Pika Pika!
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Pika Pika!

By Joanne Li

Imay haveshrieked excitedly at my computer when I first sawthisKotaku articlesome time in July. Seeing as this was a limited-time promotional event and that Ilove the original Pokemon, I absolutely had to visit the Pikachu Cafe before I left Japan. After telling a bunch of my friends about it, I dragged another Techer, Chris, with me to seek out our very own Pikachu foodstuffs.

The cafe was actually part of a larger temporary summer exhibit that was meant to promote the recent Pokemon XY movie, so we first passed by a wall of TV screens, each showing a different past Pokemon movie. Farther into the exhibit was a great gallery of storyboards, concept art, background art, and character design pages from all of the Pokemon movies. Despite not having seen the later movies, everything felt kind of nostalgic and I’m considering watching the movie… once I catch up on the old ones. Hehe.

After winding our way through the various exhibits and promotional trailers, we encountered a massive queue of people. A staff member at the end of the line held a sign informing us the wait to enter the Pikachu Cafe was 200 minutes, but we shrugged and lined up anyway. “Fortunately” it ended up being “only” a two hour wait, and by the time we were close enough to order our food, both of us were considering ordering multiple entrees. I ended up getting a Pikachu burger set, which came with an adorable Pikachu jelly dessert thing. It might be the hunger talking, but everything tasted as good as it looked.

We finished with the Pokemon exhibit with some time left in our day, so we headed to Odaiba to find the giant Gundam statue. Odaiba is an island that nowadays contains plenty of shopping malls and other random tourist attractions. (There’s a shopping mall called Palette Town, which to us sounded interesting just because we were thinking of Pallet Town from the first Pokemon games. It was just a normal mall, though.) While searching for the Gundam, one of the buildings we passed (Fuji Television’s HQ, I think?) was counting down from 5 minutes, so we paused for a bit to see what was going to happen.

Finally, we found the Gundam statue, with a pretty large crowd of people milling about in front of it. Chris wondered if they were waiting around for some kind of event, or for the statue to move slightly, but we decided it wasn’t worth it and just snapped a few photos before heading to dinner. All in all, a day well spent filled with iconic Japanese characters.

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