pigs on a blanket
april 5 note - i finally have decent internet and can upload these photos and post the blogs. to the email readers, apologies in advance because i am going to be posting 5 blogs today.
today we visited a mini pig cafe in meguro, and then went to akihabara looking for souvenirs.
i wasn’t sure what to expect from the pig cafe. i have heard that a lot of these animal cafes are kinda inhumane or abusive to the animals. so that’s sad. but on the other hand, i gladly eat pork regularly. so it isn’t that. last year we went to an owl cafe during the day, despite owls being nocturnal animals. i don’t know how to feel about the morality of animal cafes. i can say that these pigs seemed very happy and the lady running the shop seemed to really care for them. i do not think this was an evil place. the pigs were very cute.
it will probably come as no surprise to anyone here that i came out of this experience wanting a pet pig. imagine if my dog had a pig best friend named wasabi… maybe one day.
pokemon card hunting
having completed the only planned activity for the day, we didnt have anything specific in mind. we knew we wanted to buy an additional suitcase just to stuff full of souvenirs and send home with my mom. and there were some specific souvenirs i was still trying to find. we decided the best course of action to take in this case would be to head back to akihabara. i went alone last time, but i wanted my mom to see it.
the souvenirs i was after were specific pokemon cards. before leaving, i asked a ton of people what their favorite pokemon is. my idea was to find a shiny or full-art japanese pokemon card of all their answers. unfortunately, many of my friends have weird taste and named pokemon that are hard to find. if everyone loved charizard and pikachu this would have been easy. but no, i had to look for cubone and goomy and empoleon and dreepy. i am 100% aware that none of the people who read this blog have any idea who any of those pokemon are. something like 90% of this blog’s viewership is my parents’ age. but i am writing this for me, so i am going to talk about pokemon cards now. you could probably get away with just scrolling until you see a picture and nothing of value will be lost.
so pokemon cards are a crazy beast. they had sort of a resurgence in popularity during covid, i think a lot of that came from people in lockdown with nothing to do finally doing some house cleaning and going “hey i wonder what these are worth” en masse. but it got very popular again a few years ago, and as far as i know, has remained popular since. there is an organization called professional sports authenticator, or psa, that you can send your pokemon cards to for inspection. they will carefully inspect your card and put it in a sealed hard case, then give it a rating from 1-10 indicating how perfect it is. a very rare pokemon card that is psa 10 rated will sell for many thousands of dollars. for example, the holy grail of my childhood, a first edition charizard, apparently sells for $250,000 if it is psa 10. even a psa 1 first edition charizard sells for over $3,000.
all this to say, psa is a very well known and respected organization for what it does, and people put a lot of value on their ratings. there are multiple stores in akihabara that only sell psa 10 rated cards, and many more than sell cards of all varieties and include a section for psa graded cards.
i was obviously not looking for the spend the value of 10 californian houses in the 1950s, i just wanted some neat cards. we walked around for a long time, went into a ton of stores all over, including one store that i thought was very funny that was literally just named “pokemon card”. i was able to find a few of the things i was looking for here. no spoilers on what i got in case the people who named pokemon for me actually read this.
but the most incredible thing happened while we were looking for these. i happened to walk by an electronic store and saw a sign that said they have logicool products. logicool is what logitech is called in japan.
my favorite computer mouse is the logitech g600. there are no other mice exactly like it in the world. it has 12 buttons on the side, and it has a third click, to the right of right click, that when held can be a modifier on those 12 side buttons. so basically it has 24 side buttons. there are plenty of mice out there with 12 side buttons, but the logitech g600 is the only mouse that has that ring finger click modifier / 24 functional buttons. it has twice as many as any of the alternatives. and i have been using one for years. i used to buy them 3 at a time and replace them yearly.
logitech discontinued this mouse a while back. for a good while, you could still get them for ~$40 on amazon brand new even after being discontinued. but its been long enough now, and people have realized that this is a unique product that cant easily be replaced with something else. so now if you want to buy a brand new one, they are like $200. its an outrage.
anyway, logicool didn’t discontinue it. they still make it. for some reason, it is impossible (or at least difficult) to find the logicool g600 online from a reputable vendor in america, even though i know it exists.
i saw this sign saying they had a logicool section and decided i had to take a look just to hope. and what do you know,
they had it. they had a giant crate with like a hundred of these things in it. they are kinda expensive ($66) compared to the $40 i was used to paying, but they probably know you cant get these things in america and raised prices to compensate. there are dozens of us out there missing this mouse. so i bought 3. 2 for me and 1 for a friend.
this was the comeup of the entire trip. i walked in here on a whim, interrupting a hunt for pokemon cards, and solved a real problem i have back home. incredible.
etc
not sure what to label this section, but we tried to go to a sushi restaurant recommended by shinobu-san. google maps said they opened at 5. so we went there, were about 20 minutes early, and then went in at 5. they quickly told us they open at 6. big sad. so we gave up, went home and ordered pizza. but i did get this cool picture while we were waiting that doesn’t fit anywhere else in the post:
