Return travel day begins and we lug our original two luggages and the new white one we purchased the other day from Don Quixote and 1 duffle bag into Akihabara station. It was not too bad as while not as good and close as our first Akihabara hotel, it was still manageable.

It also helps that we decided to travel on the Yamamote line to Nippori station, just two stops from Akihabara after rush hour, this is like approximately around 10:15am-ish I think. Pretty empty and dead compared to if you were on this line at like 8-9am.

Our trip to Nippori station was to connect to the keisei skyliner, an express train that runs directly to Narita airport with a purchased ticket. The train to Narita terminal 1 itself was like an hour and had shinkansen like seat, but I don’t think it goes that fast, it’s just that there aren’t very many stops.

Once we got to Narita Terminal 1 in no time, we navigated the signs and discovered that we were too early for check-in to our flight and baggages, about 2 hours or so, which is fine as it allowed us to explore Narita shops and such. Using this baggage trolley, we began exploring and shopping more.

We were not the only ones with the same idea and or were too early. Many shops like this selling omiyage and souvenirs lined the halls of the airport every so often. We brought more shit, we opened our last duffle bag to store airport goods, we were now carrying 3 luggages and 2 duffle bags. Shit, reckless abandon.

WIth two hours to spare before check-in, we decided to get some post-noon lunch at this more expensive than normal tonkatsu place. Just park our cart outside the restaurant, not like anyone’s going to steal our heavy bags and shit.

While we had multiple times tonkatsu throughout our trip, mainly via curry rice, we actually didn’t get around to having katsudon yet, thus both of us ordered their katsudon set. Pretty tasty. I also ordered a side of 2 fried oysters and 1 crab cream croquette, pretty good i’d say. You order from a tablet, like many of the more tourist friendly places in Japan, and since this is an airport, only makes sense.

Exploring more around the airport and they have dedicated Cospa shops selling anime akihabara merch from popular franchises and other stuff that is hot, like hololive and vtubers for instance as pictured on the left. If Japanese clothes sizes weren’t so small and me being too fat for them, I would have brought so much shirts and clothes during our trip but atlas, that wasn’t so.

Bocchi the rock gets it’s own dedicated section here along with Lycoris Recoil, these are two media franchises that they are definitely pushing to make as popular as possible for whatever reason. Good choice on that I’d say as these two shows are quite marketable.

Another shop takes it a step further by putting in Totoro inside to help sell goods. There are also official pokemon goods and other bait anime stuff like one piece and naruto here too, all officially approved I guess. This store itself was pretty nice too visually.

Once we get through the painful ritual of security clearance and carry on bag checks, we finally make it to our location at Gate 43 direct flight to Toronto. Gate 44 is heading to Vancouver interestingly. After getting through all the checks and stuff I thought we would have more time but in reality we only got about an hour and half of chilling before they start boarding and take off. Wow.

A 12-13 hour flight isn’t so bad when you are dead tired from a long trip full of madness and insanity levels of buying of goods, gacha, crane games, walking and eating stuff. My sister and I pretty much just sat there for the entirety of the flight, just trying to sleep, no point watching shit on the screen; too tired. All of these nice planes have these lights and shit to simulate night and morning to help you adjust to sleep time and etc. Our flight had only 2 meals, dinner and breakfast and were whatever, the majority of the flight the lighting and atmosphere was set to ‘night sleep’ theme which made sense really.

After our flight landed there isn’t really a whole lot to say or cover, we got through customs easy, they didn’t even ask for shit like how much you are bringing back of goods since it’s all automated by kiosk now. Waiting for luggage took a while but once we got them all it was fine, got picked up and went on home to my family’s home to unpack and rest for the night/chill.

All of the prize figures seen in the above photo with the exception of the sitting noodle stopper Fist of the North Star Kenshiro were won by my sister. Shit, she’s pretty good at crane games and other similar games like cutting the rope and such. All of our prize figures would have been impossible to bring back home given our luggage space so we actually opened all of them and bubble wrapped them for maximum space efficiency when packing and flattening the boxes while discarding the extra cardboard inside for structure. Yes, I brought bubble wrap with us expecting this might happen.

My sister also won/brought a very large number of plushies that all had to be vacuum sealed in order to fit into one of our luggages and even then it took about 50% space of the new white one we brought. If we didn’t have the air vacuum sealer compressor all of the plushies would literally take the space of all three of our luggages and then some. Insanity.

As for myself, I had a far smaller haul of prize figures, I only won the Power from Chainsaw man and the swimsuit Rin from Idolmaster Cinderella Girls. While I tried many times, I sadly gave in and just brought the sailor outfit Hololive Subaru that is sitting in front as well as the noodle stopper Kenshiro from an aftermarket preseller shop that I found. Ahwell, can’t win them all I guess. I did end up winning a few other plushies not pictured here, some pretty big ones too but yea, nowhere near as much as my sister. But then again, who cares about prize figures; I brought a huge 1/4 scale Freeing bunny figure from the AmiAmi second store and that basically took a huge chunk of my luggage space since I didn’t want to open it. I focus on quality, not quanitityyyy.

So yea, that pretty much ends our trip in a summary in Japan 2023. Overall I’d say it was a great time to visit considering the cheery blossoms and the relatively mild weather, although the two or three days of rain at the start of the trip were rough. It also sucks that I got sick with diarrhea or whatever it was that made us slow down but luckily my sister helped big time finding me medicine in her own mini journey. We brought alot, ate a lot, saw alot, won alot and took alots of nice pictures of ourselves so I’d say that this trip was a big success.

Would do it again.. but just focus on Akihabara honestly and Tokyo lol.

I might make more posts in the following days/weeks as I sort and organize my photos and exchange with whatever my sister has as well and make “theme” posts choosing the best of the best I guess; for instance, choice scenery photos, choice merch photos, food photos (because I didn’t post everything we ate, even though there are photos of them), choice selfie/human photos, random dumb photos/interesting people etc. I dunno how I feel but we’ll see.

Bonus:

“A man dies outside the entrance of Enoshima caves” – Circa 2023

“Salute to the living at the Royal Host”. – Circa 2023

Bonus Bonus:

For some reason all throughout our trip, wherever we go we heard this new STU48 song “Breathing Heart” that is also a Dance QR Video blasting everywhere in stores even watched the full MV via an ad on youtube on our hotel tv. It is quite literally the song of our trip lol.