Continuing on with the anime theme, my sister and I decided to go to Ikebukuro on day 22. Ikebukuro is home to the very famous Sunshine city which is a mall complex that literally has everything from an aquarium to the world’s biggest pokemon centre.

Ikebukuro is a really huge place with multiple malls. Together with Akihabara, Ikebukuro is known for being the centre of otaku culture.

As soon as we reached there we went straight to J World. Anyone who watches anime knows Shounen Jump, and for good reason – long running series such as Dragon Ball Z and Naruto were the shows that introduced many to anime. Their characters are really iconic and J World is a mini theme park for these well-loved series.

The entrance fee wasn’t too expensive (800 yen I believe). They also have another ticket which includes all the rides/games, but is a bit more expensive. The place is divided into sections dedicated to each of the series.

We weren’t really interested in the one piece area mainly because neither of us have seen it (gasp), and so we just looked around and moved on to the Dragon Ball and Naruto sections.

Knowing the shows is pretty crucial to having fun in J world, since the main attraction is the set designs and characters, rather than the rides (remember, the theme park is within a mall, and so the rides are small and more aimed at children).

My sister loved the Haikyuu area (where she played a pork bun related mini game and won a key chain!) I really liked the Naruto area and the Dragon Ball area because we got to meet Goku!

All of the areas had life size cut outs of characters. There were also gachapon and purikura with the various characters, which I thought was really cool.

After exploring J world we decided to get some dessert (because why not).

Next was the pokemon centre! The pokemon centre was pretty big and had a quite a few large pokemon statues.

The merchandise was really cute, but as expected was really overpriced. My sister and I were pretty content with just window shopping but in the end we bought a deck of pokemon themed poker cards (our family loves card games, it’s our weakness)

What really surprised me was that when we made the purchase, we were given free pikachu key chains! I’m not sure if they were given out for a limited time only though.

After exploring around the mall for a bit (it’s huge), we decided to head over to Animate, which was about 5 minutes away. It’s always fun looking for merchandise, but if you visit do look out for special events. When we were there there was a Haikyuu cafe at the top floor!

Overall it was a pretty good day. It was still quite early, but we decided to head back to get dinner and get some rest since my sister was feeling a bit sick.