Two things have caused my blog slowdown in the past few days — the first was the 30ish hour transition between Shanghai and Tokyo from one hotel to the next due to the red-eye flight — that didn’t affect that specific day too much but completely kiboshed the one for the day after because my body needed catchup sleep. And then by the time I caught up with that, my Tokyo leg itself was almost half over. The other factor is just the sheer amount of post-outing work I need to do each day. There are so many places to collect paper from in Japan and I take so long sorting and categorizing them each evening, so that I can remember where they came from for the metadat when I eventually scan and upload them.

That on top of how building my spreadsheet ledger is a lot longer here because I track all my expenditures, what I bought and when it took place, etc. In China, WeChat (and Alipay) anchors the money/timestamp data very efficiently so my ledger was usualy pretty quick to fill up, and for Singapore they use English names in general so I get to skip the translation step of my log most times. In Japan, everything becomes a mess that I have to untangle at the end of the evening with whatever notes I make along the way, especially with the penchant of stores to only accept cash and often not provide receipts on top of that.

Anyway I’m making excuses. Most of this post was written in the last couple days before the end of the trip, but it didn’t get finished before my flight home, and I was in zombie mode for the last 50 hours or so of the trip, so everything from this blog post onwards was posted after I got home. I’ll still do them to get them all out first and then do a second pass through them for typoes and stuff later. It is definitely something I have to watch out for in the future though, if I do another longer Japan trip to scavenge for paper again.

Talking about paper, I haven’t really shared a ton of what I have collected with my travel blog during this trip, especially since I don’t have time to talk about or analyze the papers so all the blog entries would just be “I looted this.” or “Gemini told me to take those two and ignore the others” or something. There was a real estate office in the nearby shopping arcade with a bunch of papers outside though, and I had been waiting for an opportune time to harvest them without the risk of the agent inside the shop seeing me and coming outside to talk to me. The horror.

Well, this perfect moment came today as I walked by, since a woman walked into the store in front of me and began to talk to whoever was on duty there. Perfect! Yoink! All this (well, one copy of each) became mine.

16 pieces of precious socio-economic and real estate data, all mine, and I hadn’t even been outside my hotel for ten minutes yet. To be fair though, it was already past 1 pm at this point, since after not sleeping until 4 am the previous night, I woke up at 10 and then worked on my blog (and my last bit of remote work on this vacation for my actual job) before allowing myself to leave the hotel.

I had mentioned three days ago that I had received some good news regarding meeting someone in Tokyo later on in my trip. Zian had touched base back then and said that she would be in Tokyo from the 21st to the 26th, which overlapped my own 19th to 23rd nicely enough. She said she’d be flying in from Beijing and landing in the afternoon, and we agreed to try to meet up in the evening once she landed. We spent the day texting on and off with each other though, and I learnt that she was also taking Spring Airlines from China to Japan, in a very similar kind of flight, except she wasn’t in Spring Plus and the flight wasn’t at 2 and a half hours past the stroke of midnight.

I would later learn though that Spring Airlines did enforce the 7 kg carryon limit for her plane at the Beijing checkin counter, but thankfully she still had her mom, who came to see her off, with her then, and she was able to just remove a bunch of things and hand it to her mom to bring home. I definitely dodged some sort of bullet on my trip though. Phew. I also took the opportunity to show her how scrawny the Spring Airlines bear was, and she laughed at the sight. She also confirmed from her plane seat that her flight sold the same two bears.

We agreed to meet up somewhere in Shinjuku for dinner, but we’d decide exactly where a little bit closer to dinner time as Shinjuku was huge and she’d need to actually arrive and check in at her lodging first to dump off her bags. Thankfully, the place I was going to to start off the day had a direct train ride to Shinjuku Station, even though it was over an hour from where I was staying. In addition, I needed to source lunch from somewhere, and Gemini suggested I try to look for something at Kawasaki Station because the quickest route that I had to take to get to this initial place involved a change between the Keikyu Line and the JR Line anyway, and this change involved physically ticketing out of the Keikyu station and walking to the nearby JR station to continue my journey from there.

I agreed, and thus I found myself walking around an area called Kawasaki Azalea, a fairly big underground mall that had a bunch of event stalls set up in the middle of a large plaza that I walked by on my way to food.

