Staycation

A sad reality of my life in Japan is the fact that I never seem to have enough money.  Case in point: I have been on vacation for a week and a half but I haven’t left Yokohama.  Unless you count Tokyo, which I don’t...who really knows where one ends and the other begins, anyways?  And maybe I’m just getting old, but the idea of two weeks of staying up late and sleeping in, and generally just puttering around however my heart desires kind of appealed to me.  And that is why after a week and a half of vacation the most I can say I’ve accomplished is drinking enough coke to kill a horse and staying up to date on my photography assignments toward my master’s.

Be that as it may, I felt that I couldn’t, in good conscience, leave my six faithful readers without any adventures to enliven their dreary existences this week.  I had a great plan.  I was going to go out to Sanrio Puroland, since my suggestion to go there with friends had been shot down by said friends.  And then I walked out of the house last Friday to do exactly that, and I realized that it was cold and rainy and I wanted no part of the great outdoors.

Well, that decision made, I started looking for what else I could do on a nasty afternoon.  I opened Google maps and started looking at the places I’ve starred over the last few years.  I have a tendency to mark places I find out about where I want to go as favorites, so that I can visit them later when I have time.*  I had been looking at the west part of Tokyo, and decided to get a little weeb-ish.

One place I marked about a year ago was Shiro-Hige’s Cream Puff Factory.  This is a little place out in Shimokitazawa owned by Hayao Miyazaki’s brother, and it’s the home of the most kawaii cream puffs on the face of the planet.  I got there around 1 and was really only thinking about dessert until I stepped in the door and realized there was a restaurant with real food upstairs and it smelled delicious.  I inhaled the fettuccine carbonara, didn’t ask for a hundred refills of ice, and took my cream puff to go, which is actually pretty good behavior for me, but what can I say?  There was just something about the place that made me want to be respectful.

Next I caught the train over to Chofu.  At some point since I started watching Gegege no Kitaro I found out that Shigeru Mizuki used Chofu as the setting for his manga.  In fact the entrance for the forest is through Fudaten Jinja, so it had a star on it as well.  There’s also a Kitaro Chaya by Jindai-ji, the temple I visited last year for the daruma market, but I’d already eaten pasta and a cream puff, and since I shouldn’t reaaaaally be buying anything else, I decided to give the tea house a miss.  

I checked out the shrine itself, and then tried to find Gegege no Mori.  The back part of the shrine is restricted, but I noticed a row of stone lanterns along the east side of the shrine.  I followed them back to a small cemetery, where I could see the back part of the shrine.  Mostly it was an empty lot with a sakura tree, which was kind of disappointing, but not altogether surprising.  After all, you can’t just leave the entrance to the unseen world lying around where anyone can find it.

Although I may not need any more stuff to pack, I couldn’t stop myself from visiting Nakano Broadway, since I was already all the way out there.**  Call it a fact-finding mission in case I decide to sell off any of the stuff I already have and leave it at that.  At least on this occasion I successfully resisted temptation.  A few days later I was browsing the craft section of my friendly neighborhood Daiso when the opening song from The Promised Neverland - which I’ve just finished binge-watching - started playing over the PA system.  It was about that moment that I realized I really, really didn’t want to leave Japan.  There are things that bug the ever-loving shit out of me here, not least of which is the fact that it’s impossible to enjoy an art exhibit here (don’t even get me started on my job).  That said, it’s going to be really hard to leave it all behind.  Here’s hoping I make it back in the next life.

*The flaw in this otherwise brilliant plan is that I don’t always remember why I wanted to go some of these places.
**For the record, Nakano Broadway is nowhere near where I was, other than that they are both geographically west from the rest of Tokyo.