Making it Up As I Go

My original title for this post was going to be “Comic-Con Hall H Has Nothing on Japanese Fan Girls”, but there are only a certain number of people who would get that. 🙂 I’ll explain it a little further down.

Tiny’s birthday is tomorrow (yay for being 5!). We have a tradition of going to an amusement park to celebrate the girls’ birthdays, and since her birthday is on a Tuesday, we went on Saturday instead. After looking at all of our options (there are a fair number of amusement parks in Tokyo) we decided on Tokyo Dome Attractions. The Tokyo Dome is a concert venue, and it has a bunch of things around it- a spa, an amusement park, lots of restaurants and stores. So we set off, and on our way discovered what the girls are now calling “the submarine station”.  They LOVED these doors.

 

When we got to the Tokyo Dome, we were a bit concerned because there were an insane number of people there, and an incredibly long line.  And when I say long, I mean LONG.

I worked for the San Diego Comic-Con for a number of years, and Hall H is where all of the super movie stars do their panels. The lines for Hall H are insane. I think the longest line I ever saw was the line on the day Angelina Jolie was there. That line was NOTHING compared to this line.  This line started at the train station and wound around and around- B approximated that it went for at least a mile.  And the line wasn’t moving, and it was HOT outside.  So you can see why we were concerned. We quickly discovered, however, that the line wasn’t for the Attractions, but for the SuperShow 5 concert happening later that night.

 

SuperShow 5 is the 5th tour of the Korean boy band Super Junior. After we came home I looked them up, and they’re pretty awesome. If you’re interested, you should check out their wikipedia page; the ins and outs of the band are kind of fascinating. (There are officially 13 members, but currently 5 are off on mandatory military duty.) One of them apparently just started an Instagram account, which has people all aflutter. If you’d like to see what the big deal is (you know you want to) here are some videos: Opera, No Other, Mr. Simple. I highly recommend them.

Anyway, this was the line in it’s entirety.

 

Because I’m a dork, I drew a little diagram to make sense of the madness.

 

 

What was truly madness, however, is that all these girls weren’t even in line for the concert. They were in line (at 10 am) to buy Super Junior stuff. These girls waited in line for HOURS to buy concert swag and then hung around the Tokyo Dome the rest of the day, and presumably got back in a super long line to actually get into the concert that night. That is commitment to your fandom.

Here’s some of the girls:

 

A fan dressed up as Cinderella. Why not?

 

This billboard truck was driving past as we left. I could just imagine all the girls looking at it and saying, “Oh trust us, we know.”

 

While they were all waiting in line, we went on rides.

The carousel:

 

Cars:

 

This was the ride where the ride conductor told Tiny that the rules were, “Don’t stand up. Don’t look down. And…” in a fake spooky voice, complete with miming, “DON’T TAKE OUT YOUR EEEEEEYES!” It was hilarious.

 

More carousel:

 

Japan’s version of the “mini Drop Zone”:

 

A sign with hirigana translations over the top of kanji, for those who can’t read the kanji. This fascinates me. (Everyone learns hiragana and katakana – the two “alphabets”. Then they learn a set amount of kanji a year, starting in 1st grade. They learn about 1,000 kanji in elementary school, and another almost 1,000 in high school.  But not everyone goes to high school. And then you learn more if you go through college. And there are between 2,000 and 3,000 kanji in common use in Japan, and many more kanji that exist. So you have varying degrees of how much any given person can understand. The government stipulates that newspapers and official documents can only use kanji from a certain set- kanji everyone should know. A lot of advertisements for common things use hiragana, while ads for colleges or higher level things use kanji. The politics around it are fascinating.)

 

A water blaster game- Tiny’s favorite thing of the day.

 

She starts out all zen:

 

then enters battle mode:

 

She said afterward that she had “never done anything funner.”

My sister is going to hate the following pictures. This ride was insane and awesome. You stood in a little metal cage and went up super high-

 

and then it dropped you down again. It wasn’t as fast as the Drop Zone; you fall at an equal speed as the cage, so there’s no feeling that you’re going to fall out, but still thrilling and fun.

 

Z loved it, and loved that she could go on it by herself. I just had to not think about the reality of what she was doing.

 

Riding on the ferris wheel.

 

I love that they spell out that you’re not allowed to bring fire on the ride.

 

While B and Zo went on the Log Ride, Tiny and I stumbled across a girl group doing a performance. It was fantastic. Tiny just walked in and saw this picture and said, “Oh, that was SO COOL. I loved the spinning and all the other parts.” There you have it.

 

I love this guy.

 

Odd shoes, just for your edification.

 

I just like this picture.

 

Out on Saturday night:

 

And because you guys seem to want to know I still corporeally exist… 🙂