This underground area also apparently housed the world’s shortest escalator (local). I actually rode that escalator, but I had no idea that it was that significant until reviewing my notes later on in the evening, because I was too busy hunting for paraphernalia and because it didn’t seem all that unique to me. I did remember reacting to the length of the escalator by thinking about another really short one on the path to the subway at Clifford Wonderland in Guangzhou, near where Kel stays, though I don’t think it was quite this short.

Anyway, while blithely trodding over history, I ended up at a Vietnamese restaurant called Jasmine Palace for lunch:

I had planned out my itinerary with Gemini to figure out what my schedule would look like, and Gemini suggested that I order something light here, instead of a full set meal, because I was kind of pressed on time since I had left the hotel late today. I agreed, and went for some fried vermicelli with seafood:

Yum, this was very good, though it costing 1,250 yen made me pine for China prices again. In the context of Japan, this was certainly worth it though. it made me kind of wish I had ordered a full set meal!

But the clock was moving inexorably onwards, so I downed my meal and managed to catch a train that Gemini was sure I would miss. That’ll show it. I even had enough extra time to buy a physical ticket so that I could get a mukou-in stamp at the target station, just in case the station had a cool one. I think I’ve explained this elsewhere already, but a mukou-in stamp is a stamp that renders a physical ticket invalid but allows the passenger to keep the ticket as a souvenir so it doesn’t get eaten by the ticket machine on the way out. Virtually every station has a stamp, and many of them are customized and unique in some way, and to get them a physical stamp from the source station is usually needed, and then one just needs to ask the station staff for it on the way out at the destination station.

Sadly, this station that I was at, did not have a particularly special or interesting mukou-in stamp, but hey, at least I got to keep the ticket itself. More ephemera! This station that I ended up at was called Fuchuhommachi, and the reason why this was significant is that it was (one of) the station(s) that fed into the Japan Racing Association’s Fuchu Racecourse, west of Tokyo. It even had special entrance and exit gate right at the station that led to a long, overhead walkway and then eventually into the racecourse itself!

This was cool. I do remember visiting at least one other station in the past that had a dedicated exit for the attraction/landmark that was set up next to it, but which station exactly escapes me. Tokyo Big Sight? Regardless, this tunnel was bright, roomy, and long. Run, run, run!

There were lots of people coming the other way, from the stadium toward the station, and I noticed everything from single old men to young couples with kids strolling by me until I finally ended up at the other end of the tunnel:

These were entrance gates, and as far as I knew, how the racecourse works is that when there are actual weekend races going on here, everything is open bustling and there’s an admission fee of 200 yen. On weekends where there’s races going on elsewhere but not here though, or during some weekdays (they seem to be closed Mon/Tue) admission is free, albeit to a stripped down set of services within, and large screens showed the races to people who wanted to watch. Or bet.

Nothing was stopping me from walking past the turnstiles here, so in I went. The Fuji View Grandstand area was right in front of me as I entered: 

And the turf itself was to my right, as were the big screens.

To the left was an information desk as well as a map of this section and level of the enormous racecourse:

And across from that was a Turfy Shop, the main reason I came here:

I was hoping to find a Tamamo Cross plushie, that was one of the soft goals of the trip and one that I had been idly looking for earlier in Sapporo, but as I was not spending most of my trip in Japan like I had originally planned, this was just a secondary goal. Tamamo Cross is my favourite horse girl character (local) from the Uma Musume/Umamusume: Pretty Derby anime and game, as I’ve mentioned before, but all the horse also have Turfy versions (that look like the big one outside the store in the picture above, but smaller and thinner) that are very cute as well, and I was hoping to find either one or both on my trip. Coming here was an attempt to find the non-anime version.

But this first Turfy Shop, which Gemini swore was the flagship store, was pretty terrible. Or at least not as “floor to ceiling plushies” as I had been led to believe both online and from the bot. There were plushies, but restricted to the Turfy versions of like 4 or 5 of the most common anime characters, and then a bunch of other horses I didn’t know but who must have been recent winners and such. And there were other stuff like blind boxes and accessories that I didn’t care for.

Instead, I wandered back out and east, passing by and ogling at the number of people who were here glued to the television screens for betting purposes. Not even the big racecourse screens outside that were easily visible from the grandstands, but little televisions with betting odds and winnings. On an off-race weekend! This place must be crazy during actual races!

From the map of the racecourse, I originally thought that there was only one Turfy Shop in the building, but it turned out that each floor, and also each stand area (there were at least two), had its own map, and I found that there was a second Turfy store when I looked at the floor 3 map.

