Friday the 26th Digital Meme, shirts and Meiji University

Ono-san called on Thursday evening and offered to help me obtain the book Recalling the Treasures of Japanese Cinema and the Japanese Anime Classic Collection DVD collection. He met us at the ryokan, we grabbed our umbrellas and headed out for Shibuya. Armed with the address, a map, Ono-san's navigation skills and some wandering about we located the offices of Digital Meme. Now to non-Japanese this is not an easy feat as very few streets have names and buildings do not have separate numbers. Instead major avenues have names, blocks of buildings have a number designation then sections within those blocks are also given a number, each section may have several buildings. For example the address of the office we were looking for was in the Yushin Building, Shinkan 27-11, Shibuya 3-chome Shibuya-ku. However after some wandering we located the building and headed to the elevator and the 12th floor. There we were shown not only what I wanted to buy but also new releases, with English subtitles of two classic Japanese silent films.

My wallet a little lighter we left and on the suggestion of Ono-san headed to the Shibuya branch of Mandarake. While I had fun looking at various goods, and Cindy searched for figurine of Spike from Cowboy Bebop, which she did not find. Steven kept turning up interesting Lupin III items. He finally decided on a four figurine set. On Ono-san's suggestion we headed to a branch of Cospa where I picked up several t-shirts and a coin purse with the laughing man logo from the first Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex Tv series. By then I was running out of funds, in fact I had to borrow some from Steven so we headed to a post office where I could use my ATM card to refill my wallet. Post offices in Japan also function as banks and have ATM machines with English instructions. Paying Steven back we decided to head out for food. However it was lunch time and the department store restaurant complex Ono-san took us to was packed.

We then decided to head for the Museum at Meiji University. Now everything we had heard of this museum said it was an archaeology museum, however it was more than that as it included large sections on the history of the school and on traditional craft techniques. This pretty much filled out the remaining daylight and when we finished we headed for a very late lunch at a local Yoshinoya. This chain has the advantage of being smoke free. After devouring our meals we headed back to the ryokan where we visited with Ono-san and using my laptop showed off the photos Cindy and Steven had taken over the past few days.

After seeing Ono-san off at the station we headed back to the ryokan and called it a day.

Ono-san, thank you for your excellent guidance around parts of Tokyo, I only hope that soon I can do the same in California.