Shoji Kawamori Expo

Last Sunday I went to the Shoji Kawamori Expo at the Aamo Gallery, inside Tokyo Dome City. Shoji Kawamori is the designer/producer of the Macross series, he also participated in the designing and/or production of a lot of other works including Vision of Escaflowne, Eureka 7, Genesis of Aquarion and a lot more. He's also the Mech designer of the Armored Core video game series, and participated in a lot of other games too.
Another very interesting thing he did is that he designed the AIBO dog robot that Sony released in 2001.

I am a big Macross fan, and while I'm not in Macross for the robots(not an actual Mech fan) I was still very interested in this expo.

 The Expo was probably one of the best I've seen. It was seriously really cool. There was a lot of stuff, and while I could only take pictures in the first room displaying some big scale items he designed, the whole thing was great.

The Expo had an option to enter the K-40 theater, we had no idea what it was, but we decided to take it, it was 400 yen more than the entry fee of 2000 yen. (audio guides are also available for 800yen more).
The theater thing ended up being pretty cool, it was a dome shaped projection above us (kinda lake a planetarium) with characters from a lot of his series woprking together to battle some evil spatial monsters. It was pretty short, but still great. Might not say it was worth 40 yen, but still ... nice.

After that, the second room had big displays of things he created. Giant Mechs, Cardboard, Punch made of model boxes, all pretty cool.

There was also a wall with a bunch of fighter toys from the past years, I noticed that a toy I had when I was a kid was actually a Valkyrie toy, and not, as I tough, a transformer toy lol.

There was also a display of some figures created for the shows he produced. I think most Macross figures don't actually look good personally, so wasn't interested in this too much.

You could take a picture of yourself shooting missiles.

And there was a cool display demo of one of the fighter's toy doing it's transformation. I tried to take a video, but someone moved in and I couldn't get a good one.

After the display part, we couldn't take pictures anymore but there was a bunch of tunnel like corridors filled with design sheets, notes and storyboard that he created.  It was very nice to see, starting from the first Macross, covering all the entries in the series, and also going over all the rest of his works, including the work on Nissan's car and the SONY AIBO robot dog. There was so many design sheets they went up to the roof in an arc, it was great.

Overall the Expo was great, and it's still going on for a few days, so if you're in Tokyo now you should definitely go see it, it's up until 2019/06/23.

Full album: On Google Photo because I can't find anything else now

As it Happened: Chinese New Year 2015

First post in a new series of post "As it Happened". These post will be posts about old things that happened in japan, and that I didn't talk about on this blog, but that I want to talk about, or at least I want to remember them.

2015/02/17:

My favorite ramen shop in shimokitazawa employed a couple of chinese students, and they decided to make a chinese new year party inside the shop on the day it's closed. I was invited because I was friend with the manager and some of the part timers there. It was my first time really celebrating the chinese new year. All the food was cooked by the students, and I think most of it was by my friend.

As you can see on this picture, there was a lot of food involved. If I remember well, a lot of it was gyoza (I love gyoza so I was very pleased).

The strangest one was a gyoza cooked with cola. I love cola so I was really looking forward to trying it, but if my memory is good, it wasn't actually that good lol.

That's all for this post. Hopefully this new series will get me to actually start posting more frequently again.