行きましょう Brianna!: Junji Ito Exhibit in Ginza

Hello! A few people expressed interest in this exhibit, so while I don't have many pictures, I'll write what I can!

On Saturday, April 6, 2019 I went with my friend Christine to the Junji Ito exhibit in Ginza, Tokyo!

Since I was coming from Hamamatsu, Shizuoka only for the day, I took the shinkansen. After a pretty chill morning, I got on the shinkansen and realized that I accidentally reserved a seat in the smoking car. This was the second time I've done this now!

I got to Tokyo with my lungs mostly intact, and went to Omote-sando, where my friend and I were going to meet for lunch. I found this really cool cafe when I was visiting Tokyo in February to see my friend Lauren while she was on vacation in Japan.

This is 文房具カフェ, or the Stationery Cafe!

So here's how the stationery cafe works: you come in, put your name down (if there's a wait) and then you can look around at all the cool stationery things they sell while you wait! Once you are seated, you're given a little explanation of how the cafe works. There are tons of drawing and writing supplies available for you to bring back to your table to doodle with. There are pens, pencils, pastels, crayons, pencil crayons, and even tons of Copics! There are communal sketchbooks which you can look through and add to yourself, scrap paper, or you can even draw on the placemat on your table. In the first pic, you can see a little green tube that says wasabi that's actually a green marker!

The food and drinks here are actually quite good! It's usually good to keep your expectations low when it comes to theme cafes, but the pizza here was tasty, and the presentation was nice. I personally like their lemonades, and this chai latte was really tasty as well!

After lunch, we headed over to the exhibit, which was being held at the Span Art Gallery.

My friend and I decided to go on the day he was having his signing event. I was hoping to maybe catch a glimpse of him from far away or something, since we hadn't found out about the event in time to get a signing spot. There were only 120 signing spots anyway.

So when we arrived at the gallery and went in, we weren't expecting him to be doing his signings in the middle of a tiny gallery!

I was a little (read: extremely) starstruck. My friend and I went around the gallery and looked at whatever we had access to, while occasionally sneaking obvious looks over towards the signing table. His comic pages were in the far corner, behind his table so we were unable to check those out, but we were able to look at most of his cover artwork from over the years that he had displayed.

Towards the front of the gallery, they had a a merch section. I ended up spending less than I expected but still got two A4 clear files, a postcard set, both of the available sticker sets, two canvas totebags, and a Tomie shirt.

Left: Signed Reproductions Right: Tomie Shirts

We saw some pictures in frames available for sale for around $400-600. If they were originals, I would have easily paid way too much money to get one, but they were only signed reproductions.

I really loved being able to see him and his work in person. He's my favourite artist so I'm incredibly grateful to have had this opportunity. I've started using twitter again just so I can find out about any future signing events of his! One day I hope I will be able to meet him and get a signature on my favourite comic Uzumaki.

In the middle of our gallery visit, my friend and I went to a huge stationery store in Ginza called Itoya. It was very fancy and has almost anything you could need, stationery-wise. I will definitely come back to check it out again next time I'm in Ginza.

After that we decided to be bougie and went to the Shiseido Parlour Salon de Cafe.

This was.. a fancy and expensive parfait. My friend and I decided to try the two different seasonal strawberry ones to see the difference. We think it was maybe the area where the strawberries were grown? Mine seemed more ripe and sweet, while hers a little tangier. They were both extremely delicious.

After Shiseido Parlous, we went back to the gallery, hoping we would be able to check out Junji Ito's comic pages up close. Unfortunately, we weren't able to since his signings went on until the gallery closed.

I really enjoyed my short trip, and hope to have more like it in the future!

PS:

As soon as I found out there was a Junji Ito gallery exhibit and signing, I start working on plans to decorate a dress for it. I had two weeks to do it. I did what I could to plan and prepare everything in time; buying a white dress secondhand, ordering additional transfer sheets in case the ones from Canada didn't arrive on time, drawing an outline for the cameos, and even buying five of his books so I could make high resolution scans for the cameos. Unfortunately, I messed up the actual application of the transfer sheets despite my preparations, and was unable to wear it. I hope to follow through with this idea in the future, if I'm ever able to get these stupid set transfers off this dress.