I went by Mandake, a big manga/anime store, a couple days ago, hoping to find a cool figurine to use for my huge, somewhat retarded Paladin character in one of the D&D games I’m playing in. Fukuoka doesn’t have anyplace that carries the little lead figures or the new plastic ones that you’d find in a US game/comic shop, so I was trying my luck with collector’s figures from anime shows. Some of them are small enough to be usable on a battlegrid.

Anyway, no luck. The ones that were small enough were all unsuitable–schoolgirls with magic wands and the like. But it did remind me of what a weird place these shops are.

The first time I went there was with Alexandra, one of my fellow players back in the days of the Hakata Hackmasters. Everybody else in the group was at least 10 years younger than me, mostly JET Program members just out of university, come to Japan for a couple years to teach at public schools. Wendy, another member, found me online through a review I’d written of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook. She got some of her friends together and we started gaming.

Anyway, Alexandra was helping me out. The Man in Black (the one from the Delta Green Mailing List, not Johnny Cash) had done me a favor and I was paying him back with spaceships he could use in a game of his back in Hawaii. Alexandra was a regular customer of Mandrake, so she took me there to show me around.

Now, the 4th floor is where the figures are, and there’s a lot of them. Sadly, there’s a strict no-camera rule, so I can’t show pics, but it’s probably somebody’s idea of heaven. Tons and tons and tons of stuff, and a lot of it quite cheap. But very narrow aisles, and very little organization. I get exhausted just looking around every time I go there.

The weirdness really started when I was done looking around and Xandra took me downstairs to the 3rd and 2nd floors. 3rd floor is "girls’ comics," which means original or spoof hentai made for (and mostly by) ladies, which means it’s mostly stories about gay guys having lots of romance and a little sex. It’s also the cosplay floor, which was pretty cool to look at, and which was what she was there for. Some seriously elaborate costumes from anime were on display.

2nd floor is "boys’ comics," which means hentai, hentai, LOTS of hentai. Some of it was of interest to me, but most everywhere I looked was very heavy sanity-damaging stuff. While I was trying to pop my eyeballs back into my head, I was worrying that one of my students might show up. "Oh, David-sensei, are you into lolicon tentacle bondage?" [strangled voice] "No, just lookin’ around…"

Back on the 1st floor, what a relief to be surrounded by regular used comics and used video games. Anyway, these days it’s just straight up the escalator to the 4th floor when I go in there once every few months. I always have to have a long pause between visits, so I can forget how tiny and cramped the place is, and the musty smell. It always makes me miss Dragon’s Lair, my old shop back in Austin, with its big, open spaces.