Japan: The Final Days

So now I am in the airport and all I really have left to do is get on the plane itself. It is finally actually over oh geez. This was "quite the trip" to say the least. My last full day here was a lot of fun, too. I was thinking about going to the zoo but decided that was sort of silly 'cause it's not like there isn't zoos at home or anything. Only other reason I had to go is that I figured it'd be an okay parallel to the end of Cancer Ward but that's not really a happy line of though.



Anyways I then considered spending the day scrambling to fit in what few experiences I had planned on but hadn't gotten around to, but I thought maybe if I failed to do them, that would end the trip on a sour note. I mean they were pretty silly and few things, here's pretty much a



Comprehensive List of Things I had figured I might do in Japan but I Didn't
-Eat beef sashimi. Not sure why I really wanted it. I just sort of assumed it would be more like the opportunity would be everywhere and I'd eventually just go eh yeah alright I'll try me some raw beef.
-Go swimming in the ocean. This turned out to be way less feasible than I thought and probably wouldn't be all that great, I mean, it's not like it'd be that warm or anything.
-Go to hot springs. Pretty much the same as w/ the ocean. Also I'm not sure if I really wanted to do this or if I just wanted like, the experience and authenticity, which is why it would be so hard to do.
-Find the albums Zatraciene and Coctura by Matryoshka and Color Variation's self titled. Haha, just kidding, I never actually expected I would find these.



With regards to that last point, though, I still have this lingering feeling that those albums must be somewhere out there. One of the things I did on the last day oh uh yeah better finish making that point first: I didn't want to just scramble around trying to knock the last few things off the list, but almost in some contrast to that I did go to some record stores while just wandering around in some of my favorite areas and trying to really solidify my favorite parts and what seemed to me to be quintessential Japan, and I did look for these albums, and yeah I feel like I was close. There's just so, so many cool record stores in Osaka. I'd say like the top five record stores I've been in are all exclusively Osakan ones. Maybe I will make a list of that sometime as well.



Anyways though I wouldn't say it's so much that Osaka is known for music. And although I made a point earlier about how Japanese stores for enthusiasts are much different than ours in terms of them not prioritizing accessibility over selection I'm not sure if this applies to record stores as most of those back home just have the same sort of rows after rows etc. And I mean like, the selection is great, and unique, and the increased presence of Japanese stuff is cool, and it seems like because the stuff that's getting imported is getting imported by people who have made the effort to get into the genres, there's a higher quality standard, maybe, and that leads to all sorts of cool stuff like Panda Bear floor displays and sorting by hip hop label and uh, well, originally I was going to make the point that Japanese record stores might not be so great and it's more just big cities have good record stores in general and I just haven't spent enough time in a big enough city before but now that I'm writing it out I think I might still think that Japanese record stores really are much better.



So there's that. So yeah, hit the record stores, bid one last fond farewell into the great otaku kingdom that is Den Den Town (where I ran into the video game bar owner again, odd), wandered around my favorite neighbourhood areas, etc, went home. When my cousin got home we went to “Round One Entertainment”, which is the big time-based arcade we went to soon after we got to Osaka and I wrote about awhile back. I played a bunch of Taiko and DDR, naturally, and my skills for those are now on the level of “not embarrassing”, which is exciting. I also played this rhythm action gun game that was broken the first time we went. It's essentially like Osu!/EBA except you shoot the targets instead of tapping or clicking them. Probably not coincidentally, it had Osu! staple “Bad Apple!”, and I also played “Only My Railgun”, which is a staple of pretty much every game in Japan, it seems – seriously, I played it in like a half dozen games over the trip – and have now started enjoying that song so much I might actually go back to watching Raildex. We went later this time, so the video games shut down before our time ended. The sports games upstairs stayed open, though, so we did like the batting cages, the tennis hopper, the ping-pong hopper thing, pool, etc, etc. Really fun.



This morning I went back down to Tokyo and managed to find my way to the airport. My last proper meal was a “traditional spread” that had this weird duality of tourist marketing but also a good number of actual Japanese people “unironically” eating it, and it was really good. Had like, pork cutlet, rice (obvs), miso soup, a shrimp and fish custard thing, tempura, a bit of sashimi, tasty! In the luggage line I talked to a woman who was coming back from visiting her daughter. She had married a Canadian, though, and lived in Canada, although her adult daughter didn't. She was showing me a book she had bought about a cat who works with a doctor. Really fun sort of conversation. Keep expecting to see her again at the gate, not sure if we now have like a responsibility to reengage conversation. Anyways I hope she has a good flight home as well. I personally plan on sleeping a lot and playing Tetris. Battery is running low plus boarding starts soon anyways so that's it for this final in-Japan instalment! I do have like a million anecdotes and observations and lists and stuff I've been jotting down, though, plus the final report of the big haul, so I guess tune in for the retrospective??? Plus don't forget all the quality content this blog normally has like uh talking about anime for way too long or music or I dunno can you believe there's over 200 posts of this stuff now?