Ikebukuro and Evangelion

I revisited Ikebukuro two years after my previous visit. While my family spent the whole day shopping inside Sunshine City, I took a small amount of time to wander around the anime-related stores in the area, and see how much things have changed or remained the same.


The long known Animate building just opposite to Sunshine City is now vacant. It moved to a whole new building several streets away earlier last month.


Lashinbang and K-Books anime shop next to Animate are still there. There are several branches of K-Books stores in the area, with most of them catered for the ladies and their tastes.


K-Books doujin store


K-Books comics/manga store


K-Books cosplay store


A Volks hobby store is also there in one of the alleys.


Despite numerous no bike parking signs in the area, a lot of cyclists don't seem to care about the warnings at all. Funny enough, I did see an officer starting to issue tickets for a scooter not too far away from where I took this picture.


The new Animate store. It feels a lot bigger, and indeed it does seem like so, with a lot of the space still seem unused behind the curtains. Otherwise the each floor occupies about the same space as the older store or the one in Akihabara.


Entrance of the building


Bandai's chogokin Saber. It's about 1/12 scale, so it should be around the same size as many other action figures such as Max Factory's figma or Kaiyodo's Revoltech etc.


Toranoana store is moved. The building is vacant like Animate's


Toranoana's new location is on the sixth floor of Takamura building, which is situated on the Green-odori (グリーン大通り).


Huge Super Sonico poster spotted.


Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo was on air in cinema. Since I was in in Japan, and even though my Japanese is still very much at a tourist/beginner level, I thought "why not give this a shot?".

No spoilers here, but heck, the movie felt really strange, as if I got slap cold in the face after a long slumber and not knowing what's going on all of a sudden. It's not just me, but others sitting around me echoed similar feelings as well. It felt so strange that I could not explain to my sister whether it was even good or not; I had a hard time digesting and accepting the plot (it made more question marks than full stops overall). o_o;


Another movie poster as I left the big screen


Evangelion merchandise were sold just outside the big screen, with some already sold out earlier.


There are some odd kinds of anime merchandise that one may not expect, such as these metallic lunch trays with Nerv logo. Seems interesting, but never saw that coming.


Life size statues of Asuka and Kaworu just before I head downstairs and leave the cinema


There are also Evangelion Unit 01 and Ayanaemi Rei outside at the entrance of the pachinko area.


I bought a letter opener that is shaped after the spear used by Asuka's Eva Unit 02 in the movie.


The letter opener itself. The whole thing is in red with green gem on both sides, which looks pretty nice overall in my opinion. Funny how they called it a "paper knife" though ^^;


Size of the spear compared to a HGUC 1/144 Zaku F2. I'd say it'd be suitable for most Evagelion figures of similar sizes to wield it. ^^

That's it for Ikebukuro! Hope you like it! Next post is most likely to be something from Akihabara, or the recent Gunpla Expo event that is happening in Hong Kong. We shall see once I get through the photos eventually ^^;