This morning James spoilt me with breakfast in bed – while I was still asleep, he went down and bought us some yummy croissants from the hotel bakery, and believe me after staying up until late last night typing up the blog, they were well received, along with an ice coffee which went down a treat.
Today was the day that James and I had to go our separate ways – he to a samurai sword lesson with the choreographer from Kill Bill (cool!!) and I to Asakusabashi, or Bead Town, to stock up on some beads to make some new jewellery. We walked down to Shinjuku station together. Our original plan was to go to Harajuku in the morning to see the cosplayers, however as it was rainy, we took our time getting organised back at the hotel, and instead went straight to our respective destinations – James to the phenomenonally named ‘Jimbo-cho’ where his lesson was to be and myself to Bead Town.
I took a few minutes to work out what train I had to catch, and happily found one that went directly from Shinjuku. Asakusabashi is just on the other side of Akihabara, and so I found the trip followed basically the same line as the one we took yesterday, however I got off a station further along.
It took me a little while to get my head around the neighbourhood of Asakusabashi – the map I had seemed to indicate that there were bead shops all along a plaza where the station was, however when I arrived it became clear that the shops were all built in underneath the rail lines. Honestly, it was madness. There were so many bead shops, some with a couple of floors, all selling amazing beads and at ridiculous prices. Many were aimed at more commercial buyers, with long strands of beads, however several including Parts Club and Kiwa had literally thousands of packets of beads in numbers more suited to casual jewellery makers like myself, and it was so difficult to pick out what I wanted!! I was jealous of the girls and ladies I saw who had lists of items that they wanted to buy to make particular pieces – if I could come and go as I pleased, I would also have been more organised, but as this was my one shot at all of these shops, I just tried to pick out beads that I knew would go together, and findings that I knew I wouldn’t get at home. I got some beautiful swarovski crystal beads, some nice glass pearl beads and some really pretty chain, some cool earring hooks and a couple of really nice kits that will hopefully not be too hard to make up. I also got some charms to make a little Japan bracelet, and some sterling silver chain to link them onto, so hopefully I can get some nice and unique souvinirs out of them when I make them up. One of the hardest things is now having to wait until I get home before I get to play with them all!!
At about 2.30pm I had spent all of my money, and so I headed back to Shinjuku, where I spent some time wandering around the local department stores while I waited for James. We had arranged to meet in front of the lockers with a huge photo of puppies on the front of them, and at 4pm sure enough James arrived, really excited and pleased with how well his lesson had gone.
There was only one other girl and himself in the lesson, and so James had a translator all to himself, who translated what the teacher and his assistant said. The teacher did all of the fight scenes in Kill Bill including the famous restaurant scene, so that was pretty awesome, and he has done heaps of work on other movies released in Japan also. They took photos of James and using his video camera they filmed him doing a mock’fight’ with the assistant, where James kills the assistant and then looks at the camera with a ‘hero’ shot, which is very very cool.
We went back to the hotel so that James could have a snack and we could drop of some stuff, and then headed back out with plans to do Nakano, which has a big Manga/Otaku shopping mall, and then go to Harajuku. First we got to Nakano, and I had read that the big shop called Nakano Broadway was immediately outside the North exit of the station. However we could see no signs to indicate so, only a covered arcade, and so we walked around the block (it was a big block, and took about 20 minutes) before we came to the back of the arcade, where the Nakano Broadway building was. Apparently the arcade is part of the Broadway complex, however the instructions that I had had neglected to tell us this. Anyway, we spent an enjoyable couple of hours looking through an amazing array of shops – the wierdest combination I have ever seen – there were book stores, many branches of Mandarake selling comics, models, gashapon figures, otaku collectibles, etc, cd stores, record stores, cosplay stores, military stores selling replica weapons, toy stores – you name it, Nakano Broadway has it. Downstairs we found clothing, lingerie and fabric stores, as well as shoe stores and a darts store – crazy!!
We had seen all we wanted to see, and were heading to the station to go to Harajuku when disaster struck. It was about 6.10pm, and when James went to get his rail pass, he couldn’t find it. We searched everywhere, every pocket of his jeans, bag – and finally came to the conclusion that it had fallen out of his back pocket. We split up and retraced our steps, and when we met 20 minutes later, I found James looking miserable, holding in his hands the soggy, muddy remains of his pass – it had indeed fallen out, onto the pedestrian crossing, where it had sat in a puddle being stepped on for the past hour or two. Incredibly lucky enough to find it, (I had been doing some serious talking to ‘Tony’ (St Anthony) while I had been scouring the floors) even better was the fact that the part where James’ details were was relatively unscathed, and though soggy, was still readable.
We hurried to the rail office at Nakano station where in a mixture of English and actions, we tried to explain the situation. We were very lucky again to have a very friendly guy serve us, who had a good sense of humour, and when he saw the sad and sorry remains of the pass, instead of lecturing us he just gave a laugh, consulted with this colleagues and then said he would ring Shinjuku station, as they couldn’t do anything about it there. He came back out, grabbed a sheet of paper and sticky tape and said ‘I will repair’ – again with another laugh – and by this stage we had to see the funny side too.
He taped it together, and then wrote a note explaining the situation (in Japanese) which he attached to the sheet of paper. He then said ‘please, be careful…put in bag…!’ he told us that the note he had written would provide James with travel back to Shinjuku, and tomorrow morning we were to take the remains to the Shinjuku rail office, where as the date and James’ name were still readable (‘not broken’) luckily we should be able to get a replacement. This is really amazing, because if it is lost or destroyed it will not be replaced, and we are talking about several hundred dollars’ worth of rail travel…so clearly our guardian angels were looking after us tonight.
We thanked him profusely, and then proceeded to head straight back to Shinjuku. I’m not sure what he wrote on the note attached to the remains of James’ pass, but I think it might say something like ‘please accept this mangled JR Pass that this buffoon has dropped into a mud puddle’ – because every time James showed the note, the JR officer would giggle and let us through with a funny smile…
So feeling a little stressed, we decided to eat the ultimate comfort food, Ramen, for dinner, which we washed down with a much needed beer. A quick visit to the nearby Lush store meant that we could head home to a relaxing bath, so we could soak away the day’s troubles and prepare for another full and hopefully less adventurous day tomorrow.
