On the 2nd day I went to Akihabara after applying for an Alien registration card to try open a bank account so I can do online shopping from Japan easier.
Since I took so long sorting everything out with the Alien registration card, it was already past lunch time and I decided to have a quick wonder around Radio Kaikan outside Akihabara station before I had to leave to meet up with my friend for dinner.
Each time I went to Akiba, I’d pass by Shibuya to change from the train station to the subway. So I decided to take a few photos of Shibuya. I’ve only ventured as far as to the outside of the station, but haven’t gone any further than that. I remember there are some anime shops there according to a book my friend, Mac, lent me so I have to check that again.
Akihabara had changed a bit since the time I went about 1.5 years ago, and it also seemed that the station was under construction which I reckoned ruined the atmosphere a bit. I didn’t even see any girls in maid outfits handing out stuff. Still, all the shops where there, and I ended up buying quite a bit of stuff on the 2nd day there. For the first day, I just mainly held back from spending money and just got used to the standard prices of everything at different stores to figure out the average price. My shopping for the first day was a 1/4 scale Konata figure released by Freeing and a 5 CDs of Manami Okui’s music.
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I found one of the limited edition Kanakon figures while I was checking out Kotobukiya in Radio Kaikan. Even the the figure was meant to be a Wonder Festival only exclusive, which I didn’t buy at the event despite there being heaps of stock. I was able to buy it from there on my 2nd day after deciding that I actually wanted it. 
I started my 2nd day with K-Books and aimed to buy a few art books and groundwork books to help me learn to draw my favourite anime characters. I tried to look for Key’s 10th Anniversary art book called “White Clover” for myself and my friend Mac, although all I could find was the limited edition version that was selling for twice the price and apparently had some damage to it.
I always enjoy looking at the rental showcase boxes to find some bargains, and managed to buy the entire set of Key plushies for a cheap price.
By that time, I had a look in one of the other stores before I got a call from Ronald (Rin) who wanted to meet up. Since we were both in Akihabara, we decided to meet up next to softmap. It was a funny experience since we both knew there were a lot of softmaps there, but fortunately we were able to find each other pretty quickly.
Ronald took me around and it seemed he knew his stuff about where to buy things from Akihabara. Although I have been to Akihabara many times before, I am not as familiar with it as he is mainly because I often bought too much and got too tired of walking up 7 floors of stairs for each and every building on every street. (^^;)
Anyways, we did a bit of visiting various stores and noticed one store he took me to sold some resin kits at decent prices. I saw a couple of Liquid Stone ones at some decent prices, so I plan to check it out again when I go back to Tokyo. I hope it won’t be sold by then. (>_<)
After all my shopping I left Ronald, and met up with my friend to have some sushi at a revolving sushi resturant.
After leaving Perth for Singapore, I wasn’t able to get any internet access until after getting into Japan, apart from at the internet booths at Singapore which I used to check my email and find out Rin’s mobile number to meet up with him at the Wonder Festival 2009 figure event on the day of my arrival to Japan. The plane on Singapore airlines was quite nice, and they had quite a few movies to pick from, although I only watched a couple, including a bit of dragon ball evolution. For the meal, the ran out of meals when they got to me, so they gave me one of the first class meals which was something called Fish Pasta. It essentially was a nice piece of fish on top of some pasta. The fish was really nice, but the pasta was rather flavourless. I think the economy class meals probably would of been nicer. (^_^;)
After arriving in Singapore, I didn’t really look around much at Singapore, I got to the boarding area when the boarding should of been open, but the entire area was empty apart from a Japanese family who arrived at the same time. In the end, the boarding area did end up getitng packed and ended up boarding the plane after a bit of a wait.
The plane I arrived in was a 2 storey plane which even had suites in it. I was located at the end of the plane, and mainly just slept, though I did get to have a midnight snack in the form of a hot turkey sandwich which was quite tasty.
When I arrived in Japan, I had planned a busy schedule of going to the courier to deliver my luggage to my friend’s place I was staying at and get my mobile phone sorted out to use it in Japan. In the end, although I got through customs pretty quickly, getting my mobile phone set up took quite a while as I was checking all the rental plan they had and took my time deciding which was the cheapest and most suitable for me. I ended up geting a rental SIM card from Softbank for my Japanese phone that I was using in Australia. The rental fees are cheaper than renting an actual phone, which was conveninet for me. I also enabled the internet access on it letting me send emails at an expensive rate.
