As my latest long trip gradually winds down towards the end, I find myself overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I'm tired and want to go home. Travel is expensive and getting sick twice sucks, blogging takes up a lot of time, working on my laptop instead of my computer with a big keyboard, two monitors, and a wired connection is uncomfortable, I miss gaming and doing things with my friends, and I want to "extract and secure" all my current loot and just sleep in my normal bed and eat crappy instant noodles and random hotpot soup every other day again.

On the other hand, there's so much else to do out here, that I haven't yet seen, but that I should go see and do while I'm here. There's too many things that I could still do and too little time left. Should I really be blogging when I could be exploring another really neat mall at yet another really neat station, or looking for more anime character goods or something that I want, or visiting shrines, or looking for sakura festivals, or looking up other cool things to do? Now that I'm out of China and all the "friction" of travelling there is gone, it feels like I can breathe and dance again. And Japan is such a transient country, from the point of view of a chronicler trying to collect and scan ephemera to help historians in the future, there's just so much to find and save. It's a literal endless paper trail everywhere.

I wish it were cheaper to come here to Japan for short trips. When it costs around $1,000 CAD at the very least, if not closer to $1,200, for the round-trip plane ticket alone, I feel obligated to spend a bunch of time here at once, whereas if I could secure round-trip tickets for $500 I'd be more likely to just do a week or two here four  times a year or something. Japan's tourist prices keep ratcheting up too, and anything one saves on tax-free goods now goes right into accommodation tax and more expensive train tickets anyway. Love the energy, hate the cost. Whereas in China, I love the low cost of living but am uncomfortable with some of the energy, like there being cops and soldiers everywhere, and how children just carry around toy rifles in public, and those Meituan mosquitoes going honk honk honk on their motorcycles every hour in the day, and there being so many aggressive hawkers.

But even that is contradictory. Japan, especially Tokyo, feels like a treadmill that I am constantly running on, a hamster running on a wheel that others are trying to extract money from. It feels like I'm constantly needing to filter out shiny things that are trying to get my attention, and also playing an ongoing game with social rules that I don't fully comprehend, and and even though Japanese people are better than Chinese people at English and far more polite, my Japanese is worse than my Chinese and so there's a larger language barrier here too. Whereas in China, overall the vibe I got was that it was more of an authentic, lived-in place, and not a facade built for tourists, on average.

But yes, my soul does need a bit of home time. I have been feeling pangs of loneliness now and then, in particular once around Fuyou Road in Shanghai that I didn't talk about but that surprised me because I was in a crowd of people and suddenly felt very far away and out of place. And the conflicting feelings are tough to deal with near the end of a trip. I don't mind saying I cried in the hotel room tonight, Mar 20, for no good reason other than to let out stress and fatigue and the conflicting feelings. Felt much better afterwards.

We're nearly there. Like it or not. The end is nigh, but the end is merely the beginning of a new adventure. I will likely be back to China and Japan sooner rather than later, possibly even before the end of this year if several pieces line up and if I feel the wanderlust building up again. Otherwise, next year. And in the meantime I have lots of memories and ephemera to scan and process anyway! Being a chronicler of the times is my life's goal, and the correct move for that is to actually process the things that I have collected over the past 40 days or so, and regroup to reflect on any mistakes I have made and see how I can do what I do better, since I do not think anyone else in the world actually does it.

(For any readers that kind of plopped in halfway, "what I do" is go around collecting ephemera while I am on holiday, and bring them back home to scan, and then discard most of them after. I digitize things to save them so that historians and researchers in the future have primary sources that would otherwise have just dissolved into the ether of time. This is what drives me and makes me happy in life, and is my personal answer to the question of what the meaning of (my) life is. I currently upload my stuff on archive.org here and have a large backlog of scanned stuff that I haven't uploaded, and a larger backlog of stuff to scan yet!)

Alright, enough pontification. Life, travel, and people are complex, everyone knows that. We're here about the travel diary, yes? My goal today was to buy a second luggage bag for my trip home, as I had a quota of 1 checked bag with a 30 kg limit for my Shanghai to Tokyo flight, but 2 checked bags with a 23 kg limit each for Tokyo to Edmonton. I also had a 7 kg carryon limit for Shanghai to Tokyo, but was carrying something closer to 13 kg there, and they thankfully did not check limits there. I also have spent two days in Tokyo so far, and have easily accumulated 1-2 kg of paper a day from just walking around and raiding brochure and magazine racks. Paper is heavy!