But it was closed.

Besides the Fuji View Grandstand, there was also another part of the stands called the Memorial 60 Grandstand, and though I don’t have a map of that one, I did find the Turfy Shop there too.

This one was about the same size as the one that was open at the Fuji Grandstand 2nd floor. I did like the stock here a bit better, despite Gemini going something like “by all accounts that’s just a smaller satellite store, probably not worth visiting”. I wonder if the main one that was closed was the main Turfy Shop and the other two were both satellites or something.

I did not find any other Turfy Shops, so the Tamamo Cross quest was a bust today, but I did spend a couple hours walking around and gawking around, until the races ended and people filed out and the place started to gradually shut down.

I had no idea what this commemorative plaque was at first, but the story is actually very cool. The image on the right is the bow detailed on page 2 and 3 of this English Japan Racing Journal issue (local). Basically an extreme underdog.. er underhorse won a major horse race on Oct 30 2005, the first one that the Emperor and Empress of Japan had attended in 83 years. And the horse’s name so just happened to be Heavenly Romance, which people took to be a sign of a blessing for their only daughter, the Imperial Princess Nori’s wedding to a commoner less than a month later on Nov 15 2005.

I do know this horse, Vodka, from the game and anime, but this commemorative statue is kind of small.

This one was much bigger, but I think is just a generic mother and horse statue. I’m not 100% sure though.

On the eastern end of the racecourse, there was a horse-racing museum that also contained the hall of fame for Japanese horse racing. I thought I came too late to do anything here but the main entrance hall was still open, so I barged in with four staff members dressed in green standing there watching me, and looted the pamphlets from there with a big, friendly smile on my face. Mine. Scan scan scan. Absolutely no photos were allowed inside though, so I didn’t bother going in, especially since I was pretty sure that they were about to close anyway. But I wasn’t THAT interested in horse racing history. Yet.

Earlier, I had entered the Fuchu Racecourse through the West gate from Fuchuhommachi, and when I left this museum I found myself right next to the East gate, exactly on the other side of the main walkable path. Gemini calculated that the fastest path to Shinjuku Station was through the Central gate though, and it also said to skip the first station and walk to the second one about ten minutes away from the instead, so I dutifully walked back to the Central gate and out and along residential side streets until I reached the station. I think Gemini actually tried to guide me through a park and maybe a near temple here but I found the side streets more interesting and stimulating.

The first station that we skipped was just a platform that was practically attached to the racecourse itself, but didn’t connect up to where I needed to go. The station I ended up in, the actual Fuchu station, had a mall and other amenities satellited around it.

I had no time though, due to the evening meeting with Zian, it was already nearly 5:30 pm at this point and I still needed to get back into the downtown area of Tokyo. Fuchu was apparently a good choice for that though, as there was a Keio Line Limited Express train from here that got me there in half an hour.

My schedule flipped from “getting late” to “an hour early” at that point, so I wanted to go look at some anime stores to see if I could find the plushie I wanted, or anything else in general. Gemini suggested a nearby Shinjuku Marui Annex building, but warned that walking there would involve navigating an underground labyrinth or a chilly topside forest of traffic lights. I picked the underground, and the walk led me through the Shinjuku Promenade, a long, straight tunnel that reminded me og the Chi-Ka-Ho in Sapporo.

I visited two or three shops here, but the closest I got to that elusive plushie was a Tamamo Cross coaster or whatever this was.

I was only half-heartedly looking though, as I was also deep in conversation with Zian over WeChat at that point, since she had landed and crossed immigration, the latter of which alone had taken her over an hour. She was currently on a train from Narita Airport to her lodging not too far from where I was, but we fretted over how to actually meet in Shinjuku itself, since it had dozens of exits and was the size of a small city itself. I pondered starting to go look at restaurants nearby to see if anything was open and had room without being overly crowded.

But in the end, Zian actually suggested that we eat at a restaurant that she had eyed the and then bookmarked last time she had been in Tokyo, but never actually managed to swing a visit to. It was apparently within walking distance of her lodging too, while being within 30 minutes of where I was. This would also give her time to jettison her bags at her hotel and freshen up a bit before coming. This seemed good, but required me to go all the way back through that long Promenade again to catch a train from the Oeda Line’s Shinjuku Station to Nakai Station, which was the closest station to her restaurant.