I ended up taking the train to Kaihin Makuhari Station as the bus I was planning to take already left by the time I was ready, so instead of waiting till 10am and arriving at 11am. Unfortunately it ended up taking much longer by the train, although it was about 1000 yen cheaper than the bus.
When I arrived at Kaihin Makuhari, I didn’t really know the way to get to Makuhari Messe and didn’t know which halls it would be in, so I simply followed everyone. It was a good idea, since there was a huge stream of people headed for the event despite my late arrival to the station. It was about 11am by then. Everything was going well until the stream of people split into two heading in different directions and I ended up following the wrong people. That took quite a bit of time and after all the walking I was pretty exhausted considering I had just came from Winter straight into summer. It acutally was 33 degrees and humid which was apparently hotter than the previous days in Tokyo. I ended up finding my way to the 2nd floor of the event and although I couldn’t enter via there, I took some really nice photos overlooking one of the halls of the event.
I had to go downstairs to get to the entrance where there was a little queue to buy the entrance tickets which was actually the guide book for the event. It cost 2000 yen and despite the really small number of people, the staff still wanted me to wave my book in the air. (^^;)
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Currently waiting for my plane at Perth International airport..
Even though it’s winter, it’s really stuffy and hot here.. but i don’t wanna buy at $3.50 bottle of water. Haha! I probably will though. 
Managed to claim back my tax for my digital camera safely, though the 16GB memory card i bought seperately I couldn’t. Apparently you have one receipt adding up to over $300AU.
Oh well.
It’s the day before my flight and I am about to go to Japan. Currently packing my bags and have been checking my documents to see if I have all the contact details of all the people I’m gonna meet, confirming my schedule and checking if i’ve brought everything.
Ah! So busy!
I'll be leaving for Japan this Saturday (25th July). It would be cool to
meet up with some of you while in Japan if you would like to meet up.
I'll be there for about 5 weeks. Pretty much all of August.
My current schedule is:
July：
２６th Arrive in morning, head straight to Wonder festival (Meet with
Japanese Otaku friend (やす６９), Rin and also try meet Danny Choo)
２７th： Have plans
２８th： Shopping at Akiba
July ２９th-Aug ２nd Go to Himeji to visit friends
August：
３rd-６th Shopping at Osaka
７th-８th Have plans
９th Tokyo Figure Show at Harajuku to meet Danny Choo (if possible) on
last day of event
１０th Have plans
１１th-１３th Shopping at Akiba
１４th-１６th Gone to Comic Market!
１７th-20th No plans.. in Tokyo
２１th Go to Karate tournament at Makuhari Messe
２２th-２３rd Watch the Animelo music festival
24th No plans
２５th Have plans
２６th-28th No Plans
２９th Go to C3ｘHOBBY for the first day and leave at lunch for flight
home.
If anyone is headed to Japan in August, I done some research into what events are on.
Here is a short list of them:
Wonder Festival Summer 2009
Comic Market 76
Tokyo Figure Show (Hosted by Danny Choo at Harajuku)
Gundam Big Expo
Amateur Radio Festival Ham Fair
Animelo
C3xHobby
Monster Hunter Festa (at Makuhari Messe)
Kyokushin Karate Tournament (at Makuhari Messe)
Also, since it's summer, there is a high chance you will come across a
lot of fireworks and matsuri (festivals) during your stay.
Hope to meet up in Japan if you're interested.
Just let me know when in my schedule is a good time to meet. I'm happy
to meet on day of events and so on, just ask and I'll see what we can
sort out.
I already have plans to meet up with a few people, but please leave a comment if you’re interested.
After reviewing my photos I took at Supanova the weekend 2 weeks ago, I realized that most of the photos I took with my old camera, a Casio Exlim EX-V7, were all blurry. (>_<)
Since I am set to go to Japan in under 1.5 weeks, I decided to get a new camera to let me take decent shots of figures at Wonder Festival, Comic Market 76, Hobby Complex and other events as well as some shots of the full scale Gundam in Odaiba.
I tend to prefer point and shoot camera over the big bulky DSLR cameras, so I decided on the Panasonic Lumix LX-3 which I kept seeing awesome photos taken with the camera on DannyChoo.com.
Since I’m a complete noob when it comes to cameras, I got a couple of my good friends to look over the specs for the camera, and from reading some reviews, it seems to have a lens which is capable of taking photos in low light which should resolve my blurry photos problem.