So the way the math works, I brought into Tokyo: 30 kg + 13 kg = 43 kg. I have a limit of 23 kg x 2 + 10 kg = 56 kg. The new bag itself is going to weigh a couple kg on its own as well. So say 43 kg + 3 kg for the bag + 2 kg of paper per day x 5 days in Tokyo = hey, that's 56 kg. With souvenirs and gifts, I might go a little over that, but those numbers are very top-end conservative anyway, I don't think I actually bring back 2 kg of paper a day (though I could if I tried) and that includes nonsense like my phone and batteries that I can always stuff into my pocket. My bigger worry is actually how to properly separate my stuff into two bags that are around 23 kg each.

I started the day by going west from my hotel instead of east. I outlined my neighbourhood in yesterday's post, but basically my hotel is in (southern) Kamata district in Ota City, and is right smack between two stations on the border of the district, Keikyu-Kamata on the east and JR Kamata on the west. I'm about a 5-10 minute walk from either station, but came in from Narita Airport via the Keikyu-Kamata station, so I was more familiar with that half of the district. Well, time to find out what was in the other half of the district!

This tree, for starters.

This is apparently yet another different type of sakura tree that isn't the main, and most famous one, the Somei Yoshino that the sakura blooming calendar and most of the tourism photos revolve around. This one is a weeping cherry tree, or a Shidarezakura. I found it interesting that this one was wrapped with green netting in the middle of a paved plaza too.

There was also a notice board nearby that I snapped a picture of to save.

And then I ended up in front of this building by taking a wrong turn on the way to the station. Oh no. This was the Kamata Ekimae Library, and contained a ton of flyers and pamphlets and stuff.

Although there were duplicates between them, the front lobby had about 15 brochure racks and that took me nearly an hour to go through and pick and choose interesting things to take home even with Gemini's help in scanning through the shelves. I was somewhat encumbered already and I had barely started the day's adventures!

After departing the library, I went back to the intersection that I had taken the wrong turn at to end up at the library, and went the other day to end up at Granduo Kamata, a two storey mall attached to the JR Kamata train station.

The way this mall worked, there were two separate buildings, the east wing which went up 6 storeys, and the west wing which went up 9. The JR Kamata Station connected the two with a concourse on level 2 of both buildings, and there was a walkway across level 3 of both buildings that overlooked the station down below as well.

Gemini had suggested a couple places to eat a late lunch to start, and one of them was a sushi restaurant on the 6th floor of the east wing. The whole station and mall was incredibly crowded though, likely partially because of the holiday (Vernal Equinox Day/Shunbun no Hi) and even though I got there at 4 pm, I was faced with this.

Yikes. That line of people sitting down on the left side of the photograph were in queue for the sushi place. There were people in queue for another restaurant on the far right side as well, and a third one where the line was kept in a stairwell on the far left side by restaurant side so they wouldn't block the hallway. This place was a complete bust, and I fled the scene as quickly as I could.

Instead, I picked another option from Gemini's list that wasn't inside the station itself. Instead, it was about a three minute walk away, and was called Maruyama Shokudou. It had apparently closed earlier in the afternoon after lunch and had just reopened for the dinner rush at 4 pm, yet I only barely managed to grab the last empty seat in the place when I arrived at the place.

These pictures of the eatery below are from *after* I finished my meal though, so it looks like it cleared out a bit once that initial 4 pm rush was over.

It was kinda fancy in that it was just a square bar surrounding the kitchen with one single table at the side for a group of up to 4 to eat. Everyone else ate at the bar. I made my order by just picking the daily special that was listed on the door above, the "Today’s Service: Shoulder Loin Ginger Pork (Shogayaki)" for 2,000 yen.

The pork was pretty good, although it was supposed to come with a fried egg that I couldn't find anywhere... until I lifted up my final pork chop and found a large fried egg, almost perfectly the same size and shape, hiding beneath it, haha. Also the name of the dish reminded me of ginger beef from Canada but of course was nothing like that, nor was I expecting that.

