Four hours of sleep don’t feel that bad when you’re jet-lagged anyway. Getting through the day after feels even less arduous when a good party, like Weekend Ravers we’ve been to last night precedes it.

¶  First brief experience of Harajuku

When we arrived at Takeshita Street, the most iconic spot in Harajuku, it was already half past noon. As one should expect given the time and the celebrity of this place, it was jam-packed. The sheer number of people made it difficult to move forward, let alone stop and browse the store displays.

We randomly took a detour and found ourselves at Mozart Street. To our astonishment, it was completely empty, as if Takeshita Street–just a few steps away–wasn’t overflowing with people right at that very moment.

Yet another surprise awaited us when we decided to have a lunch at 回転寿司みさき, a chain restaurant serving using conveyor belts designed to look like Shinkansen trains. Despite hundreds of people passing by the restaurant each minute, we’ve got seated immediately after entering.

This was our first time at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, and we really loved the experience. We even came back later during our stay in Tokyo.

And just like that, we’ve just eaten sushi for the first time in Japan. We spent over an hour picking the most intriguingly looking pieces and savouring them. It might sounds like a casual and trivial desire, but tasting authentic sushi was actually one of the experiences I was looking forward to the most. Despite unprecedented worldwide popularity of this delicacy, the variety of toppings available is quite limited in most places. With more than 2000 ports, Japanese fishing industry is highly developed and some spieces cannot tasted anywhere else.

¶  Mika Pikazo exhibition

Towers of empty plates were emerging one after another, but we had to move on. Our friend we met on that day toured us to Q Plaza, where Mika Pikazo’s art exhibition was taking place. She is known for her distinctive art-style, which features vibrant colors combined with abstract patterns. Most of the exhibition featured her original works depicting female characters, but she has worked on illustrations for various contemporary franchises, including Pokemon Master EX, Fate/Grand Order and Summer Splash.

Some works in the exhibition showed how Mika elevates illustration to a whole new level with innovative techniques.

¶  Touhou Project exhibition

After a short breather at Miyashita Park we headed to Tokyo Anime Center located just across the street.

Dai-Touhou Project Exhibition 2023 was being held between August 4 and September 18, 2023. There weren’t many visitors when we went to see it on 6th of August. We queued up with several other people and waited until the next full hour for the admission. The organizers must have expected the event to attract a much more larger crowd.

As one could guess from the poster, the event was mainly focused on Perfect Cherry Blossom, seventh official Touhou game released 20 years ago at Comiket 64.

The exhibition was divided into several parts. Visitors could get familiar with the story told in Perfect Cherry Blossom, as well as characters and their music themes. Touhou Project games are entirely developed by Team Shanghai Alice/上海アリス幻樂団, run by a single man known as ZUN. Seeing all features of the game displayed next to each other, one could attempt to comprehend the immensity of work carried out by a single person.

Unpublished concept arts, featuring rough sketches of characters, were displayed in this part of the exhibition. To my great disappointment, photography wasn’t allowed. Personally, I found this extremely frustrating. ZUN’s artstyle is, shall we say, the extraordinary one. Especially characters from his earliest works are often made fun of for different reasons. Seeing them as raw pencil sketches just hits different. In my opinion, much of their iconic weirdness comes from the digitization and coloring process.

Seeing these concept sketches was truly a life-changing experience that completely rearranged the way I perceive ZUN’s art.

The middle section featured an interactive attraction. With guidance from a staff member, visitors could try casting one of the iconic spells or attacks from Touhou universe.

Fan-made works are an essential part of the Touhou Project, so the second half of the exhibition was dedicated to fan art and doujin. Each playable character of Perfect Cherry Blossom had their own section featuring arts created mainly by Japanese artists.

When talking about derivative works, you can’t overlook the music. Another section was dedicated to the most iconic Touhou-related doujin ongaku albums to be ever released. The albums were grouped according to the Touhou installment from which the arranged music originated.

In a separate room, a 3D-animated video of a danmaku battle between Reimu and Yuyuko by minusT was playing on a loop. At the time of our visit, it was an exclusive screening, but the video can now be watched on YouTube.

The final part of the exhibition featured two full-sized exA-Arcadia machines running Touhou Perfect Sakura Fantastica, a platform-exclusive official game based on Perfect Cherry Blossom. The game has some notable differences compared to its predecessor, including full voice casting, a re-arranged soundtrack composed by Keishi Yonao with an option to fall back to the original game music. Obviously, the game screen is oriented vertically and a player controls the character using an arcade joystick. The latter alteration turned out to be quite tricky to adapt to at first, but eventually Yuu was able to clear several stages.

It wouldn’t be a legitimate Japanese video game event if it doesn’t drain your money with event-only merchandise! Keychains, t-shirts, tapestries, clear files and all sorts of acrylic novelties.

We’ve got ourselves one t-shirt for each, some for our friends, a handful of keychains and also several copies of our favorite official releases. The prices of games and soundtracks were mostly in line with what I usually see in second-hand online stores.

¶  Summary

Breaking the bank at the event store marked the end of our adventorous second day in Tokyo. On the way back to the hotel, we crossed the infamous Shibuya Crossing. Tomorrow is an early start–our Shinkansen to Kyoto departs at 7 AM.