Toy nerd heaven, parts one and two

Thursday night I went to Nakano, home of the Broadway Mall. This is one of Tokyo's two central locations for toy collectors. The mall has three floors of tiny little toy shops, all packed with goodies! It's kind of hard to describe what the mall is like, there aren't really places like it in the US. Definitely not high-rent, very claustrophobic, and pretty old. But there were some nice shops there and I picked up a bunch of new Real x Head Fortune cat babies at One-up.

Then, last night, I went to Akihabara (Akiba for short). Akiba is nerd central in Tokyo, and it has hundreds of toy stores, manga and anime shops, and camera, computer, and electronics discount places. It's also called "Electric Town"（電気街）because of all the neon and lights. You could easily spend a whole day trying to visit every place of potential interest (at least, I could!), but a few hours were all I could take before I got tired.

I went to a lot of places. I first visited Studio Uamou, which is on the outskirts, in a rather fashionable little mini-mall that had small art studios.  Unfortunately Tagaki-san wasn't there so I'll have to go back again so that I can say hello to her. In the main area, I went to Akiba Zone, which contains the main store for One-up, a designer toy shop that produces many toys by Touma and other artists I like.  I found 3 Skuttle Babies there that I didn't know existed, so this was a major discovery!  Mandarake is probably Tokyo's major toy store; they also have a presence in Nakano (spread out over multiple small stores) but Akiba has their 8-story flagship store.  I found a tan T9G Rangeas there that I'd been looking for.

In the train station I came across a great little mochi stand in the east-west passage that connects the two sides of the station. Mochi are little bite-sized balls of ice cream wrapped in rice paste...they're a little bit chewy on the outside and creamy on the inside.  This stand had all sorts of fancy designer flavors and I had one chocolate banana and one caramel.  The caramel was especially good, it had a liquid caramel center in the middle of the ice cream.