh.

Let me just say here that I worship this woman – she is totally cool Not only would we have been horribly lost the first few days without her – I’d probably still be wandering the halls of Odaiba Aqua City in a state of shock – but she’s also a whole lot of fun to be with, as you will soon see. She’s a Tokyo native, but about half the time when we asked, “what are we doing?” or “where are we?” she�d say, “I don”t know” and just keep going.

Anyway, if I had had her number, I would have gotten a phone card and called her from the airport, duh. But no…no number, no address. Thankfully, Emi had more sense than I did, and had taken the number of our hotel, so she called us there. When I managed to get a phone card, she was already on her way.

Phone cards for NTT do not work in non-NTT phones. Just in case you were wondering.

Pattie and I split up so we could cover both hotel entrances, which were, of course, not visible from each other. Pattie found Emi first. She apologized because she *had* been at the wrong terminal, but hey, we all made it, so we were okay. We gave her our Xmas present for her and decided to go out to dinner.

The area we were in had dozens of small restaurants and they all overwhelmed me. Emi passed by a Tapas place (now *there’s* something you never expect to see on your first night in Tokyo!) which Emi dismissed as being for salarymen. She bundled us into an elevator and stopped at every floor where she either decided the place was too crowded or didn�t look right. We rode up and down that elevator like 4 times, until Pattie and I were hysterical, to the consternation of the couple in the elevator with us. And then the 4 guys who replaced them and kind of watched us out of the corners of their eyes while we roared in hysteria as we stopped at the 5th floor for the third time.

Eventually, we ended up back at street level (naturally) and found a place that was loud and good. When we ordered our waitress would shout out our order, “3 Calpis!” and three or four other severs would shout it back, followed by the chef who would also repeat it. This made a lot of sense – making sure the chef heard the order…except that he was standing right in front of us. We were seated directly in front of him at the counter, watching him grill squid.

We ordered pretty much randomly by pointing at stuff, and Emi told the waitress what it was we wanted. At one point we asked Emi what the heck we had just ordered and we got to teach her the phrase “house special.” So we still don’t know what it was – but it was pretty good. To thank Emi for dragging her butt around town and helping us over the next three days, we picked up the tab.

The three us us sat and talked for a long time, and went over the Comiket catalog. The Comiket catalog is something that needs to be seen and experienced to be understood. It is a 1400-page extravaganza full of teeny-weeny little boxes, each showcasing the art of a particular “circle.” Circles are what the Japanese call groups of people who band together to do a project. (Gainax started as a circle, so did alot of well-known artists groups, bands and other endeavors.) This monstrosity weighs about 4 pounds. In comparison, the Stratford Illustrated Shakepeare (Chancellor Press edition) weighs in at about a pound. This is one big, heavy em-eff-ing book.

We had a quick tutorial on how to understand this thing…you page through (this could easily take a few hours) noting the circles that look interesting, then you identify where that circle is located. Each day of Comiket features different things, and there’s pullout maps you can mark up to identify who�s where. But I get ahead of myself.

At last we parted for the night, with a promise to meet the next day at 11 o�clock in the lobby. Pattie and I went back to the hotel and, to quote Samuel Pepys, “so to bed.”

Sorry for the delayed update, I’ve been sick. But I have rectified the haircut issue!

12/26 – 9:50 AM

Because of security “enhancements” at the airport, I wanted to arrive with time to spare. Tales of security line horrors and my own experiences had given me a thrill of Orwellian fear as I packed. Is this pen too weapon-like? Will my medications be so numerous as to arouse suspicion? What will I do without a nail clipper for 15 hours? This last is no joke – I feel naked without one. As I mentioned once to an apoplectic knife-owner, there’s nothing I’ve ever needed a knife for that my nail clipper couldn’t handle…and it’s true! Plus, I really hate when my nails are dirty.

So, we left *really* early and watched the dawn rise over New York City. Kind of a nice way to say goodbye to my home. (Oddly, that’s what I’m missing most right now – my house. I love my house, my bed, my couch. It’s been a few hours and I miss them already.)

We arrived with plenty of time, so the minor delays of checking in and security were to laugh at. We sat down, had breakfast…I *finally* had my coffee, so I once again had a personality. Now we sit and wait our flight, while suffering from nervous stomachs. I’m a joy to travel with…not. Between my asthma, allergies and slight claustrophobia and tendency towards insomnia, I’m difficult at the best of times. As you can imagine, the prospect of 14 hours in the plane was very appealing, also not. I cannot imagine a flight to Australia!

11AM

We’re on the plane and it’s very much like a teeny little slice of hell. Smarmy Xmas carols are being interspersed with Lite FM-type music, extra lite. Pattie’s dying, I’m laughing hysterically. So far we’ve heard:

Johnny Mathis
Crosby, Stills, Nash
Paul McCartney
Simon & Garfunkel
John Lennon
Beach Boys

If Dante were alive today, he’d have begun his Inferno in an airport, instead of a dark wood…

They keep making us eat on this flight, which wouldn’t be bad, if the food wasn’t so godawful. For lunch I ate P’s pretentious lemon cookie, with all hand-rolled, organic ingredients. We napped and they woke us to feed us again, too bad they’ve never heard of protein.

I’m reading Dashiell Hammett’s the Maltese Falcon. The writing is so over-adjectival that if I received it as a submission for the Fanfic Revolution, I’d probably have rejected it.

Well, that blew – now I’m reading a Charlie Chan mystery, which is better right off the bat. The characters are more engaging, for one thing.

Our seatmate for the flight was a total fashion victim. She wasn’t very nice, but I didn’t want to kill her or anything until she spent the whole landing blocking the view out the window while she attacked her split ends with a determination and spirit that would have made her teachers proud.

As we landed, our usual horrible travel karma kicked in. Our friend Emi wasn’t there to meet us! We waited about an hour, but no one showed. I assumed, rightly, that Emi was at the wrong terminal (we had a “code-share” flight, meaning that while it said it was one airline, it was actually a totally different one. As it happened, by the time Emi showed up at our terminal, we had already left.

Now, our bad travel karma works in two ways – one, we usually are surrounded by sports teams in hotels, or drug dealers, or other people who roam the halls until the small hours making A LOT of noise. Or, if there’s a choice to be made, we make the wrong one…if there’s an easy way and a hard way…well, you get the idea. :-) And the hotel never has my reservation.

We had a choice of a bus that went directly to the hotel, or the subway. On the assumption that the subway would be less money (it wasn’t – it was more) we chose that. The Narita Express takes you as far as Shinjuku, then you get on a crowded commuter train to Ikebukuro. We sat down on the Express, but apparently had non-reserved seats and were in a reserved car. The conductor tried to tell us how much it would cost to stay there, but we were so sleep- and protein-deprived that we couldn’t get it and we just moved to a second-class car.

At Shinjuku, we found the right platform. We just couldn’t figure out the right train. (More on the trains later.) Eventually, after P went and acted blonde at a conductor, we got the right train and found the hotel with no fuss. At the hotel, of course, the reservation was wrong. :-) (You thought I was kidding about that, I know. But I’m not – it’s *always* like that.) After a slight delay we got a room which was room-like and we sort of sagged with relief.

Next time: Night on the Town