You’re reading the second chapter of my eight-day travelog recounting my unbelievable trip to Japan to cover the 2023 Pokémon World Championships. If you already haven't, check out Day 1 of my Pokemon journey in Japan.
Day 2 - Pokémon Sweets and Unbearable Heat
6:00 am - I wake up and I’m so tired my face hurts. The 16-hour time difference is brutal. I was awake for 18 hours straight yesterday and my body is not having it. I push the button on the nightstand that automatically opens the blinds (this hotel is so fancy) and I’m surprised when the room fills with sunlight. My eyes scream. Turns out the sun rises at 5:00 am in Japan. But once my eyes adjust, I see a beautiful view of Yokohama and suddenly the pain of being a lil sleepy guy fades and I get hyped for the day’s planned adventures.
6:20 am - The weather here is obscenely hot and muggy so I pack a bag full of essentials to deal with the extreme heat: sunglasses, cap, mini-fan, and one of the hotel’s complimentary water bottles from atop the minibar.
6:40 am - I head downstairs and run to the 7/11 across the street for a quick breakfast. I decide on some banana bread rounds topped with dried banana chips. I had heard tales of Japanese 7/11s and their scrumptious wonders, and it turns out the legends were true. They have aisles and aisles of yummy foods, and I would make many a trip here during my stay.
6:45 am - I join the press group on the tour bus. It’s full of journalists and influencers from around the world. We all swap stories on how little we slept and how no one could figure out how to turn off the minibar light.
6:51 am - We head over to our first destination of the day, the Sunshine City mall, where there are numerous Pokémon stores. Our Pokémon rep explains that even though this place and some others on our itinerary aren’t directly related to Worlds, they still wanted to give us a look at Pokémon’s presence in Japan and all of the unique things they have here.
8:05 am - We arrive at the Pokémon Center Mega Tokyo inside the mall and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Wall-to-wall Pokémon merchandise of every type you could possibly imagine. I’ve been to many pop-up Pokémon Centers before, but this fully stocked store has far more product and a wider range of more peculiar merch. There’s the traditional plushies, card sleeves, playmats, and card binders, but also Mareep feather dusters, Pikachu camping gear, and Shedinja humidifiers. I’m overcome with analysis paralysis and don’t know what to buy. I ask Eric from The Gamer to help me keep an eye out for a good playmat.
8:15 am - We’re on a tight schedule and they give us a five-minute warning. I run to the cutest fluffy Mew I can find and look into its adorable blue eyes. I must have it. I look at the price tag. Maybe I don’t need it, after all. Eric shows me a Terastallized Charizard playmat and I tell him to quit wasting my time with that gaudy overrated lizard. I find a blind bag with a random Pokémon t-shirt design inside and think it would be a fun souvenir for a friend back home, so I decide to buy it.
I see there’s a whole shelf of playmats and choose a Venusaur one and a Blastoise one that look nice across from one another. I especially love the card zone outlines and how in Japan the discard pile is called “trash.” I take the mats with the only two good Kanto starters and the blind bag and check out. It cost me 4250 yen. I still haven’t totally figured out the exchange rate to US dollars, but rather than do the math, I tell myself it’s probably not that much…
[Editor’s Note: He spent $29.05. And no, I’m not upset the blind bag t-shirt wasn’t for me, my kid would’ve liked it, but Joshua’s never met her, so...]
8:20 am - We head over to the Pikachu Sweets Pokémon Cafe and it’s also the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s decorated with Pikachu wearing different colored chef uniforms and serving various confections.
We’re given a Pikachu waffle coated in thick frosting that’s almost too cute to eat. Almost. It was sugary sweet and soft and reminded me of Hostess Cupcakes. We’re offered a selection of three different drink flavors: grape, orange, or chocolate coffee. I go with the latter and consume some much-needed caffeine.
My coffee was topped with picture perfect Pikachu foam art, but Cody from ScreenRant shows me he took the one cup with Jirachi foam art. I’m overcome with jealousy and feel mad he got the Mythical cafe mocha and wish misfortune upon his entire family. “That’s cool! You’re so lucky,” I tell him.
8:40 am - Riding the sugar buzz of a lifetime, I announce my intention to never leave this place because it’s just so sweet and lovely. The coffee, on the other hand, has other plans, and I begrudgingly exit to take care of that.
