Akihabara

Because it was raining very heavily today, I didn’t actually travel very much, nor did I take a lot of photos, since I had to hold an umbrella and bags most of the day. I still hit my 10,000 steps quota that I had noticed I had been keeping up since the start of the vacation though, according to my phone’s Google Fit app tracker.

I spent the day walking around Akihabara, visiting various stores to buy CDs, both for myself and for Shuuka, a mutual friend of Mart‘s. I went to two stores selling brand new CDs, Gamers and Animate, and two stores selling second-hand CDs, Lashinbang and Book-off, all within a city block or two of each other. This was to be my last shopping day, so I picked up enough CDs to more or less fill my bags — my theory being that otherwise the $130 that I had spent on sending the initial box of loot that I had back home would have been wasted. That and these CDs aren’t exactly things that I can get in Canada.

I picked up seven CDs that Shuuka wanted, all first-hand CDs with a few small bonuses like poster and badges, and this cost a touch over 15,000 yen (but I would be paid back in full for them a week or so later).

I also grabbed 15 CDs from the second hand stores for myself. A bunch of these were 330 yen or so each and were to partially round out my Wake Up, Girls! collection, though I still only have about half their CDs all in all, but I found a few other CDs that I liked along the way as well.

In particular, I found this disc containing my favourite Japanese song, which I have previously featured in the Song of the Week segment of my weekly blogs.

It was complete happenstance that I found it wedged between a couple other CDs, while looking for a separate CD on someone else’s wishlist that I never did find. I had given up on looking for this one because it was in a weird mini CD format that most second-hand stores didn’t really carry or only had a small selection thereof, but this one was in the normal section in Book-off, and was the very last CD that I bought on my trip.

I was pretty happy with my haul overall though, with one of the other CDs that I bought today also containing the single version of another previously featured Song of the Week song. My fifteen CDs would cost me 6,202 yen in all, a little under $4 CAD per CD at the time.

Although it was all I could do to hurry from store to store, it was still really interesting to get to see Japan’s umbrella culture out in action for at least one day on my trip. Everyone breaking out their umbrellas meant that everyone needed more personal space, which made me wonder how places like the Shibuya Scramble crosswalk looked like in the rain. There are so many people crossing at every green pedestrian light there, as I saw when I visited the day before, that I’m not sure how people manage to navigate that crossing in the rain with umbrellas open. It must be quite a sight to behold from above.

Because many people in Japan use bicycles, I noticed that there was a sort of device or attachment for their bicycle that some people had, that allowed them to attach umbrellas to their bicycle, so that they could drive with two hands on their handlebar while still being covered by an umbrella, more or less. Not everyone on a bike had this, and there weren’t that many people out on bikes in general compared to a regular sunny or cloudy day, but I definitely saw the attachment in use a number of times.

Also, since it was Akihabara, the sidewalks I walked on between the four stores that I visited were lined with girls in different maid outfits trying to hand out brochures, tissues, and coupons to promote their nearby affiliated maid cafés to passersby. This was no different in the rain, though the girls all had umbrellas, but I felt a little sorry for them, all lined up in cute and frilly dresses, trying to attract the attention of people walking by while also trying to stay warm and dry to various degrees of success. Some were wearing jackets or windbreakers on top of their dresses, but not all. There were easily over a dozen different girls that I passed, closer to around 15 or 20, just in the segment of Akihabara that I traversed today alone. I did not take any pictures of them though, as I was trying to protect my bags of CDs by that time, the sidewalk was crowded, and taking pictures of them felt wrong to me anyhow.

Another interesting piece of rain culture I got to experience were umbrella racks and bags, every store had some variation of them at their door and they were interesting since nothing like that exists in Edmonton (nor Singapore, as far as I can recall, though it was nearly always sunny when I went there for two weeks recently as well). In several shops, but especially restaurants and convenience stores, there would be a rack outside that someone could deposit their umbrella into while they went inside to eat or shop.

For stores with umbrella racks, one can often see a couple umbrellas abandoned and sitting forlornly in them even on sunny days, and this sort of rack was where I “borrowed” (and then returned) my umbrella from back on Day 23 in Osaka. However, there is always the danger that the specific umbrella that someone deposited would be gone when they came to pick it up again, so people generally only leave cheap umbrellas in there. I actually think that the original umbrella that I borrowed might have been taken when I was eating my lunch earlier in the day, leaving me to take one from the rack next to it that was identical in size and design (clear, see-through plastic), but I couldn’t be sure about this. These make me a bit uneasy though, since I feel like most of the items I own have (miniature) souls or spirits in them, and I don’t like losing them or exchanging them for identical items unknowingly without time to mentally process (and collecting the item’s souls before) letting go of an item.

Other stores have something different, umbrella bags made of disposable plastic that they leave out front for customers coming into their store to wrap up their umbrella in before actually stepping in. An example of an automatic one looks like this, where one places the umbrella into the hole on top of the lid, and then “pulls” the umbrella out through the side, which leaves the umbrella wrapped up in plastic:

An example of a manual one looks like this, where the person with the umbrella simply takes a bag and slides their umbrella into it:

The umbrella bags are thin and narrow, and the process for using them is more or less to shake the umbrella dry at the entrance of the store, then wrap up and buckle the umbrella as though storing them away, before slipping the end of the umbrella into the long, narrow plastic bag and pulling it up. It’s fairly difficult to think of it as anything else besides an umbrella condom, because that’s basically how it worked — at the end of the shopping trip, the bag would be sensually slid off the stiff umbrella, and it would by then have accumulated a little pouch of water at the bottom due to the wet umbrella constantly dripping water into it while the person was walking around the store. The plastic pouch of water would then be tossed into the bin, usually located right next to where the bag was acquired in the first place. All the CD stores that I entered used this system, as did supermarkets and grocery stores, shopping malls, and even train stations.

Anyway, here’s a general gallery for the Akihabara portion of my day: