TOKYO GEEK’S GUIDE
Book review:
Did you know Prince of Tennis is also a long running musical? Fancy watching two dashing waiters dressed in highschool gakuran meet via Pocky stick? Tokyo Geek Guide provides practical tips for the visiting otaku.
This is a glossy, visually frenetic guide to Tokyo with a bent for anything related to Japan’s vast pop media portfolio. Besides staples like the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (book ahead!) you can taste a Resident Evil brain cake at Capcom Bar in Shinjuku, check out the fully-sick, well, super-kawaii, itasha cars at Ita-G Festa convention in Odaiba. Trips to theme cafes can go far beyond the maid-schtick. Chapter organisation is by locality and the emphasis is on real world visitation. Tokyo’s many neighbourhoods are scoured for not just shops, eateries and galleries but festivals, concerts, conventions, spinoff toys from plushies to plamodel kits, trading card shops, music, specialist fashion boutiques literally anything with connection to otaku-space.
There is already a considerable amount of material published along Japan’s “geek” lines. More is not a bad thing but any new offering has its work cut out to differentiate itself. Tokyo Geek’s Guide comes across as a practical blend of background information plus on-the ground reality. It straddles two genres being both a city guide and an infopedia. The latter function is complemented with interviews with prominent inhabitants including Harujuku’s Chocomoo and Studio Dwarf’s Goda Tsuneo, the creator of Domo kun.
Author Gianni Simonne is in good published company. A Geek in Japan is Hector Garcia’s polished travelog. Tokyo on Foot is a charming, illustrated tour, hand-drawn by Florent Chavouet. Patrick W Galbraith provides the otaku theory, in moe style with the Otaku Encyclopaedia. Brian Ashcraft investigates some of the more niche aspects of a …niche topic with these two works. Publishers are certainly finding their authors far and wide. Simonne is probably the eldest of this group, going by his childhood anecdotes of watching a super robot series from the 70s at dinner time. All above mentioned titles are available from our library.
Shelf: 291.361 SIM 2017
Tokyo geek’s guide
by
Gianni Simonne.
Tuttle Publishing, Tokyo ; Rutland, Vermont, c2017
Text in English
144 p. : col. ill., col. maps ; 26 cm.
ISBN: 9784805313855
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