Reid Main

The only thing on our schedule for today was to be in Ikebukuro by 1:30pm to rendezvous with a friend who had recently relocated to Japan. Since Ikebukuro is home to Sunshine City we figured we could do some shopping before meeting up. We left our hotel at 9:30am to grab coffee from the usual Blue Bottle when we saw something quite unexpected. The ENTIRE Tokyo Portcity Takeshiba building was shut down for disaster testing. This is a 40 story building that has offices for large companies such as SoftBank as well as residential apartments and they powered it down for 24 hours. But as luck would have it there was a Blue Bottle between the subway station and Sunshine City so we still managed to caffeinate ourselves.

After spending nearly three hours in Sunshine City I can highly recommend it for anyone looking to do some serious shopping. There are a plethora of stores which cover all of the Japanese cultural staples like Pokémon (both a store and cafe), Studio Ghibli, Rilakkuma, Disney, Snoopy, One Piece, etc. There is even a Toys "R" Us which you should not sleep on because it has some of the coolest Japan-only children toys I have ever seen. Their cars and trucks are on another level of quality and I made sure to pick up an Isuzu truck to bring back home.

We were meeting our friend in Ikebukuro because there was a Delicious in Dungeon pop-up cafe in the Prince Hotel. I have written before about how these collaboration cafes go harder than anyone should expect but this one was on another level. The creativity and presentation of each dish was beyond anything I expected and it peaked when we got our "roast dragon meat" which turned out to be crocodile. I had no idea Japan could even source crocodile meat which lead me down a Wikipedia crocodile farming rabbit hole.

After another fantastic meal we wandered around Sunshine City some more and found the Bandai Namco store. What's so special about this store is that it contains over 3000 gashapon machines and they are stacked so high that you will undoubtedly get lost roaming the aisles. Short of being there the only way to get an inkling of what it feels like is through watching some YouTube videos:

After gambling more of our money away we said goodbye to our friend and headed back to our hotel to relax and recharge. While brainstorming ideas for dinner I somehow stumbled upon the fact that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning had already been released in Japan. We decided that tubs of popcorn count as dinner and headed to the nearest theatre where we got tickets for the 8pm show. Not realizing that we were in for nearly three hours of Tom Cruise running around the world, we got back to our hotel around 11:30pm and collapsed into bed.