東京 | Tokyo (7) - The Last Day

Found this set after scouring Japan these past 3 trips. Just after buying a slightly-less-cool one.

Our last day was a bit of a weird one, because we knew we'd be ending it early in order to go grab our luggage and head to the airport for a less-than-comfortable sleep in the waiting room.

We ended up not risking doing anything too major, and just went back to Akihabara to spend the last of our yen and play some last few games.

My mantra for this place: I do not need any more plush toys. Repeat.

I could never live in Tokyo because I'd always be painfully poor and would probably die in an avalanche of anime memorabilia crammed dangerously into my cheap little 4-tatami bedsit (that I can't even afford because of my terrible spending habit). Oh well. Go out doing what you love, eh.

I wanted this so badly.

You can buy room interiors for your figurines and the displays are incredible.

Learning from experience, we got to Akihabara at a decent time and found it as busy and hectic as we'd been expecting the first time around. It probably helped that it was a weekend.

Girls cosplaying as an Idol group, quite possibly selling something.

東京 | Tokyo (3) - Sumo and Akihabara!!

Intriguing post-breakfast drink. Bought it solely because it looked carbonated but it told me I should shake it?

On day 3 we decided that our punishing schedule had been enough to keep jet lag at bay a little longer, and took a slightly more relaxed day out. We went to check out the sumo as there's only a handful of official tournaments in Japan each year, and even fewer are in Tokyo. So the fact that one happened to coincide with the dates of our trip was quite serendipitous indeed.

We headed off to Ryogoku, home of the Ryogoku Kokugikan (try saying that 5 times fast) bright and early to get ourselves some day tickets, the cheapest but also the most likely to sell out.

The whole station seems to have been dedicated to sumo.

Once we were through the ticket barrier, we could see all kinds of old paintings of sumo tournaments, as well as what we later found out were probably photos of the current yokozuna or 'Grand Champions'. To become Grand Champion you have to win 2 tournaments in a row. There are a lot of stages to each tournament and a lot of participants, so to win once, let alone twice, is an intense feat in itself. Testament to this is the fact that there are currently only 2 or 3 Grand Champions still competing and only 71 have been named in the last 300 years!

Yokozuna handprints. They are HUGE. Interesting to see how they get bigger over time.

There's also a cute homemade height chart, so you can see how you measure up to previous yokozuna. Annoyingly, I'm taller than all but one of them. Sigh. Again, it was interesting to see how obviously genetics, diet and environment have made increasingly bigger contenders.

67th yokozuna Musashimaru Koyo and Ann-Marie. 6'3", 518lb vs a kitten. Beast.