I'm Asuka...Fly me

I’ll post more when I get around to it, but my recent travels to Osaka and Tokyo went relatively well. I haven’t quite licked my earthquake paranoia that triggered my previous quick exit in 2004 but I managed to function fairly well during the 12 days I was there…I only ran into problems when I visited the Floating Garden Observatory at the Udema Sky Building in Osaka, which seems designed primarily to upset people who have problems with heights.
You take an external glass elevator up to the near the top, then a 200 foot glass enclosed escalator suspended between two buildings and then you have to take another glass enclosed escalator to go down back to the glass escalator to leave. Normally I can handle heights OK but I found this place really, really off putting although the views were pretty good..and it is unusual in the fact that you can actually go outside on the roof as well…but I was no way that bold.

My favorite find on this trip was something truly dorky. Last year, there was a trading figure release of All Nippon Airways (ANA) stewardess uniforms that was quite popular and sold out quickly (unsurprisingly there turns out there is serious stewardess uniform fetishism in Japan). I came across some modded versions of 1990-2005 uniform in a consignment shop in Osaka…Instead of the original release heads, these figures have had their heads replaced with those of Neon Genesis Evangelion anime heroines Rei Ayanami and Asuka Langley Sohryu. Rei and Asuka are evergreen properties in the trading figure world and they have gone through dozens of various releases and are frequent crane machine items in Japan. The funny thing is that if these were actually released, I suspect the cross pollination of these two subcultures would likely result in significant sales. If ANA can see $ in doing a Pokemon jet, I can only imagine the $$ they could make with an Evangelion based jet.