Emperor's Birthday
February 23, 2025.
Did you know that on public holidays in Japan, it's more common for big chain stores to be closed than small ma and pa stores? Because I sure didn't. We got up at a somewhat respectable hour to hear down to Nippori Fabric Town only to discover ALL of the Tomato stores were closed. Meanwhile all of the small indie stores were open. Alas Tomato was what I was most excited to visit to get some lolita sewing supplies.
So we went back to Ikebukuro because surely the malls there must be open and have fun stuff and not be too crowded right? So we tried to go to Tobu: CLOSED. Then we tried to go to Parco via the train station: BLOCKED OFF. So we tried wandering out further into Ikebukuro to find some food. ALL CHAIN STORES CLOSED.
Koinuko pulled us into a BBQ restaurant to shove some meat into us while we pondered our next move. She suggested we try going to Woodpepe, the wax seal store she wanted to go to. I was a bit apprehensive because everything we had tried to go to so far was closed, but we went anyway. And wouldn't you know it? It was open! We then spent a delightful hour melting wax and making adorable little seals. Because we went together we got the Valentine's Day couple's discount.
After this we popped into an arcade while looking for more food and I won a You and Idol Precure makeup bag on the first try!!! The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. We ate, we shopped, and we went back into the yaoi dungeon. We spent a lot of time in used anime goods stores but I struggled to find any goodies. However I did have a lot of fun spotting goodies for Koinuko. Over this trip she trained me to spot her blorbos. I ended the day feeling a little depressed by all of the explicit anime nonsense I'd been seeing in the last few days. But getting to chat to Koinuko and eat kombini pasta in bed while watching YouTube made me feel a lot better.
