This was my last full day in Tokyo, and as I ended up not sleeping at the end of this day in an attempt to defeat jet lag as early as possible, it was also my last non-zombie day in Tokyo. But I needed time tonight to pack my bags -- or more accurately, repack my 30 kg bag and all the extra stuff I'd picked up in Tokyo into two 23 kg bags, so I knew that I couldn't stay out too late.

So in return, my idea was to go out a little earlier than normal (mind you, this was still 12:30 pm-ish rather than 2:00 pm-ish) and then come back earlier to commence packing, and then whatever spare time I had I'd throw into the blog. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan. In addition, another reason I wanted to go out earlier was because today was Akihabara visit day, and I figured the earlier in the day that I go there, the more likely it would be to find the item I was looking for, even if this increased chance was still a very small one.

Plus, I didn't think that I would have time at the end of the evening to go visit that information center that was closing down, before it shut down for the night, so I needed to go do it before I left for Akihabara, so that threw an additional wrench in my schedule. Although I could have technically done it the next day as well, I wouldn't have been able to easily pack anything I bought into the luggage at that point.

So my last full day in Japan found me leaving the hotel a little bit after noon, after refusing room cleaning service from the cleaning lady, which I apparently could do when she asked if I needed room service while I was still in the room, even though the hotel TV said the cleaning every 3rd day was mandatory and couldn't be refused. I did mention I was leaving the next morning though.

My first adventure of the day had me walking over to the Keikyu-Kamata Station yet again. This time, instead of turning left to the ticket gates from the western entrance that I normally used, I turned right instead, taking tha path towards the eastern entrance to Keikyu-Kamata Station (which I had not checked out up till this point, but I did take a couple of minutes here to poke my head out. I remember seeing a whole bunch of pedestrian bridges there.)

Then I went back along the connecting passage, and this time, I stopped by the Ota City Tourist Information Center. There was a second closing notice pasted on the doors, and I took a picture of that this time:

However, it doesn't seem like I actually took any pictures of the interior area. There were desks on the left side, brochure racks to the left of the door and straight ahead that I looted, a kimono wearing area to the right, shelves with stuff to buy in the near left side and far center as well, and some ink stamps on a table in the middle.

I did raid all the brochures and take a copy of pretty much every last one in there though. There were also a couple of product related ones on the shelves next to the products that they were advertising, and I took some of them too. They'll be scanned eventually, like everything else, since they've now all made it home. What I did take a picture of, and what Gemini was somehow spot on regarding its existence, was the commemorative pins sitting in a basket in the Center:

Each one cost 300 yen so I picked one up. Also there were plushies of their mascot, Hanepyon! I was super happy to find this guy and grabbed one of the plushies on sale for 2,700 yen.

Yes, he's holding a washbasin, apparently because Ota City has the most public bathhouses, or sento, of all the wards in Tokyo. I never organically saw one on my journeys here though. Funnily enough, the washbasin is too large for 6 of my 7 Linlee ducks, but the new style one with the funny face fits perfectly into the washbasin.

Oh dear, oh my.

I also picked up all the stamps that I could find for my sticker book, which was a fun project initially near the start of the trip but has taken a distant back seat to the collection of ephemera itself. One of the ladies in the shop, who could speak somewhat broken English, also came up to me and mentioned that they had kimono try-on sessions and a couple other experiences like that for tourists, but that if I wanted to do them I'd have to come by before the 31st since they were closing down afterwards. I mean, I was leaving the next day, but I nodded in understanding and sympathy nonetheless.

I had come away with a sizable pile of brochures from here, and the quickest way from here to Akihabara was through the other station, JR Kamata, rather than this Keikyu-Kamata anyway, so what I did from here was to head west and return to my hotel, dump off the brochures and the plushie and pin on the bed, and then leave again, continuing on westwards to the JR station.

It was past 1 pm at this point and I wanted to eat lunch before I went to Akihabara so I wouldn't have to pay tourist tax prices there for food, so after consulting Gemini, I acquired a list of places where I could have a quick meal around the JR station, and went westwards past the station to have a look-see around there. Before I got to my destination, I saw this in a square just outside the station:

I had no idea what this was, besides some sort of traffic safety thing, nor why there were so many cameras there that looked like they were from private enthusiasts recording the event rather than news outlets (though there were a couple of those, too). I had no time to vet this at that point, but I took a picture and showed it to Gemini and Gemini said that this was the following event:

Kamata Police Station Traffic Safety Parade and Campaign

Date: March 22, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Location: JR Kamata Station West Exit
One-Day Police Chief: Akiko Oshidari (conducted talk show in sign language)
Performances:
• Tokyo Jitsugyo High School Marching Band
• Haneda International High School Cheerleading Team
• Wadaiko Daigen-gumi (Japanese drums)

Huh. That was amazingly exact from a photo. Gemini can do that?! Was it true? I watched it for a while, then went for lunch, then watched it for a little while again on the way back, and I did see the lady with the sash, who was apparently a deaf actress named Akiko Oshidari, doing sign language at that point.

