Japan Trip 2008

Japan is fun allot of fun.
Thats why we at Neo Tokyo took a trip there with 12 of our customers this Summer.This is a report to those whom couldn’t make the trip.

(We have gotten full concent from thouse whom are appearing in our pictures. We will never post your image without your consent;) ) 

First day pre-Japan

We were all going to meet up at Oslo airport at 11:05 since our plane leaves at 13:05.
I live in Oslo but I’ve heard that some of the people live far away as Bodø I hope everybody gets there on time… ^^;

When I get there I see a crowd of people at the meeting point, OMG am I the last guy there!? (~O~)!
Everyone has gotten there before me! Good that everyone is excited about the trip.

2…4…6…8…..14 Head count of 14 people (Something tells me that I will be doing this allot on the trip)
Everyone was there and and so off we went to the far away land of Japan.

Took us 15 hours with a plane transfer at London but the plane was very nice and had a screen on the back of every seat. Free access to many, many new movies, games and even some j-drama and my favorite,”Shouten” so the trip to Tokyo seemed to take no time at all!
The food was great too, with real Japanese beverages,

Yay! We are there! We can’t believe it!

There was a guy waiting for us to send us to our hotel in Ikebukuro.

Picture in front of the bus, everybody ready to have all the fun in the world! (^_-)

On the way to the hotel we managed to see Disneyland and a fair part of how Tokyo looks like.

Here are we at the hotel.

We all need a well deserved rest. But we weren’t finished for the day, we all went to get a haircut. ; )

After that we toped it off with the first Ramen in Japan!

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2nd Day,

Today we go to Akihabara,

We will use the most used form of transport in Tokyo, the Densha!(Subway or T-bane)

The Densha in Japan is a pretty easy way of transport, as long as you can navigate through the line map.

Well anyways getting on the train is not that difficult.
If you have a “Suica card”, as shown in the picture bellow, it’s very easy in fact!
You can just hover it over the reader at the gates of the train station, get on the train and when you get off you just hover it over the reader again and the trip is finished! It’s easy as that.
The fare for the trip will be automatically deducted off the Suica card which is prepaid. (^_-)
Suica card is included in Neo Tokyo package.

The platform for the train

From our hotel in Ikebukuro, we when to Akihabara, which took us around 20 minutes.

Here we are right in front of Gamers main store near the station.

The reason we went here first is that it is a heaven for all “Otaku” beings.
You can find all kinds of stuff here from house hold appliances to high tech gadgets, watches, games anime, manga, New/old PCs & PC parts, Doujin, pro-wrestling goods,arcade machines, spy cams,air guns you name it they probably have it all right here.
We could of even just came here everyday and it would still been lots of fun!

We went around for a while to as many shops we could and for lunch we all went to a “Maid Cafe” called Pinafore.
If you have seen “Densha Otoko”(Train man) or “L Change the world” this maid cafe was used in both of them.
We were not allowed to take pictures of ourselves at the Maid Cafe but here is a pic from the movie just to show you how it looked like.

We noticed this later but we were sitting at the exact same table that L was at!

I ordered some ketchup rice wrapped in an egg skin(Omurice) and a caffe latte.
Every caffe latte here at the shop is special, the maids will draw cute animal faces on them right in front of you.

Like this!

I ordered a cat

The Omurice also has the writing service with ketchup.

Of course I sticked with the standard and most used “Moe” letter.

Afterward we took a trip to the Yodobashi camera on the east exit.

Here is something that you don’t see that often…
Do you know those “Gatcha” machines that we have in our shop stacked one over each other?
Well, this picture should tell you how popular they are in Japan!

There should be at least a hundred just in this aisle alone!

Here they sell CD-Rs DVD-Rs by the stack. Awesome cheap prices.

We walked around a lot of stores and called it a day.

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3rd day,

Shibuya, Harajyuku

This day I remember was raining, not that hard but a slight shower or so.

Shibuya, a place that most people have seen in drama or movies.
It’s an icon of Tokyo as Times square is for New York.
Many bright screens and billboards on top and on the side of buildings it’s a colorful place.

It’s also the stage where the game “The World Ends With You” from square enix takes place.

They also had billboards on trucks! It was near the release date for Metal Gear Solid 4 so they were going all out to advertise it.

At Shibuya there is a statue of a dog, his name is faithful dog “Hachiko”.

The story behind him is that during his masters life, he would see him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. Even after his master’s death , Hachiko returned every day to the station to wait for him. They said he did this for a total of 10 years every evening at the same time the masters train was due in. More info about this here>

Harajyuku

Harajyuku, the birth place of Harajyuku girls, we’ve managed to see some in action!

The entrance to Takeshitadori, here you will find so many shops meant for “fashion conscious” people.

There are many stalls like this that sell the all too famous and great tasting “Crepe”.
It’s like different types of fruit and cream and ice cream wrapped in a Norwegian type pancake skin.

This is one type that you can get there!

