Electric Town and America Land

I might have chosen a remote island off of Borneo or maybe an adventure with the dragons on Komodo, but for my kids there is nowhere they would rather go than Japan. Is it because of an interest in Samurai and Ninja, the likes of which fascinated kids around the world when I was a child? Is the beautiful landscapes with cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji? Or maybe the cultural history and food? It turns out it’s more about Japanese anime, or cartoons, something which seems to fascinate children and young adults from around the world.

Tokyo is a city of bright lights and crowds of pedestrians, both of which seem to light up even brighter in Electric Town Akihabara. This is a mecca for anime fans from around the world. As the kids spent hour after after wandering between anime stores and browsing anime vending machines, I found it more interesting to watch the enthusiastic people that come from all over the world for these cartoons. There are Indians, Arabs, Americans, Russians and probably a hundred other nationalities wandering Electric Town, many of them dressed in wigs, costumes or at least t-shirts demonstrating their enthusiasm for Japanese anime.

At dinner nearby, I notice the tables next to us are full of young men playing with their anime figures while they chat with their friends. We order from an iPad at our table and the food is delivered by a robot. After the robot gives us the check, we pay by scanning our receipt and putting bills into a machine. The next day we eat at a Dragon Quest fantasy restaurant where the food is shaped like characters from the Dragon Quest series.

Besides endless toy stores and electronic stores, this area of Tokyo is saturated with multi-level claw machine stores where mostly adults are dropping in 100 or 200 yen to control a claw for a few seconds which may, or more likely, may not pick up a toy and drop it down a chute for the skilled winner.

Getting back to the hotel room, the kids convince me to watch anime with them and I finally relent, although I still insist on calling it cartoons just to annoy them. But maybe that’s part of the experience here and I’m missing out on it if I know nothing about it.

There’s a lot of things we could do in Japan, but as our family hasn’t been together for a year I wanted to make sure we did something special that the kids would enjoy. There’s a Disneyland in Tokyo, but Universal Studios in Osaka seemed a better option to me because the newly opened Super Mario World. Mario was a Japanese invention, so it seemed appropriate to visit Super Mario World in Japan.

I didn’t realize though that besides Super Mario World, Universal Studios in Japan is basically America Land. It’s designed as a little United States with a section for San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. The restaurants are themed like 50s diners and they sell hotdogs and burgers in every corner of the park.

It was kind of interesting though to experience America in Japanese. The Monsters Rock and Roll show, for example, has Dracula, Frankenstein and Beetlejuice doing a song and dance routine in Japanese. The Water World show was magnificent, but also entirely in Japanese. I would say I found everything to be more interesting this way.

We rounded out our American experience in Japan with dinner and drinks at the Hard Rock Cafe. Now that we’ve had our fill of the US, it feels like it’s time to return to Asia.