Tag Archives: japan

See this post for the introduction. See this post for background info on Comiket 86 After a relaxing day of cosplay photography came the main event of the trip: Comiket 86 Day 3: doujinshis, doujinshis, doujinshis! King of comic conventions, do you have enough doujinshis in stock? Unlike in day 1 and 2 where we only got a small glimpse of the fight, day 3 was going to be a battlefield. A true test of strategy and preparation. The real deal. Prior to the trip, we (well, mostly me) had spent countless hours at night drawing up the battle plan …

See this post for the introduction. See this post for background info on Comiket 86 After the exhausting first day of Comiket 86 came C86 Day 2: the day of cosplay photography. Hnnnnngggggggggggg! *dies from heart attack* It was also cloudier that morning, so the initial outside waiting for doors to open was much more tolerable than the previous day. Day 2 of Comiket consists mostly of female-oriented BL circles and Touhou circles, so we managed to finish our shopping really early and spend some time wandering around or photographing cosplayers (which was mainly what I ended up doing). Which …

See this post for the introduction. After our last day of visiting Kyoto/Osaka, we took the shinkansen back to Tokyo and took a day break in preparation for the main event of the trip: Comiket 86. The calm before the storm: Waiting in line for Tokyo Big Sight to open it’s doors to Comiket 86 goers… For those who aren’t familiar, Comiket (short for ”Comic Market”) is Japan’s oldest and largest doujinshi convention. It is a 3-day event held bi-annually with Summer Comiket happening in mid August and Winter Comiket happening in late December. It has in recent years been …

See this post for the introduction. While going through photos in Lightroom for my recent Sakura-Con 2015 photo blog post, I realized that I actually never finished uploading and writing the rest of my Japan Trip 2014 blog posts… Oops… So here they are, with whatever commentary I can still remember… Better late than never I guess! On the same day we visited the Art of Gundam exhibition, we explored Nipponbashi and Dotonbori. I had visited both places multiple times in the past, so I didn’t end up taking all that many pictures this time around. We meet again, Giant …

See this post for the introduction. In case you didn’t know/notice from my previous blog posts, I am a huge Gundam fanboy (to be fair though, I actually don’t blog all that much about Gundam, mainly cause I never find the time to build all those gunpla kits gathering dust). I grew up watching Gundam Wing as an elementary school kid (somehow convinced my parents to ignore all the “Rated T for Teen” warnings) and went on to watch (and enjoy) all the older series from long before I was born. So when I heard about The Art of Gundam …

See this post for the introduction. Continuing on from the Fushimi Inari Shrine visit, I went to meet up with sorrowmoon for a visit to Volk’s Tenshi no Sato. Tenshi no Sato was a dedicated Super Dollfie museum and “den” for Dollfie owners, complete with a Japanese-style garden in back and had always been a must-see for doll owners (reservation required, passport needed for foreigners). I had previously visited the location before and took some of my first Dollfie photography there, but that was before I had completed Arcueid, so this would be Arc’s first photoshoot there. Arcueid posing outside …

See this post for the introduction. This was the first actual do-stuff day of this Japan trip, and the plan for me was yet another visit to Tenshi no Sato, but this time with my completed Arcueid Dollfie. sorrowmoon had scheduled our visit for the afternoon, so I decided to spent part of the morning with the rest of the group visiting the Fushimi Inari shrine yet again. Arcueid chilling at the Fushimi Inari shrine Japanese breakfast at the ryokan/hotel! Consisting of tofu, fruit bits, cheese balls with some sauce, preserved radish, bowl of tea, some spinnach?, piece of fish, …

After visiting Japan the past two years, I’ve decided to return once again this summer. The 2012 trip was right after graduation and my first time being in Japan and, thanks to rigorous planning by my friends, was a full blown tourism trip, with me doing tons of random figure/gunpla shopping and starting my figure collection. The 2013 trip was still partially a tourism trip, but I had money saved up from working for a year and ended up also partially being a shopping trip, buying figures from my wishlist and starting my Dollfie Dream adventures. This third time around, …

This is an essay I wrote while in university, titled “The World of Hatsune Miku – A brief overview of the VOCALOID phenomena”. The complete PDF version of this can be found here. Published under CC BY-NC-SA. Just under 6 years ago, while wandering around the somewhat unknown video-sharing website called YouTube, I came across an interesting 3D animated music video: The first YouTube reprint of the 3DPV for Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru? / “【初音ミク】3DみくみくPV” It caught my interest because not only was the 3DCG pretty impressive (this was still during the time when Flash animations were still popular) …

See Flickr for the complete photo set For photos of Tenshi no Sato, see my previous post Tenshi no Sato (aka “Angel’s Den”) is the heaven for Volks doll owners (website). Located in Kyoto a short walk away from the JR Saga-Arashiyama station, it is a facility dedicated for allowing doll owners and their dolls to com and relax (and take pictures of course).