8:45 am - There’s even more Pokémon stuff to see in the mall. I enter a tabletop gaming area dedicated purely to the Pokémon Trading Card Game. It, too, is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. As a TCG lover at heart, I geek out and force Steve from It’s Super Effective to take numerous pictures of me sitting at the game tables. I remember how when I was a kid I would go to a Toys R Us for weekly Pokémon League and play on the floor, and I imagine how fun it would have been to go hang out at a place like this instead.
9:00 am - We enter a Pokémon GO store where there’s a tall, blue PokeStop and statues of Professor Willow and the leaders of the three teams, Spark, Candela, and Blanche.
9:30 am - We explore the atrium area decorated with different Pokémon statues chilling on the grass. Yamper, in particular, is too precious for words.
9:52 am - Our time at the mall is over and we go back to the bus to continue our journey. I reflect on how cool it was to see a whole area filled with Pokémon stores catering to every aspect of the fandom. Back home in the US, we have plenty of stores that sell Pokémon merchandise, but we don’t have a single store dedicated purely to Pokémon, let alone a whole section of a mall! I begin to wonder if I could ever see myself relocating to Japan.
11:21 am - The next stop couldn’t be more different. We’re brought to Sankeien Garden and enter a traditional Japanese tea house.
We take off our shoes at the door, sit down at long wooden tables, and listen as we’re told the historic significance and deeper meaning of the tea ceremony we’re about to witness. A Japanese tea master performs a ritual to prepare a special matcha tea for everyone in attendance. It’s quiet and elegant and full of artful movements that turns the act of brewing tea into a serene experience.
We’re given a small doughy sweet made of bean paste that’s shaped like a flower and sprinkled with gold flakes. It’s a gorgeous little work of art, to the point where I feel bad eating it, but it’s custom to finish it before the tea is served.
The tea comes served in a small wooden bowl. We’re instructed on the proper way to hold the bowl and that it’s to be finished in three sips. The tea is frothy and green and hot and sweet.
12:20 pm - We are greeted by Ari, Product Marketing Manager at TPCi, and she thanks us for attending. She hints that the special tea ceremony we just took part in is linked to an upcoming announcement tied to the upcoming Scarlet & Violet DLC.
[Editor’s Note: Turns out the matcha tea was a tease for the new Pokémon, Poltchageist.]
12:35 pm - We’re served a bento box for lunch, but not just any bento box. We’re told it comes from the most famous restaurant in Japan, Yugyoan Tankuma Kitamise. It’s a centuries-old establishment that makes the fanciest bento boxes in the country and is known for being so exclusive that it’s virtually impossible to get a reservation. Our local guide told us he’s lived in Japan for 18 years and even he had never eaten there. The box is full of exquisitely crafted delectables.
It’s mainly seafood, with sushi and sashimi, along with more unique things such as deep-fried Red-spotted mash trout in Japanese sweet pepper sauce and pickled unripe Ume plum in jello syrup. I ask if the fish is also a hint at an upcoming Pokémon project, perhaps a new Water-Type Legendary, and they say no it’s just fish.
12:57 pm - With our legendary lunch now over, we kill some time by exploring the Sankeien Garden grounds. The sun feels like it’s far closer to the Earth than it should be, looming directly over us like the moon from Majora’s Mask and frying us with heat vision. We see a temple atop a tall, forested hillside and make the absolutely incorrect and obviously terrible decision to hike up to it.
The air is so muggy it feels like we’re walking through boiling hot oatmeal. It’s a beautiful climb up the winding path and we finally reach the top. I’m sweating in places I didn’t know I had. We take pictures at the summit and make our way back down to the bus. The group decides to take a lap around the small lake and I decide to leave those psychos behind and go back to the bus. I get a cramp in my left leg, which is a painful reminder that, yes indeed, that was an absolutely incorrect and obviously terrible decision.
1:30 pm - Back aboard the bus I regain the will to live thanks to the air conditioning. The rest of the group boards the bus and we head to our next destination.
2:00 pm - We arrive in Chinatown, a bustling area full of shops and restaurants. The sun is burning us alive. We walk down the streets and see all sorts of neat stalls and stores. It feels like it’s 95 degrees in the shade and eight billion in direct sunlight. There’s so much food for sale and under normal circumstances I’d want to sample some but I’m so full of fish and the weather is so oppressive that even looking at food is starting to make me feel woozy.