After lunch, I went back to the earlier mall, Granduo Kamata, again. I went hunting there in the Muji for a luggage option, and found their store's line of hard shell cases:

I wasn't really feeling it though, plus the crowd was wearing on me, so I left it as a backup option for now. Gemini claimed that there was a Loft in the opposite building, so I went down to level 3 and crossed over to the other side, which meant that I passed by a little arts and crafts display that was going on in the walkway called the Ota Culture Week in Granduo 2026. There were also a few nice brochures here that Gemini really liked, and this is one of the rare times when it gave me the okay to take every brochure I found here because they were just so worth it from a cultural and ephemeral standpoint.

Stuff like that. They'll all be scanned and uploaded someday. Not that plushie though. I didn't find a version of it that I could take home. 🙁

When I got to the other building, I learnt that Gemini had actually hallucinated the existence of the Loft store here, which was very annoying. I guess the hallucination still worked out to some extent since it got me to the culture festival brochures, but the occasional misdirections like this to something that very obviously do not exist, but that are too nearby for me to bother to double check before going there, do ultimately eat up time to verify that they don't exist, and Gemini apologized and said that the nearest Loft store was accccktually one stop north at Omori Station instead.

So fine, I hopped on the train and zoomed over there even though it was getting late in the evening already. The Omori Station area was pretty nice all lit up though, and these pictures are from both my journey to the Loft store and then back later on:

(Hey, there's a sign for another Nihao 你好 branch there in that picture just above -- the place I ate dinner and those winged gyoza at last night).

The Loft store was located in a mall called Ito-Yokado Omori, which is apparently a subsidiary of the same parent company that owns the 7-Eleven convenience stores. It was about ten minutes away on foot from the train station.

I quite liked this sign I found inside the mall toilets on the 3rd floor:

The entire mall was set up in an open concept sort of way, without walls between different shops. The entire ground floor was a supermarket that sold groceries and prioritized 7-11 products, and was open until 10 pm, while the rest of the mall featured individual stores in a kind of departmental store format but closed at 9 pm. There was a food court on the 3rd floor, and the Loft store was also there:

But it turned out that they did not sell suitcases at all in this store, although i did eventually end up buying other gifts here like a nice pen for Mom that Kel said that she could probably use. If I'm using this to look up the exact model to get refills in the future, the model was a Uni Jetstream Blue Pen 0.5 mm SXN-150-05 and the blue ink refill for it is called SXR-5 Blue Ink Refill for SXN-150-05. Got it? Great!

Regarding the luggage, the cashier lady whom I asked directed me downstairs to a store name Gran Sac's instead.

This was a pretty good store, and did stock a couple of the models from the list that Gemini had given me that people considered to be reputable brands online, and had various extra features that I might want. In the end, after a lot of hemming and hawwing, I settled on the left one here:

This was from Innovator, a Swedish-Japanese brand, though the suitcases themselves were made in China, and they featured things like ultra-quiet and lockable wheels, a built in TSA-approved numerical lock, and most importantly, a front pocket that I could slip things into without having to open the entire case, which I really appreciated.

I was also trying to get a hardshell case sturdy enough to hold nearly 23 kg of stuff, but that was also small enough to act as a carry-on piece for short flights that I might want to do around Canada in the future or something. And so I picked the Innovator INV50 pictured above here, because it had a "Carry on" label on it, which meant that it was sized for doing just that. This turned out to be a problem later on though, once I got home and realized that the dimensions of the INV50 were actually 55 x 35 x 25 cm, and the 25 cm is a problem because while many airlines do accept 25 cm as the maximum for a carry on, Westjet, Air Canada, and Flair only accept 23 cm, and most Canadians use those vultures to get around as we don't really have many other options. Both ANA and JAL accept this one as a carryon though, so I could just stick to using those two too when I'm flying out.

What did make me feel better about this later on in the evening though, shortly after I had found that fact out, was that the smaller version of the Innovator was also 25 cm wide, and the Muji one that I was otherwise looking at was *also* 24 cm, so none of them would have strictly worked either. That's a future problem though, from a preliminary review I do like the convenience of this suitcase very much nonetheless and it allows me some interesting manouvers like putting it inside of my larger luggage bag if needed on the onset of a future long trip. And I'll probably try it as a carry-on now and then in the future too and see what kinds of travel stories that creates.

