Japan Part 9 - Ikebukuro, Tokyo, Pokemon Mega Center and Animate

In the morning we ordered some mackerel. Steph insisted on eating some natto with it as a side dish, which we both knew we would hate (we've hated it every other time!). Turns out it... was terrible. Natto is fermented soybeans, popular with women here because it apparently helps them lose weight.

I mean, if I had nothing but natto to eat, I'd probably lose weight too. Because I would never eat my food.

Pokemon Center

So turns out there's a "super store" for pokemon in Ikebukuro (one of the districts in Tokyo). I'm not a pokemon fan (well, not for the past 25 years) but figured we might as well check it out. It is in the Sunshine City Alpa building, about 500m from the train station.

It was actually super cool

True to pokemon, there was just merch for everything. Cups, pens, blankets, bedsheets, toys, card games, everything. Lucky I didn't come here 25 years ago, I would've spent my meagre pocket money on everything.

The walls were covered in pokemon artwork.

But I was just glad to see gen 1 pokemon that I can recognise.

Every single wall had a giant pokemon mural.

They popped out at you, you just had to take photos and I even recognise almost 1% of the pokemon!

Gengar is popular too for some reason, I have no idea why.

Ahh the starting pokemon, my safe space. I was a pokemon red player, and my level 100 charizard was basically my go to to annihilate every single opponent. How would you balance the 1000 or whatever pokemon there are now?

The mall wasn't super modern or new but there were some nice touches. This particular setup makes me almost want to figure out the complexities of the Japanese recycling and categorising system. Almost.

There were little patrolling robots everywhere. I think this one is just sweeping the floors.

Animate Building

Walking back towards the station, there is a new anime superstore, called Animate.

Its the largest anime store in the world, with 9 floors of stuff.

It wasn't actually all that impressive in the end. 2 floors of goods, 1 floor of gachapon (boo), 1 floor of cinema (screenings etc), and the others were miscellaneous. My feet were killing me by that point, but normally the excitement of seeing everything would give me enough energy to want to go through everything. Not so in this case!

We just went home pretty quickly and got packing, to get ready for our flight home.