Later on, back in Edmonton, I also asked it for some links as proof, and it gave this link (local) as the primary source and this link (local) as a secondary source. It all checks out! Good job, Gemini. And yes, apparently there is a subculture of enthusiasts who go around either photographing or filming events featuring the actress herself or chasing the police/one-day-chief type of events. Interesting. 

Back to the moment itself though, I was pressed on time so I walked by behind the event to what apparently were a couple of interconnected shopping streets behind. I never realized they were here, since I never walked out the west side of JR Kamata. I didn't have the time to do more than ogle for a couple of minutes though.

I ducked into one of my target shops, the shop with the white sign visible on the left just above this paragraph. Fuji Soba, it was called, and it was a no-frills soba/udon place where I ordered from a machine and then gave the meal ticket to the lady in the checkered clothing behind the counter.

She then asked me if I wanted my order, the Mini Katsudon set, to come with udon or soba, and then hot or cold. I picked hot and soba, so I got a Mini Katsudon with Kakesoba. While it wasn't anything fancy, it was filling and satisfying, and most importantly, quick. It was at my table within 5 minutes and I was out the door within 10 more minutes after that! It cost 770 yen in all and Gemini called this a salaryman's lunch. I also got to keep the meal ticket so that's always a nice little souvenir.

I tried my best to ignore the rest of the very tempting shopping street, and returned to the station after this. It was a 30 minute straight shot along the Keihin-Tohoku line to Akihabara from there, and once again, yet again, I was at the mecca of anime.

Although I had been here six times before, I had never been here on a Sunday as far as I was aware, and according to my blog my previous visits were on:

Monday (Oct 24 2022)
Saturday (Oct 29 2022)
Wednesday (Nov 23 2022)
Tuesday (Jun 13 2023)
Tuesday (Apr 25 2024)
Thursday (Apr 27 2024)

The reason this was significant was that I was actually unaware that Akihabara shut down its streets on Sunday and turns the roads between the buildings into pedestrian paths. I don't know what I don't know, right? That was kind of cool. Also apparently I need to visit Akihabara on a Friday now to complete my set of visiting it on 7 different days.

Anyway, I was here specifically to find one item only this time though, the Tamamo Cross plushie, and I visited multiple shops to try to find this. I started off with the Atre, since it was connected to Akihabara Station itself. It had an Umamusume pop up shop, but for other characters entirely:

Although I made an important find there -- I saw these T-shirts, that looked very familiar:

Those were the Girls Band Cry shirts that I saw on sale, and that I bought one of because Gemini told me that it was a steal, from the official Toei Animation store in Bailian ZX, Shanghai. Now was the moment of truth, was Gemini right?

From Bailian: 120 CNY, which was $23.93 CAD.

From this pop up store: 3,300 JPY, which was about $28.61 CAD

Gemini was right! It was a great price back in China!.

Feeling vindicated, I continued my prowl through Akihabara. I went to Amiami next, and also came up blank there, but I did find a see of clear files there and decided to pick them up. Why not, at 990 yen ($8.64 CAD) in total for both.

Continuing my surgical strikes at the various stores, I found that different stores (obviously) had different items available, the most common types being acrylic stands and badges and nonsense like that that I do not care for. Some stores also sold figures, most notably Astop:

These cute throne ones were in Animate, but again, I don't really go for acrylic stands.

But Animate also had these nice pamphlets that were free to take, including a couple of chirashi movie posters for anime shows, and I grabbed one of each, so that was worth the stop by for sure:

I struck out at a couple other places, most notably Suruga-ya, which was pretty terrible and had no plushies that I could see anywhere. The closest I got to in the end was the 1st floor of Lashinbang, where I found both a couple of Turfy plushies as well as a couple of the anime plushies:

But not quite who I was looking for. Sorry, Satono Diamond.

There was also a random small store on the side of the road with a bunch of plushies laid out, and I found some Turfy ones in there too:

But again, no bananas. Lastly, Mandarake had this amazingly expensive one of a horse girl named Aston Machan:

But I didn't know her and wasn't going to drop 20,000 yen (nearly $175 CAD) on a plushie that wasn't of my favourite character. Heck, probably not even one of my favourite character. Mandarake was also a pain to navigate, since it was a tall but narrow building with 8 or 9 stories and only one single elevator and one single flight of stairs going up to the top. Most people took the elevator up and the stairs down, but that often meant that there was a multiple-minute wait time for the elevator, and if the queue was long enough then a bunch of people would have to wait for the second or third cycle of the elevator before they could get upstairs.

