Yesterday, myself and two classmates went on a drive to Fukuoka. The drive was about two hours of the most beautiful country-side I've ever seen. I'm from Florida, with relatives all the way up to New York and Maine. I've seen some country/rural areas. Thing is, though, most of the countryside I've seen was FLAT. Japan. Not flat. Mountains everywhere. Tunnels everywhere. I'm pretty sure the pictures are public on FB, so you can quite easily see what I mean. And there's always Google.
Anyway, scenery aside, the city itself was... Ok, lemme put it this way: if you've watched anime, you already know what the place was like. If not, think New York City and Buffalo's suburbs bumping elbows. We parked someplace where it was $1 an hour and then had to walk past a bunch of houses to get to a main road lined with huge buildings. After that we had to walk 20-30mins down that main street to get to someplace that would have been Times Square if the buildings were taller.
Here's where I need to get basic. We got hungry and had Tonkotsu ramen, which I was told is famous in Fukuoka (I still prefer Shouyu ramen). After that we kinda wandered around, crashed into some kind of event that not even my friends knew about, and finally decided on a destination when I brought up how I still needed sports gloves. So we went to the eighth floor of some building I may never find again, and I got the gloves. Then we went to a hobby store, which I'll talk about later. Finally we got some dinner and drove home.
Ok, the hobby store. A topic all its own. Again, remember, I'm from the United States. There if I say I'm an anime fan people back off because they instantly think I'm with the weirdos who scream bad Japanese and shove their hobbies on everyone else. You can't buy good anime in the US, because the only stuff that's usually sold or easy to access is stuff that's aired on TV or stuff that's been translated into English and heavily editted/censored-unnecessarily. Same with manga. So, if you want the real stuff and to engage in the culture, you need to do it online. Buy anime straight from Japan, pay to have it shipped, then download subtitles made by fans who may or may not be hunted down as criminals for making the subtitles available for free as their own work.
Now, with all that in mind, here I am, in the middle of a city I've never been to, in, again, some building I may never find again, going up the escalator. One friend is in front of me, and he knows where we're going. The other is behind me and not exactly interested in our current destination. When that escalator deposited me at the top of its track, I thought I'd cry. Plastic figures from anime, obscure and popular, EVERYWHERE. Not an exaggeration. There were even figures from American comic books and from Star Wars! There were Zone Of Enders figures! Zone Of Enders! The only people who know ZOE are people who either love mech-stuff to DEATH, people who love Kojima games to DEATH, or people who played the demo with MGS2 because why not. The friend of mine who led us there got into a conversation with an older guy about which Zoids figure he should buy next since he already has almost all of them. While he did that I picked out a BlazBlue pin for a friend of mine in the US who's a die-hard fan and geeked out over the sheer amount of shows represented in that little store. Some of that stuff I had to take a picture of, just to be able to prove it existed later!
In the end I only got the pin. I figure that if I'm going to buy some model of something, have it shipped back to the US unbroken, and put it on my shelf, I better be rich. I'm not. So I'll stick with the game it came from, where I can control the dang thing and blow up unmanned killer robots with it.
