The Otaku Report: New Year, New Love

Anime boyfriends are the best.  My friends may tease me, but it's true.  For starters, they are literal works of art.  Anime boyfriends don't get jealous.  They can't knock you up.  They won't leave you but if you decide it's time to move on, they'll let you go - no stalking or manipulative threats of suicide.  I know, because it hasn't been so long since I left my last anime boyfriend for my current one, and this post is about the shopping days of a certain anime fan in a certain city.  Because I needed some new swag.

Being away from Japan during Jump Festa and Comiket was torture.  On one hand I was enjoying my time with the fam, but every time Twitter butted in with a notification it was like being stabbed with a needle.  At least a few things were left for me when I visited the Jump Shop my first Saturday back, though.  Til that point I hadn't really thought about the fact that Jump might have more/better swag to sell for their titles in their own shop than Animate.  Normally this wouldn't be relevant but Golden Kamuy (aka, my #1 obsession these last few months), is published in Young Jump.  I managed to walk away with a several things I probably didn't need, but that I justified buying by reminding myself that when I'm back in Mongolia I may wish I'd taken better advantage of living in the Promised Land.

Before that happened, though, I treated myself to dinner with my mostly-completed Sugimoto doll, back in December.  Area Q in Harajuku hosted a Golden Kamuy treasure cafe, and although I took a long time deliberating whether or not I needed to go to another cafe, in the end I decided that I deserved that quality time with my new anime boyfriend, just like I’d deserved it with the old one.  The Golden Kamuy cafe had a special dimension to it - you were supposed to hunt for the treasure using QR codes hidden throughout the cafe.  I came loaded for bear (BOKKI!), with a QR reader on my phone, my pocket router, and a mobile charger, in the end, I couldn’t make the magic happen.  You needed a specific app on your phone, which I downloaded while I was there and tried to start up, but there was either issues with my tech or with my Japanese abilities, so in the end I gave up and just enjoyed the cafe.

For the record, I had actually forgotten about to include this little gem in this post until I was sitting at Denny’s indulging in my weekly Coke bender.  I’ve been trying to knock this post out since I wrote about the fox village and I’ve got Hina Matsuri to write about this weekend, so it’s time to buckle down and get shit done.

The thing I was really waiting for didn't happen until school had been back in session for a week.  One theme of this post is the power of Twitter, which is how I learned that there was an exhibition of Ainu art paired with Golden Kamuy at Tokyo Skytree (as well as how I knew about the cafe and some of the other swag I got).  The Skytree is the world's tallest tower, but it's still shorter than Burj Khalifa, so I walked straight past the very long line to ascend to get to the east end of the shopping and entertainment complex.  (Probably this makes me a really bad travel blogger, but in my defense, I was in the early stages of the anklebiter plague and hadn't yet made it home from my monkey trip).  

The Golden Kamuy part of the event actually wasn't that interesting - there wasn't special swag to buy and the "art panels" were just stills from the anime, although I did get a free folder.  The Ainu part of the exhibition, on the other hand, was totally worth going.  Ironically I had just started working on clothing for my Asirpa doll, so it was really cool to get to see specifically how their attush are constructed and decorated.  It had me thinking that I might need to plan on going to Hokkaido on a return trip to Japan, when I actually have enough money to do it properly, with a JR Pass to get me around the whole island.  

There have been a few other things I picked up.  I used the power of Google Translate to order these incredibly tasty macaroons right to my door (hell, I don’t know that I’ve ever thought much about macaroons, and now I can’t get them out of my head), as well as a nice, warm Golden Kamuy chanchanko, leftover from Comiket.  The free hot springs collabo bath salts Animate offered, which tied in with that hot spring episode, were another fierce contender for my favorite.  I also made a side trip to Shosen Grande after a field trip last month to pick up...well, I thought it was a tapestry, but it turned out to be a curtain, and that's okay, because sometimes more is more.  Besides which, I finally finished my second bijinga painting - a nihonga painting of Sugimoto on a small shikishi board, which I very conveniently had a scroll for.  Now, usually the bijinga genre is thou ght of as pictures of beautiful women, but the characters its written with don't specify gender, so I'm subverting it to my own purposes and painting men.  That's just how I roll.

On a separate but related note, I've been forced to reconsider my evaluation of Touken Ranbu (aka, that anime with the sword boys).  I mentioned earlier this school year that I discovered that I had a little otome friend in my grade 4 class.  She asked me if I watched it, and I had to admit that not only had I, I'd also gone to see Mikazuki Munechika at the national museum.  For literacy week she came to school dressed as one of the Toushiro brothers, and when I looked up which one she was, I began to recognize the genius of the anime/game.  See, there's a certain amount of subtext invoked by the usual fans of anime with all male characters, and while I respect everyone's right to enjoy what they enjoy, I get a little pissy when there are multiple figurines of fujoshi-favorite characters but GoodSmile apparently won't make me a Sugimoto n endoroid.

So while I had watched Touken Ranbu, I wasn't obsessed, and on a bad day, I found it irritating and at least a little embarassing.  After seeing how much my fourth grader enjoyed it, though, I decided to watch it again and try to see it with different eyes.  The first thing I noticed was that there is such a variety of personalities, ages, and sizes amongst the touken danshi that there is literally a boy for otome of all ages (or at least there is as long as you don't hate pretty men).  I also decided that the so-called subtext was barely even implied.  After rewatching it, the characters really seem more like best friends or siblings, rather than lovers.  I think it says something sad about our global society that a cartoon about male characters having fun and being caring towards each other (with the occasional battle thrown in to keep things interesting) instantly gets interpreted as being homoerotic rather than as an example of non-toxic masculinity.

It was around that time when I realized that the nendoroids at my Bookoff weren't that expensive and I only had a few months to get my fill of the good life, which ALSO just so happened to coincide with the need for a good old fashioned bout of therapy shopping.  All of which explains how I ended up bringing home my #2 and #3 sword boys this week.  No ragrets.