Anyway, my day here was a complete bust, with very few sightings overall of Umamusume plushies. Oh well. It'd be much easier to buy them online when I get home, and there'll be a much wider selection even though it'll be more expensive. Trade a bit extra money for browsing time and selection choice and shipping, I suppose!

At this point, it was 5 pm and I was tired of looking for needles in haystacks. Instead, there was something else on my itinerary nearby that I wanted to check out, so I went back to the station, slipped on the JR Yamanote line, and went to Ueno Station, two stops away. For what? For this.

There was a Ueno Cherry Blossom Festival, also known as the Ueno Sakura Matsuri, that was going on in the attached Ueno Park there from Mar 14 to Apr 05 2026 this year. And, as seen above, special park maps put up featuring their mascot character Uenon that guided people through the annual spring ritual known as ohanami, or flower viewing. I've passed through Ueno Park before, on the way to the Tokyo National Museum nearby, and this park (particularly the zoo) also features prominently in various slice of life anime. I did realize while compiling this post that I also had captured the Ohanami map back in 2024 as well, reproduced below this paragraph, and it was interesting to compare the map above and the map below and look at how it's evolved over time.

The park was quite crowded, with most of the area looking like variations of this living mass of humans:

There was someone controlling a marionette puppet that played a violin, complete with prerecorded violin music in the background. He's apparently a known street performer around Ueno Park and Ueno Station, like this Instagram reel for example, captured by someone else on Dec 10 2025, features the same guy and puppet.

A lot of the sakura trees weren't fully bloomed yet, but several were more resplendent than others, and you could tell which ones, because like bees to honey, tourists and locals both gathered around them for their perfect shots:

While pretty, I was actually more interested as always in capturing shots of people taking shots of the tree (or themselves, or each other).

I wandered off northeast from there, and arrived at this setup as well:

Food stalls! Yes! No trip to Japan is complete without a visit to a festival with food stalls. This was the Ueno Sakura Festa 2026, which is a sub-event that takes place inside the Ueno Sakura Matsuri: Here are a close up of a couple of the signs:

As a sidenote, I did not take a picture of the map on the right hand side, but here's a copy of it anyway:

I acquired that one from the event's official website here (local), which was probably a good thing to archive as well regardless!

I actually hadn't seen a food stall setup with brochures and business cards that I could take before, but this festival did have a couple of tables with a bunch of "coupon" cards that I could take.

I took one of everything, not to use but to preserve, and then also saw this stand and took stuff from here too. I made sure to have a copy of every card, brochure, and even the newspaper from this area that was still available when I arrived to prowl the area.

This turned out to be interesting due to that red card at the bottom. I don't know that that was supposed to be there, but there were two red cards down there when I first arrived at the stand, and they weren't at the table with all the other business cards. I took one, though I noticed when I was leaving later that evening that no one at all had taken the other one. But this was what the card looked like:

And imagine my surprise, when a little bit later on in the late afternoon to early evening, I saw this guy making his way through the crowd:

Hey, it's him! Guerilla marketing!

The stalls themselves were divided into two sections. The main section featured one stall from each of the 47 prefectures, and the banner on top of each of the stalls showed the audience the stuff the stall sold, the name of the stall, and the prefecture that the stall was from. It was very neat to see.

Most of the stall food was themed to be from the prefectures themselves of course. Then there was a second section with just generic stalls, relegated towards the back of the festa, which sold regular festival food to the people that were all prefectured out.

I ended up buying four things from the stalls here for dinner, the first being Shiman Buta-kushi (しまん豚串) from a store named Toramu (トラム), representing Kochi Prefecture. Even though I didn't end up going to Shikoku this trip, I at least ended up eating from their store at this matsuri, I suppose!

I received one long stick of what apparently was some sort of premium pork for 800 yen. It actually tasted pretty darn good, but these were not cheap, and even Gemini was being a critic and saying that there was a significant festival tax on top of everything here while I was asking it to help transcribe and translate the names of the things I was eating. What a downer.

While I was eating, a stage near the Shikoku stalls suddenly burst into song, and I looked up to see a performance going on. I went over to a board on the side of the stage to record the performance schedules:

And then stayed to listen to the music a while as well. These next couple pictures are from different times in the evening, but they feature the same two-girl J-rock band, GAROCKTOKYO (local), as well as another performer called NAOTO (local), the violinist guy in the first picture, as he did a couple of solo songs while the girls were resting at some point. I'm not certain if the third girl in each picture (different person both times) belonged to one or the other though.

