Sophilautia ❤️🔥🌼
@sophilautia
Chaotic Destroyer of Binaries. Any/All pronouns. Chronically Casual Vtuber/VSona. R07/Toaru/Key/Nintendo fan. CW: Cursed content and 'SJW' Politics. Let's create a more compassionate, loving and fun world together!
I also found a guestbook here with messages from Toaru fans! I of course had to add a message.
My final stop was this tea shop! Choosing between Komoe green tea or Uiharu black tea, I went with Uiharu. I was greeted by an old man working the store with a Saten badge on his shirt, who showed me that these are officially endorsed products of the Tachikawa Tourism Association. Wild!
I then took a stop for lunch. Got some really long potato fries and a "Kebab Sando" that's basically just a kebab :p
Next, I found two more Toaru vending machines, one of them leading me into a Japanese sweets shop that sold Gekota Dorayaki! I picked up some Toaru prints here. Also, I noticed the number XIII on one of these. Are there really that many vending machines to find??
Next, I found one of the many Toaru vending machines scattered around Tachikawa, and following the monorail tracks led me to this iconic view!
REALLY proud of this latter one, I even waited to get the train in view!
Continuing my series of anime pilgrimages, today I visited Tachikawa, the city in Western Tokyo which served as the basis for JC Staff's depictions of Academy City from the Toaru series! Let's see what I found!
LET'S FUCKING GO. I found a working F-Zero AX in Round 1, Asaka, Saitama! No sound but everything else seems to work! This holds up just as well as I remember it when I played it once as a kid. Still the most fun arcade game I've ever played.
And that's my Shirakawa-go adventure! Here's what I came home with, including my unlucky Double Hanyuu and Double Tomitake 😅 Overall this was an awesome trip, I'm so glad I could make it finally 💖 I even found a Higurashi fan working at the Konbini that I made friends with!
Lastly, on my way back to my car I managed to snap a photo of the murder bridge. It looks like it's inaccessible to tourists these days, so I could only get this long distance photo. You can see it's getting consumed by nature at this point.
Shoutouts to this peach water keeping my hydrated. I downed four of these today alone. Refreshing and delicious.
At the top I also found more Higu merch, and Higu Ema blocks! Good to see they didn't get rid of them completely. Here I managed to find some U-soda, which I haven't drank yet.. I'll let you know. Apparently there was a Higurashi Cafe here at some point, but the area seemed to be under renovations
Next was the long climb up to the observation platform. God it almost killed me. But at the top I was rewarded with that iconic view! Also I think this path was also depicted in the anime.
Some more shots. Supposedly the latter two is where the "uso da" scene happens, but I couldn't get the angle right.
I recreated another scene from Higurashi, then took a visit to the Hachiman Shrine, the basis of Higurashi's Furude Shrine!
I love how they use flowing water to keep their drinks cool. From the rivers to canals to rice paddies to water wheels and flour-pounding devices, Shirakawa-go is a marvel of hydrological engineering. You're never far from the sound of flowing water here. And it might be the freshest water I've seen
I then found a store with a shrine of Higurashi merch (not for sale) with a bunch of for sale merch below it!
Crossing the bridge to the heritage village proper, I found another Higurashi scene!