Visiting a wota home, Odaiba and an Ameba Studio public broadcast

By: Gordokaba

Like all of you should know, Buono! had plans to go to Sweden for the Stockholm Japan Expo this year. When I was surfing Hello!Online on April 21st, I found that a Japanese user had posted and stated that he would be going. I got interested and decided to send him a private message. One hour later we had decided to meet up for dinner. He was free from work and was only living about 20 minutes by train from my apartment. We met up, had our lunch and then went to his place. He was sharing an apartment with his friend since a couple of years back. I was expecting at least his room to be filled with H!P merchandise, but surprisingly there's wotas who are not buying much stuff at all. He showed me some cool stuff like signatures he got of Shimizu Saki and Yajima Maimi when he went to Korea earlier the same year and some videos he had recorded during his trip the previous year when Berryz was invited to the Asia Song Festival. Before leaving he gave me a DVD disc with this footage and also a Shugo Chara Egg release event that he had recorded with a camera attached on another floor at the mall it took place. I might post all this later on when I get the disc back which I managed to forget in Japan.

This day the SJX website had been down for a while so we spent the day trying to find out what was going on and before it was over we got to know that the expo was cancelled and that Buono! wouldn't be coming to Sweden. Right away I decided to re-arrange my flight and stay a couple of weeks longer in Japan instead. The friendly wota even offered me to come and stay in his and his friend's apartment when I had checked out from the apartment I had rented on my own for my intial stay, which I did decide to do. More about this in a future post!

On the next day I managed to meet up with the guy from H!O that I couldn't find a couple of days before, "Nathan". We went out to Odaiba, a large artificial island in Tokyo Bay where it's not so much people around compared to what you would be used to by being in the world's biggest city. Since both of us still were pretty insecure about going to Japanese restaurants and order food there we went to a place that served an American all you can eat buffet, which was pretty good. Afterwards we just walked around the place and enjoyed the beautiful view before it got too dark outside and we decided to go to Roppongi and from there walk all the way to Shibuya to burn some calories after having too much of the buffet earlier.

The Friday I spent with the same guy going to Harajuku and the famous Ameba Studio, from which Yaguchi Mari is hosting her weekly radio show. That day Reina and Eri from MM were guests. We got there about two hours before it would start and there wasn't many people there waiting so we decided to visit the H!P Shop. It was Nathan's first visit despite being in Japan for a couple of weeks already! He didn't buy anything but got pretty into this later on and decided to get some souvenirs before heading back home. I also managed to convince him to go to MM's concerts for the first time that Sunday in Gunma prefecture, not too far from Tokyo, so we went to the reseller store to get some tickets for him.

When we got back to the Ameba Studio the line was longer so we decided to join it and wait as well. 90 people would get to see the show in groups of 30 at a time, 10 minutes per group. If more than 90 people showed up there would be a lottery. We were not sure if that many people did show up but we managed to get tickets for it anyway, so no worries there. I ended up in the first group and Nate in the second one. The girls were promoting the new single, Shouganai Yume Oibito and talking about it for most of the time. When my time was over I still managed to watch the show from the back of the sidewalk, as long as I didn't block the way for the people walking there trying to pass by. Seeing how happy Nathan was to get to see the girls afterwards made my day more then getting to see the radio show myself. He went from not having much to say about today's H!P to not being able to stop talking about how beautiful the girls were and how thankful he was for bringing him with me for the show. I know then already that he would love the concerts that weekend, even if he was still not completely convinced.

A photo from outside the Ameba Studio and from our Yakiniku dinner later that day.