But their music was nice, and it was a lot of fun to watch. The crowd in front of the GAROCKTOKYO/NAOTO stage started really small, maybe only a dozen people or so at the very beginning, but as their really loud performance continued on, more and more people gathered there until there wasn't really any room to walk by any longer.

While enjoying their music, I went perusing through the stores again and eventually picked my second rather overpriced item of the night, from a store either named Hinata or Hyuga (the kanji 日向 can go to either one and I'm not sure which one is correct here even after some cursory research), represending Fukuoka Prefecture. I paid 500 yen for the privilege of eating some Hakata Motsukushi Tanpin (博多もつ串単品), which apparently translate to something like Juicy Grilled Beef Offal Skewers, according to the store itself.

This was just a little morsel though -- it was cheap, but the helping was so small as well. Literally this is all I got for the price (it came in a very shallow bowl of "soup"):

Was this worth it?

Unsatisfied, my stomach commanded that I look for more things to eat, and the third stall that I bought from was called something like Hi-Mic (ハイミック), representing Fukushima Prefecture. I ordered Mehikari no Karaage (メヒカリの唐揚げ) or Deep-Fried Mehikari from them, where mehikari is a type of fish known as a greeneye.

I got five fried fishes for 800 yen and they were both filling and delicious! This was a really good purchase, comparatively speaking, and I also appreciated the guy in the above picture posing for the camera, hehe. Best stall I ate at here for sure.

Finally, to polish off the night of festival food, I went looking for something more solid, and eventually settled on this store, GYOZALAB.91 from Tochigi Prefecture.

From them, I ordered their Special Jumbo Gyoza (特製ジャンボ餃子), and got four giant and juicy ones for 800 yen as well.

I wasn't bloated or anything by the end of the festival food, but it was a decent haul. 2900 yen for the four items was pricey all things considered, but not ridiculously so. Just festival tax, as Gemini so rudely called it, and paying for the fun and the festival atmosphere as well. Some items were definitely more worth it than others. I also never did venture over into the "generic food" area of festival stalls to eat. It didn't feel right, when the prefecture specific ones were right next to them.

But this was just half the festival itself, and there was a long line of lanterns lining the side of a road leading away from the eastern park area I was in, back through the center of the park, and towards the western side, along a pedestrian path called the Sakura-dori. At night, the lanterns dominated the landscape and created a very festive atmosphere as people walked the path, which was split into two down the middle for sanity's sake, one side for people walking east and the other for people heading west.

Again, some of the sakura trees, but not all, had bloomed, and people would congregate around them for photos. It was a little more annoying here since due to the way the path worked, that effectively meant that they were blocking part of the very busy walking path. But it worked out for the most part.

Eventually, the path opened up into another square, where there were more festival stalls.

Oops. I wasn't looking to eat any more at this point so I didn't give any of these stalls much love. I did, however, stop to listen to a singer who was performing on a separate stage here, complete with its own separate stage schedule.

The performer who was on stage when I was there was a singer-songwriter named Asuka Nagasawa (長澤明日香). Website here (local). While not pulling the same sort of numbers as the girls on the eastern stage were, her performance was pretty good, and she also had a very tempting table set up next to the stage:

Heck yes, CDs! After her performance ended, she came down there and a couple people lined up to buy signature cards and stuff from her. I joined the queue to buy a CD, and requested to see if she would autograph it as well. She was delighted that I was buying a CD and happily obliged! We had a good chat as well as she asked me where I was from, and I told her that I was from Canada and was leaving tomorrow. She knew a bit of English as well, which makes sense now that I've seen her website as her about page mentions that she studied in Boston for a few months, but we mostly communicated in (my broken) Japanese. I also gave her one of my Edmonton postcards, and she was delighted at this and reciprocated with one of her own cards as well. Look at her go, she's so awesome.

That was a great memory! I hope she finds nothing but success in her future endeavours. I can't imagine the level of mental strength and bravery required to succeed as a solo musician. Here's a picture of my CD, the card, and the other CD that I bought on this trip, taken once i got home.

There was also this humongous sakura tree at the western entraoce of the park itself that drew a lot of gawking and photo-taking visitors:

As well as a wall of lanterns behind it which I think must be the sponsors for the Ueno Sakura Matsuri:

People were taking photos by that one, too.

