Japan Trip Day 4 - Tokyo Game Show

Well today is the reason we came to Japan, and it didn't let us down. We could see the enormous queue fromo our hotel room forming from breakfast time, and it didn't even open until 10am. So we decided to wait a bit until we went in. With expected crowds of 160,000 people, this was one BIG event, and queues everywhere had times to let you know whether you even bothered waiting.

It was a pretty overwhelming thing to visit. All the stands for each gaming company had 'booth babes' which are pretty young Japanese women who dont wear much - but not in a bad way, more in a cutesy futuristic way. They have a uniform comprising of short, short skirt made of some kind of vinyl in assorted colours to match the company logo, short top that only reveals their tummy, and white shoes of some kind, either kneelength boots, or white heels. Their job is to give out promotion stuff to everyone, AND pose all day long for gamer geeks who want their photo. It's all very weird, but tasteful. At the end of the day, there was a photo session available outside every booth where the 10 or so booth babes at each would line up and pose for 10 minutes of photos. Here is ours:



The whole expo was just enormous and while lots of people took their kids, its not really ideal. The crowds become crushes near big attractions like the Playstation 3 area and it got soooo hot. Luckily lots of booth babes gave out promotional fans which Preston loved, so they kept us cool.

While Dan went on a game playing mission, I went on a hunting and gathering mission for free goodies. I ended up with SOOO MUCH STUFF - lots of useless things that were given out free, and then cooler niknaks that i earned from standing in small queues (15 mins or less) - so obviously the unpopular games - and then pretending that I knew how to play whatever console it was, let alone whatever game in japanese. I did manage to figure out some cool mobile phone games - the phones here are just amazing and you can play really good quality games and even read comics. Mostly, Preston earned me things because the booth babes thought he was so cute and he would smile and point at them, and who could resist??

The other cool spectacle to be seen was that here in Japan there is a hobby called CosPlay (dress-ups). But this is to the extreme - people seriously put a lot of effort into dressing up like anime characters from comics and cartoons. Outside the event halls were heaps of groups of cosplayers posing for anyone who wanted a photo. Here is one:


After 5 hours of crowds, extreme loudness and smelly geeks, we had run out of time to do everything, and there were lots of goodies that I hadn't collected yet. Our feet ached, and my back was tired from carrying Preston in the front-pack all that time. Luckily for us, he slept through quite a bit of the noise so it wasn't too bad.

Check out our Flickr album for lots more interesting sights! http://www.flickr.com/photos/regen/