3:00 pm - I see Super Duper Danni, a familiar face from Los Angeles, and I join her group to explore. She says she’s so grateful that Pokémon Worlds has come home to Japan because they have so much Pokémon stuff here unlike anything back home.
3:30 pm - We zigzag around Chinatown, occasionally stopping into shops just to catch a break from the heat. My clothes are soaked with sweat and the back of my neck is tingling with sunburn. We find a big shop with some peculiar Pokémon merchandise and one person in our group says it’s probably counterfeit. Clearly they’ve never heard of Picklechu and Venusnore. We head back out into the inferno and when I see a shop selling tomato-pandas I’m convinced I’m starting to hallucinate.
3:44 pm - I cross paths with Eric from The Gamer and we make the best decision of our lives: to leave Chinatown early and get out of the sun. We head back to the place where our group will be having dinner later and grab a table at a diner. I order all the ice water in the world and chug it until my body temperature goes back to normal and for the first time in hours I feel like I’m not on fire. I order a strawberry milkshake-looking drink and suck it down like ambrosia.
4:00 pm - Our table is across from two of our Pokémon reps. We strike up a conversation and I ask how they came to work at Pokémon. One said he was a tad too old for Pokémon and wasn’t necessarily a fan when he was hired but came to appreciate how the games let you raise a team of Pokémon and how the game sparks so much joy in its fans. He shared a story about how, through Make A Wish, he was able to help organize a special preview of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet for a young fan before he passed. This was during COVID quarantine, so they called him on Zoom and showed him the first game trailer a week before it was revealed to the public and let him see the final evolutions of the Paldean starters. He says the little boy lost his mind with happiness. I get something in my eye.
5:00 pm - We sit down at a Chinese restaurant where they bring out an endless stream of dishes for everyone to share.
Given I was still full from lunch, I didn’t think I’d be able to eat anything, but once the food started coming out and the smells filled my nose, I decided to try a little bit of everything. I don’t remember the names of each dish but I quite enjoyed the stringy goo noodles, the crispy crab knuckle, the spicy creamy shrimp, and the soup-filled dumpling. Even the gummy jellyfish tendril wasn’t half bad.
6:30 pm - My stomach has never been more full. We head back to the hotel for some downtime before the Pokémon Presents.
10:00 pm - We’re seated in a room inside the convention center to watch the Pokémon Presents on a small TV with a laptop hooked up to it. Not exactly how I envisioned watching the Presents but here we are.
Everyone in the media is on their laptop, ready to jot down the breaking news, while many of the influencers have readied their cameras to capture their reactions in real-time. There’s a flurry of reveals for all things Pokémon, and the announcement of the Pokémon: Path to the Peak online animated series piques my interest because it’s the first time Pokémon has made a show about the card game, and if it hasn’t already been made clear already, I love the card game. The room starts to “ooo!” and “ahh!” when a couple brand new Pokémon are revealed as part of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s “The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero” DLC. There’s a giraffenated Raikou called Raging Bolt, and a Cobalion that looks like it was cast in a Transformers movie called Iron Crown. The crowd goes wild.
10:30 pm - The Presents wraps up and before we head back to the hotel to turn in after an exhausting day, Pokémon gives everyone two swag bags full of Pokémon goodies.
I live in a small studio apartment, so I already know I don’t have room for any of this stuff, and most of it will become souvenirs for my co-workers and friends. But not the Quaxly keychain. That’s for me.
That's all for Day 2 of my epic Pokémon journey. Come back tomorrow for everything that happened on Day 3, including a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the place where they design Pokémon cards!
In the meantime, check out our other coverage on Pokemon Worlds:
- How a Rookie Almost Won the 2023 Pokemon Video Game World Championships
- How Pokemon Took Over a City for the World Championships
- Underdog Defeats Pokemon TCG's Greatest Player to Become World Champion
- The Pokémon Company Having ‘Conversations’ About Its 'Constant' Release Schedule
- First Ever Poké-Mom and Son Duo Compete Together in Pokémon TCG World Championship
- Why the Pokémon World Championships Going to Hawaii Is Proving to be a Controversial Choice
- What It's Like to Play in the World's Hardest Pokémon Tournament