Yummy~~

——Will continue——

4th day

Asakusa then Odaiba

This day we had planed to visit the more traditional view of how Japan was long ago and visited Asakusa.
Great weather this day, was comfortably hot.

There they have a temple called “Sensoji” and around this temple there are many sites to see from the older periods of Japan.

There are many tradtional types of foods drinks and outfits to check out here.
You can also find a samurai sword shop in this area so if you are interested in those this is the place to come.
At that Sword shop they also have a replica of the sword that Samurai X (Rurouni Kenshin) uses in the series called a Sakabatou here.

When you come to this temple, be sure to use the smoke from the incent burner thats placed in front of the temple.

It has been said to have the powers of smoking out the bad spirit of any part of the body that you apply it to.
So for example you have a bad knee you would place smoke on your knee, bad stomach you would put it on your stomach and so fourth.

I drew my fortune for the day here and unfortunatly I got a bad luck type so I tied it there to leave my bad luck behind.

Temple protector god.

 

“Furin” the icon of a true Japanese Summer. The Furin is a bell that you hang by your window side on a hot summer day. This bell will make a soothing “Chin~” sound every time that a breeze comes in through the window making the wind more enjoyable. The sound is so soothing that it is meant to make you forget about the heat all together.(^^

This looks delicious! We found this fish in a showcase in front of a sushi shop in Asakusa. Believe it or not it is made out of plastic! No matter how good it looks it’s not edible, in Japan many many restaurants have a sample of what you can expect to be served inside. But in any way this fish looked really good, perhaps when you are on our Japan tour why not order one?

This is one street that you can vist in Asakusa where they have many buildings that date up to the Edo period over 200 years ago. It resembles just like how it was in this era when Samurai’s an Ronin’s roamed the streets with kantana’s in belt. Just like you see in Samurai Champloo. And yes! You can ride the man pulled car on the right. (^_-)

Here we are in front of “Dozeu” restaurant in Asakusa. Dozeu is very special. It has a history that dates back 200 years, again to the Edo period. It serves a special type of fish Dozeu. This restaurant actually appears in Samurai Champloo episode 6. Yes we can go there when we are in Japan!

Here is the actual “Dozeu Nabe” that we were served. Under all the green onions (purre) are the special fish “Dozeu”. Nice spices and very interesting flavor, the recipe hasn’t changed for 200 years. Jin, Mugen and Fuu were eating the exact same thing in the Anime.

The “Dozeu” is not the only special thing that you can order here. You also can eat items like this carp sashimi. This type of fish you would never think to eat in Norway but actually it tastes very nice. They also have items like whale jerky and sashimi. -“The jerky just gets Yummier and Yummier in every bite” says Darkfrog from the trip-.

Afterwards we happened to find the Bandai Head office across the street from “Dozeu”. We just had to go in and check it out. They had all the new products in their lobby and it was a lot of fun!

Afterwards we would be going to Odaiba, and the best way to go there is by river boat!
The river boat will take you from the “Old” Tokyo to the “Newest” Tokyo there is.
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The tickets for the river bus. Just 1220Yen (Kr 60,-)
This ticket will take you from Asakusa to Odaiba and it will take only an hour.

 

Here we are at the middle stop on the way to Odaiba. The Kebabu here was great!

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Here we are coming out on Tokyo bay. That bridge there is called the rainbow bridge and it leads to Odaiba. We will be going under it. The name is rainbow but it only gets lighted up in a green color. I never found out why. So does everybody in Japan.

On the way we passed  bus that was on it’s way back.

Here we are at the final destination. It was a great trip. But it’s great to be on land again.

The view from the Mediage building by the bay side. The view is always great from here.

The food we had that day was Miso Tonkotsu Ramen was tasty and great. You can find 6 kinds of Ramen shops in AQUACITY Odaiba’s Ramen stadium.  This was the best choice by far.

Odaiba is must come place when you are in Japan, there is just so much to do there.
It is also where the comiket and Wonder festival are held year after year.

The Neo Tokyo winter tour will take place here most of the time!

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5th day,

Roppongi

Here we are at Roppongi Hills. Its a new building and very posh.

This is the Muji shop in Roppongi. They have a Muji in Oslo too, did you know that?
Everything looks so high class and fancy.
We ate some great expensive fruits here.

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6th day,

Ikebukuro Sunshine Creations 40!

This is what we were all been waiting for, the Sunshine Creation Comic festival.
The event opens from 11AM but we got there a little before 10AM.

There were already this many people lining up before us! Wow!

This is not all the people before us….

There are more people lined up on a different floor, And there is more than just this line. There are 3 lines just like this one!

Here we are we have gotten in after a long wait. A lot of people know what they want so they rush to the place that they are after.

Lots of booths everywhere. Here you can get lots of Doujin Books, Doujin Music, goods and PC games.
You just might just find a future god of the manga world here.

Banzai~

Just around 4PM. Everybody is satisfied and coming out of the world import mart with smiles on their faces.

We all ate some Pudding at Nanja Town Ikebukuro afterwards! Was great!

This entry was posted by Jan Ove Stien on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.