I bought the camera on the net from Digital Camera Warehouse, which managed to get the camera to me within 4 days of ordering it with a spare battery, a 4GB memory card and a LC-1 lens cap. I tried the LC-1 lens cap but it wouldn’t fit, and didn’t want to risk damaging the screw thread on the camera, so I decided to just use the included lens cap instead.
I have to say that the camera is very nice. I was able to take many more photos without even a flash that turned out clearly, and I enjoyed experimenting with the 16:9 sized photos.
I did take a few shots outside the house just to play around with it, but I mainly spent my time figuring out the macro shots as I plan to take a lot of pictures of figures with the camera.
The camera was quite expensive, at least to me at $650, considering it is about 6 times more expensive than my old one. However, after using it for a while, I think it was worth it. I was a bit disappointed that 10MP isn’t much of an improvement from 7MP, but the pictures still look more dynamic on this camera.
July 16th,2009
Shopping |
4 Comments
I haven’t been to Supanova before, so I thought even though I am going to Japan very soon, I should go and see what it is like. Since I’m running low in time till I leave to Japan, I’ll try to minimise the text and let the photos do the explaining.
The event is a 3 day anime and sci-fi event, which starts with a Friday night session which involves meeting some famous actors, voice actors, charity anime auction, charity cosplayer slave auction and a screening of “5cm a second”.
Friday:
The Friday night was interesting, however I had a lot of trouble finding the venue of the event as all the lights were off, and there were no signs indicating where the convention was held. Fortunately with the help of a GPS, I was able to somewhat pinpoint the location of the event.
Entry involved swapping our tickets with some wrist bands that we had to wear ALL weekend. That wasn’t something I quite enjoyed since you’d be denied entry if the band was removed. (>_<)
Everything seemed good at first, but since the audio was really echoey, I couldn’t really make out what anyone on the stage was saying. In the end, it was quite hard to know what was going on.
Some famous actors, the first one is Anakin Skywalker from Star wars Episode 1, the other is an actor from Star Trek.
The charity anime goods auction and charity cosplayer slave auction.
I was really looking forward to the “5cm per second” screening, however, it seemed that they had two tiny projectors that displayed a rather blurred image, so I couldn’t enjoy the show. In addition, there were technical problem so there were no subtitles for the anime, which didn’t bother me, but it resulted in most of the people leaving early or hanging out and chatting in the corridor nearby.
Sneak peeks of the stalls being set up.
Saturday and Sunday:
The Saturday was much better and the queue to enter was quite long. It was interesting to all the different people in cosplay. I took a photo of most of the stalls at the event. I missed a few, but as you can tell from the beginning, my camera was simply taking so many blurred photos that most of them were unusable. Sunday was just a continuation of Saturday but with different events.
I won’t say much, but here are a few photos from Saturday and Sunday.
Stalls:
The registration desk
Tamarket, an online shop based in Melbourne
Ace Anime
Pinin from Melbourne
Tokyo Underground
Kings Comics
Wacom booth
Trading card Tournaments WA
Wrestling
501st Legion
Artists Alley
The shopping was quite good there, and there were a few good bargains available, but it seemed that most of the items were not really discounted at all which was a disappointment. All the anime figures were aroung $150-$200 each and since I wasn’t into the discounted English mangas, I didn’t find too much that interested me in the shopping.
As for the scheduled events at the convention, I saw the anime related ones which were okay, but the venue simply was too small, so it was very difficult to see the stage and it was very crowded.
Cosplay:
As for the cosplay and the cosplay competition, it was all very good and enjoyable, however it was so crowded I couldn’t really see the stage properly and the lighting was bad, so my camera couldn’t take many decent shots.
Cosplay Competition entrees
Random Cosplay photos
Loot:
In regard to shopping, I took a few pics of the stuff I ended up buying after 3 days of the convention. Despite many stalls not really discounting the goods, I did end up buying quite a bit of stuff. I got the 12 Kingdoms DVDs on discount, although I am missing volume 8 which I need to complete the set. Apart from that, I got a couple of anime files (Negima and Getsumen Tou Heiki Meena), a He is my master pencil board, a couple of trading figures, some posters, anime promo dvd, post cards and magazines.