It was about 7:15 pm at this time and I was almost ready to go home and start packing, but Gemini had actually informed me of a misconception that I had. I had bought some Shiroi Koibito cookies back on Day 4 from New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido with the idea that I was going to lug them all the way back home, since I thought that they were only sold in Hokkaido and airside in Haneda/Narita Airports, and not in general around the other cities in Japan.

However, Gemini told me that that was not quite true. While they are indeed sold airside in the airports, there was apparently one place that permanently sold them in Tokyo as well, and that was the Hokkaido Dosanko Plaza, in the Tokyo Kotsu Kaikan in Yurakucho, as that was an official prefectural satellite shop. I was told that the Tokyo Kotsu Kaikan was a mall that was home to a bunch of different official prefectural shops from around Japan. This was intriguing, as it would save me a checklist item to do tomorrow, and would also mean that I could pack the chocolates as checked luggage instead of carrying them with me in my sling bag all the way home.

In addition, I really wanted to find out if this was true in general, since it was a fairly well known, if perhaps apocryphal, story that Ishiya, the company that makes Shiroi Koibito cookies, only sold them within Hokkaido and the occasional Hokkaido popup market event around Japan. I had tried looking for them in Osaka before in the past to no avail. The problem was that that shop closes at 8 pm, whereas it was almost 7:30 pm by the time I was ready to leave Ueno Park, and Yurakucho was five stations away on the Yamanote Line.

Five stations away in this case meant less than 10 minutes of travel though, especially since I caught the train just as I arrived on the platform, so there was basically no idle waiting time at the station as well. I arrived at Yurakucho a little before 7:35 pm, and found the shop in question with over 20 minutes to spare, as it was very visible as it was the closest shop in the mall to the station and was facing it with a bright yellow shopfront.

And lo and behold, they had tons of the cookie boxes inside still:

Awesome! They had the black chocolates, the white chocolates, and the mixed boxes as well. I bought the white ones as those were the ones that Mom liked.

That was the end of my adventures for the night, so I took the trains home from there to my hotel in Kamata. I had a nice, long shower and then rested for a bit before sorting my ephemera and trying to figure out all the food names that I had eaten in the festival, and all the stall names I had bought them from. This took way too long.

After that, I started work on the main activity of the evening, trying to sort my bags into two 23 kg lead weights so that they would both pass the weight check at the baggage dropoff at the airport tomorrow. I ran into two unexpected obstacles here, the first being that the Innovator bag that I had bought two days ago just wasn't very big, and the second was that I couldn't weigh my larger luggage bag very well with the digital scale because to get an accurate weight reading, I had to hold the bag off the ground and still for 3 seconds or so, and I just couldn't do it with that bag. It was too large and the handle wasn't right in the center of the bag so it kept on drifting in small circles and throwing off the weight just enough that the weight value never locked in.

I also learnt that jerking the bag up from the ground too roughly, or at too much of an angle, would also throw off the weighing and give inaccurate numbers, so by the end of it all, even though I had managed to squeeze three of my Kokuyo Novita folders and a bunch of my other denser things into the Innovator and managed to lock it all, and get a decent-ish reading of about 20 kg on it, I still wasn't fully confident that my larger bag was under 23 kg. It was *around* there, but who knows what the scale at the airport would actually say? The digital scale was great at weighing the things that I was moving into the smaller bag from the larger one, a couple at a time, though, since for that all I did was to put the items being moved into a lightweight bag and weigh that bag to find out the delta change in the weight of the two suitcases from that particular manouver.

In my mind, I had this fantasy that repacking the bag would just take a couple of hours, and I would be done at midnight, maybe 1am, and then could spend the rest of the hours before my checkout at 10 am knocking out a blog entry, maybe even two! Hah. Each attempt to weigh the larger suitcase bag left me with pouring sweat, and it took me all the way until somewhere between 6 am and 7 am to finally partition all my ill-gotten loot between my two bags in such a way that I finally felt they were both under the weight limit. After that, I went to take another quick shower to freshen up, since I figured I wouldn't be able to take another one after that until I reached my Edmonton home, which was around 30 hours away.

I did some pre-checkout prep work like logging out of my Spotify account on the room's smart TV, then finally managed to devote a couple of hours into blog-writing, before checkout time rolled around and the TV rudely turned itself on to flash a message that it was nearly checkout time and a late checkout would cost me some money. I had curated the images that I was going to upload to this blog post already, and wanted to use the hotel internet to upload all of it to my WordPress installation before I left the hotel room, so I ended up stretching my stay to the very last couple of minutes before I awkwardly rolled both my wheeled luggage bags out the door, then down the hall and into the elevator. My trip was almost over! Sayonara, my final hotel room of the vacation!