I was expecting a mall or shopping street or something at Nakai Station to follow in order to get to the restaurant, but instead it was all residential streets, dark and narrow and a bit liminal in parts. Remember that photos always turn out brighter than in reality.

The path took me past what I could only describe as a very intimate playground/park, since I noticed that the walls of the surrounding houses practically bumped up against the playground so closely that it might as well have been the backyards of the houses.

There was also a notice board there which I captured for all eternity:

And the front of the restaurant which we were going to finally meet up at, Tonkatsu Takahashi in the Kamiochiai district of Shinjuku ward, looked like this:

To be fair, on the other side of the restaurant from where I approached it was an actual road with a convenience store and other shops, so it wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, it just wasn’t attached directly to Nakai Station via other commercial buildings. I arrived at the restaurant a couple minutes before Zian, and scoped the place out until I saw her arriving from the same direction that I had taken to get here. A few exuberant and long overdue greetings later, we hopped on inside to escape the cold.

The restaurant itself wasn’t too big, it was one single large room with a bar area, a normal table or two, and then a couple of short tables with cushions on them set on tatami mats. We got shown to one of the latter tables, and took our shoes off to sit down on the cushions. The menu looked like this:

But since we were chatting in English, the lady that was manning the store also gave us a menu with pictures and English translations that looked like they were done by a native English speaker — one of the menu items was described.as having a “voluminous amount” of something or other, for example. The lady did say that the prices on the English menu were off though and the Japanese one had the correct prices. The price difference for each item was about 150 yen each, so that was probably the cost of inflation between when the English menu was made, until now. I didn’t take a picture of that menu, but I did take a picture of our food when after they arrived.

My meal, at the bottom, was the Kushikatsu Teishoku for 1,350 yen. It was soooooooo good, with juicy onion slices baked right into the meat as well. One of the best meals I’ve had on the trip, and very cheap as well. Zian‘s meal, up near the top, was the regular (and their specialty) Tonkatsu Teishoku, I believe.

Zian and I were here from about 8:20 pm or so all the way until 10 pm when we were finally kicked out as the place was closing. Not in a malicious sort of way, we just both completely lost track of time as we chatted and caught up on what had happened over the past couple of years since we last met on Jun 10 2023. She’d already graduated from her University in Austraiia with her Master’s degree since then and was currently in a gap semester, putting together an application to start her PhD. She’s so much smarter than I am. And she was travelling to Tokyo to attend a concert because one of the members of an idol group she follows was graduating (fancy word for leaving, for a myriad of positive or negative reasons) the idol group, and her farewell concert was the following day, Mar 22. This is also when I learnt about the Spring Airlines baggage check earlier.

Once we were kicked out, we walked back to Nakai Station and then took a selfie there before we went our own separate ways. She was living near enough to the station that she didn’t need to take a train from there, whereas I had a sleepy one hour train ride ahead of me.

I’m the one in the middle.

It was pushing 11:15 pm once I reached back to the Keikyu-Kamata Station, but on a whim I passed by my usual exit gate leading to the hotel and walked a little bit further on, as I knew that the Ota City Tourist Information Center was there and I had been meaning to visit it on and off over the past couple of days. I just was never at the right station or had time to stop by it. It was probably closed right now, but I might as well take the time to recce the place.. right? … oh.

Oh no! For some reason, the Info Center was closing down on Mar 31 2026?! Why? That’s usually the sign of a failing city or town and even much smaller places have had tourist info centers (I actually really liked visiting them, even before I saw them as crazy sources of local ephemera). This bumped the priority of me visiting this place to the highest possible level, and Gemini agreed with me once I showed it the sign — it said that not only would some of the pamphlets and ephemera there be no longer accessible forever after this, but that they probably also had a commemorative farewell pin or something that would be neat to get. I don’t know about the latter, but I agreed with the former. Tomorrow morning!

Well, tomorrow afternoon. I wanted to knock out some blog-writing in the morning, so I stopped by a convenience store on the way back and picked up a nice-looking okonomiyaki to have in the morning for breakfast.

Then I scooted back to the hotel and stayed up way too late sorting my ephemera and expenditure spreadsheet again. This was where my blog-writing really began to fall off the rails though, as I came home really late on this day and still set off somewhat early the next day because that was my “final full day of my trip”. FOMO and all that right? But, spoiler alert, I made it home and was able to eventually write out all that happened on these last few days as well.