Theresa's Blog #3

In my research, I looked into anime/manga culture and how it began to thrive in Japan. Before, I had visited Akihabara, which was the hotspot for all anime/manga and otaku culture. Since the past 3 weeks of being here, I was able to visit various places and find anime/manga in lots of different places such as convivence stores, train stations, and around Tokyo. Beforehand, I had not visited Ikebukuro. But, in doing so, I found that it is fairly similar to Akihabara and has a vast amount of anime/manga shops that cater to the otaku culture. However, there are some differences between Ikebukuro and Akihabara. Akihabara is the largest anime/manga hotspot in Tokyo in addition to catering to the more male fans. However, Ikebukuro has a lot of anime/manga as well, but while not being as large it also caters more to females. For example, in Akihabara you may find tons of anime girls or ‘bishoujo’ that are catered towards a more male audience. But in Ikebukuro, there will be a lot of ‘bishounen’ which is catered towards a more female audience. In addition, there are a lot of different shops and stores that have goods for females. Even the same shops you may find in Akihabara will have lots of different goods that cater to females instead of males. A good example of this a building called the ‘Otomate building’. 

Abeit, it’s a fairly small building, it is a building of a company that creates otome games (visual novels for females) and has some cafes and goods sold there. While Akihabara became the place for male-orientated products, Ikebukuro became a district for female-orientated products. There is even a nickname for a street name in Ikebukuro called ‘Otome Road’ which has many shops such as K-Books, Animate store, Mandarake and other small ‘doujin’ shops. What I find interesting is that after having a place that catered a lot to a male audience, they now have tons of events and shops that caters more to females and is gradually becoming more popular. There is also a building called ‘Sunshine city’ which has a mall with tons of shops inside. As I looked into this before, Japan’s pop culture includes mascots such as Pokemon’s Pikachu and Sanrio’s Hello Kitty. In addition to having a Sanrio shop in the mall, a popular tourist shop is the ‘Pokemon Center’. When visiting, I find there were many foreigners there probably due to the fact Pokemon is super popular worldwide so having a shop that caters solely to that is very popular with tourists in Japan. But this is especially due to the fact they don’t have these sort of shops dedicated to franchises in North America. There were tons of Pikachu everywhere, but you don’t see this in Canada because Japan’s pop culture differs greatly from North America. It is interesting to see the differences between North American pop culture and Japanese pop culture. Because no matter where you go in Japan, you’ll most likely always see an influence of Japanese anime, manga, and/or video games.