NEW TOURISM

Caption: A customer at the twenty-four-hour Aprecio Tokyo Bay Makuhari café relaxes with her choice from the extensive manga library. The seating charge starts at 400 yen for thirty minutes, and soft drinks are free.
Credit: TADASHI AIZAWA

Manga on Main Street

In Japan, the home is no longer the only place where you can enjoy anime DVDs or manga comic books. There are, for example, cafés where you can read manga or watch anime at your leisure, and even places where you can “meet” manga characters face to face. We visited some popular spots.


In Japan there are many manga cafés and Internet cafés, but among them Aprecio Tokyo Bay Makuhari in Chiba, Chiba Prefecture is notable for being the highest such café in Japan. From the 48th floor of the high-rise hotel, approximately 170 meters above ground, you get an expansive view of Tokyo Bay.

The spacious café has 10,000 manga books and magazines as well as computers connected to the Internet. All the seats face the window, in a variety of configurations to suit individuals, couples, groups and so forth. On weekend afternoons it is so crowded that it is difficult to get a seat.


In April this year a new tourist attraction arrived in the Akihabara district of Tokyo: a café on the theme of Kidou Senshi Gundam, the robot anime first broadcast on TV in 1979 and still hugely popular. The interior of the café is designed in the near-future style image of the world of Gundam and has various Gundam installations, including a Gundam model one twelfth the size of the real thing, successive generations of Gundam plastic models, the autograph of Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino, and a screen showing Gundam anime.

On the menu are ningyo-yaki cakes in the shape of Gundam, as well as drinks, foods and desserts inspired by popular characters and Mobile Suit from the anime. Also, the uniforms of the sales clerks are designed on the image of the clothes in the anime, and the toilet cubicles imitate Mobile Suit’s startup.

Everything combines to create a space where you can really enjoy the world of the story.





Facing the Sea of Japan, and also famous as a fishing port, Sakaiminato in Tottori Prefecture is the hometown of Shigeru Mizuki, the creator of the manga series GeGeGe no Kitaro. GeGeGe no Kitaro is a story whose main characters are yokai, or spirit monsters, mysterious and supernatural beings. There is a wide variety of legends about yokai in every region of Japan. Some yokai are said to ad-monish the tricks of humans; others bring happiness if you catch sight of them. Mizuki Shigeru Road in Sakaiminato is lined with 136 bronze statues of yokai. The slightly frightening yet somehow humorous form of Mizuki’s yokai delight the visitors who see them.


Osamu Akimoto’s Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Koen-mae Hashutsujo (This is the police station in front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward) has been continuously serialized in the manga Weekly Shonen Jump since 1976, and in June this year reached vol-ume 170. It describes the misadventures of Kankichi Ryotsu (nicknamed Ryo-san), a senior policeman at the police box in Kameari, Katsushika-ku (ward), which is a real place-name in Tokyo. Kameari is known throughout Japan for its inhabitants who are full of humanity and for its downtown atmosphere, which are recreated perfectly in the manga. Bronze statues of senior policeman Ryotsu and other characters in the stories have been erected in the shop-ping street of Kameari, and enjoy wide popularity.