Shibuya

After that, I took a train over to Shibuya Station. Shibuya Station was on the other end of the central Yamanote Line from where I was, and there were at least five distinct routes I could have taken there that were all roughly around the same duration (40-43 minutes or so), so I opted for the one that took me along a JR route for at least part of the way, since that would make that portion of the route free. I took the Hibiya Line from Minowa Station to Akihabara Station for 170 yen, then the JR Chuo/Sobu Line from Akihabara Station to Yoyogi Station, and finally the JR Yamanote Line from Yoyogi Station to Shibuya Station.

Here’s Yoyogi Station:

And here’s Shibuya Station:

I walked around the Shibuya Station area after that — it was very crowded, but very vibrant in a way that I liked.

My first stop was Loft’s flagship store:

And as my little sister predicted, I found the pen refills that we were looking for there. I had searched for these in close to a dozen other stores, including smaller Lofts, to no avail.

She was also looking for a certain correction tape refill, but I was unable to find it there, even after asking the store clerk, who looked it up in a catalog and said that it was now out of stock and replaced with a different model of correction tape altogether.

After paying and on my way out of the store, I also saw this little machine:

That looked kind of interesting, and cheap to boot. But I didn’t have many good pictures since I emptied my phone camera out onto my laptop at the end of each day, and nothing that I really wanted to print into a full size photo anyway, as that would be very vain….. oh wait. That’s right.

So anyway I now have a 7 by 5 inch blowup photo of Tigey‘s face. They called this photo size 2L. I had to download a Fujifilm app and install it to transmit the photo to the machine, but the machine worked in multiple languages and the instructions were quite clear, and it seemed to be 80 yen well spent to me.

After this, I went to another nearby departmental store that also had a stationary corner, Tokyu Hands. This store was so immense that I couldn’t actually find the entrance, though it was probably because it was also located on a city block that was very sloped, and I approached it from the lowest end. I ended up at an elevator and found out that that was considered the Basement 2 level, even though I had walked in right from the street itself. Anyway the building had a very strange layout with tons of “one-third floors”:

Even though it was only 7 storeys tall in actuality, it was three different buildings side by side that sloped into each other, and had about 21 different floors in all, labelled 4A, 4B, 4C, 5A, 5B, 5C, etc. There were stairs that led up and down to the next and previous floors on the central column, as well as stairs that led up and down to the side floors from each central floor.

I ended up buying a spoon from there labelled “The Curry Spoon”, and with a weird little flat edge at the end of the spoon that allegedly makes it easier to scoop up grains of rice with it. I would never have bought this if my current hotel and kitchenette lacked a spoon, but I did find myself in such a situation, so I bought it over slightly cheaper and more regular spoon options and have used it as my main spoon ever since. I’m using it to eat a salted egg yolk bun right now as I type this, and it will face the wrath of proper, non-Japanese curry tomorrow. But I digress.

I also stopped by a HMV & Books store, and saw that they were having a feature for the band Naniwa Danshi from Johnny’s Jr. They had a big signboard for fans to put notes on them, and it was absolutely plastered with sticky notes.

There were full-body posters of the featured guys on the sides of various shelves. There were quite a few girls wandering around the shop and taking photos with the posters, some shier than others and quietly trying to sneak them, some boldly going around and doing so in groups, but all very much starstruck. I know nothing about the band but I enjoyed seeing the girls going around and gazing at the guys’ posters, yet another fandom group I don’t really have any experience in, but is very much a large one in Japan.

I did buy a small book/magazine for cheap here, and here’s a picture of both the book and my curry spoon that I took later that evening.

I then went back to the Shibuya Scramble Crossing to see it in its “normal” (i.e. not Halloween-infused, cop-infested madness) state. It was terribly late at night, a little past 5pm or so, so the deep dark veil of nightfall had fallen across the world and monsters were roaming the land, or at least the silver screens above. There was no way they’d dare come down to Earth with so many humans in one spot, they’d just get crushed.