In conclusion, I think I enjoyed Waicon better than this event, but still found that I enjoyed myself over the weekend. Looking back, there was a lot of interesting things going on, but I think I missed out in a lot of them as I didn’t plan what to do in the event properly. Next time I will attend more of the seminars which apparently were quite good compared to the anime events which were a bit disappointing.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the swapmeet hoping to find myself a cheap but good MIDI keyboard to practice on. Since I’m a beginner at the keyboard, I wanted to spend as little as possible on the hobby just in case I end up losing interest.
Anyways, it rained on that Sunday morning, so the regular swapmeet spot that I usually went to was pretty deserted and there wasn’t anything much there, so I went to the more commercialised Sunday undercover markets in Canningvale which usually has more dealers than people trying to get rid of unwanted stuff.
I ended up finding only one keyboard there after all the searching around. It was being sold by a dealer who was asking for $80AU for it, but after checking the keyboard to see if it worked and a bit of bargaining, I managed to get it for $55AU. As you can tell in the title, the brand of the keyboard is KAWAI, which I think is a good brand for keyboards. The keys have velocity sensitivity to change how loud or soft you play the keys. It seemed like I got a good bargain, until I found out that half the buttons on the panel didn’t work.
I did try to open it up and fix the buttons, however despite my efforts, the buttons still refused to work after using some contact spray on the buttons and circuits. I was quite suprised how little is inside the plastic case.
Fortunately, the bits that didn’t work were things I didn’t really need such as recording my songs, and some random special effects. Fortunately, the MIDI functionality was still working and after ordering a MIDI to USB cable from Ebay, I was successfully able to play midi files on my keyboard as well as use a few learning programs on the PC to help me learn the keyboard better.
One program I find particularly useful is called “Notes Attack” where you have to press the correct key on the keyboard to stop notes from flying to the left side of a music sheet staff.
I picked up a number of figures on sale in Osaka during my last trip to Japan, and decided to take a short photoshoot of one of my favorites, which is Sasami from the anime series Sasami-club.
This figure is manufactured by "President Japan" which isn’t a figure company I am familiar with, but I really love the pose of her carrying the giant daikon (white radish) over her head. The figure is customisable as you can exchange the top half to have her displayed in her gym outfit. I can’t decide which I like better, but currently have her displayed holding up the daikon.
I currently have the figure displayed in my bookshelf where you can see my novel collection of the 12 Kingdoms by Ono Fuyumi and a number of manga in Japanese.
July 8th,2009
Figure |
No Comments
I have been thinking for a while about learning how to play a musical instrument. Lately when playing all the visual novels, I’ve encountered some nice music on guitar and piano that really inspired me to start learning an instrument.
In fact, I actually wanted to pursue this idea before getting into playing visual novels. I remember in 2004 when I was an exchange student in Himeji, Japan studying Japanese, one of the girls from China in our class played on the piano there and it really impressed me how good she was. Unfortunately we never exchanged contact information so I’ve lost contact with her now. I decided around then that I would like to learn to play a musical instrument like that.
Anyways, the first instrument that I decided on was the keyboard or piano. I ended up going to a swapmeet in search for a piano or keyboard around last December a few months ago and managed to find a really old keyboard for sale. I managed to bargain a bit and bought it for only $5AU!.
I was pretty happy with my purchase, until I got home and found out when I put batteries in it and it didn’t turn on. (T_T) Fortunately, I managed to find a spare power plug that seemed to match the voltage rating on the keyboard and managed to power it.
After that, I have been using Lypur’s Piano tutorials on Youtube to help me pursue my new hobby. At the moment I am able to read some simple sheet music and play some simple songs that I found in a book for playing the organ. I still have trouble reading sheet music quickly and also find it difficult knowing how far to move my fingers when playing keys far from the 5 main keys my hand is on.
Apart from the keyboard, I’ve also been trying to learn the guitar, but noticed there wasn’t any really good tutorials on Youtube like Lypur’s piano tutorials. However, I did try a couple anyways and found it incredibly difficult to get started. I tired to copy everything the person in the video did, but I couldn’t even get a decent sound, or a sound like the one in the video.
I think perhaps it may of been that my guitar (actually my dad’s) was out of tune. This weekend, I managed to spend a couple of hours looking on the net and tuning the guitar. Hopefully the next time I attempt it, I should have better luck.
I am still a total beginner with the keyboard and guitar so if you have any tips, it would be very welcome.
June 22nd,2009
music |
3 Comments
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