This store ended up being a Tax Free store too, so after I produced my passport, the price of the luggage bag went down to 21,800 yen all in all, which was charged to my card as $190.34. in comparison, the Muji one would have been about $179 if I signed up for a member account as there was a Muji Week special going on that gave members 10% off, but I would have had to figure out a weird process to get an account as the Muji app was region locked in the Google store to me and my Canadian account, despite me being right there. So stupid. There might have been a tax-free process on top of that too though, but still, this one didn't cost much more.

And in addition, since I didn't know all the words needed to discuss bag features, the attendant who came over to check on me was very helpful and nice, which was a far cry from the friction that buying from Muji would have caused. I also ended up coming back to the same Gran Sac's store a little later in the evening to buy a digital luggage weighing scale, and the same lady just tacked it on to the purchase and gave me the tax back on that as well, which was very nice. I mean, it was correct as it was still the same day and I had spent more than 5,000 yen there in total, but still, because it was a separate purchase later on, getting a different cashier at a much busier store might have meant that I would then have to bring it down to the tax free counter on the first level to get a refund later on.

And I wouldn't have had time for that, because for the moment, I lugged that bag around the mall to loot a bunch of brochures, and consulted with Kel on exactly which pen to get Mom. Then I checked the time and noticed that it was 8:20 pm, and a sign said that Last Order for the food court was at 8:30 pm. Whoops. This picture was from a little earlier on in the evening when it was busier:

But it was significantly quieter by the time I got around to ordering my own dinner. I ordered a dish called Yasai Tappuri Champon, or Champon with lots of vegetables, from a store called Nagasaki Champon Ringer Hut. Champon (or chanpon) is a dish that I have had before, both from this same franchise and other ones, but as I've never had it outside of the context of a mall food court, so to me all the memories of the dish involve places very similar to this one, and it has kind of built up a certain comfort level for me due to that. The sort of comfort level where that's what I'll go for if I'm ten minutes away from Last Order and need to decide on something to eat.

It came with little bottles of condiment to use too, which was a nice touch, though I only took a little bit of both.

By the time I was done with my meal, the entire mall was closing down except for the ground floo supermarket which still had an hour to go, so I went down there to walk around a while. Gemini told me to look out for some spring special teas that either had seasonal branding or were recently relaunched, and I found and bought these two bottles of Kirin Namacha Houjicha:

Neat. I don't know if I have the bag space to bring that sort of nonsense back, but if I do I might try.

I left the mall after that and walked back to the station, being careful to carry my bag off the ground where possible so as not to dirty its wheels too much yet. But on the way back, the crossbody strap on my sling bag, which had already broken once in Haikou and was being held together in a patchwork sort of way, finally gave out and set my bag crashing down to the ground again. Funny coincidence there, as I had just been thinking about the bag and its strap a few minutes before that and wondering if it would hold up until we got home. Well, that was a resounding no.

Thankfully, the bag again fell on a completely safe and dry part of the pavement, and as it's built like a tank, nothing inside was damaged or spilled out. The hook portion of the crossbody sling was now completely broken though, so I removed the crossbody strap and just used it as a regular handbag instead. Less convenient, but also really unlikely to break and fall since there were two shoulder straps so at least two of the four bag connections would have to break. I'll need to retire and replace this bag once I return home though.

That was all the drama that happened on the way home, thankfully. I crawled back to my hotel room and set down my new extraction vehicle, ready to repack all my stuff on the last night of my stay here. I noticed that I had basically collected two China cities worth of brochures in two days in Japan, which was a little distressing, but I can always throw away some stuff if needed when packing on the final day. Hopefully I don't. I'll be curious to see how much space I have at the end!

After sorting and labelling all my gathered ephemera for the day, I tried to go to bed, but after a little emotional breakdown as mentioned earlier, even though I felt better afterwards, gruesome slumber did not come for me in the darkness while I was tossing and turning in bed on the awful pillows, so I got up and watched some calming marbles on my hotel room television while and working on my blog a little instead. I ended up not sleeping until 4 am tonight. I wonder how bad my jet lag will be upon returning home!