Tokyo: Part Three. Shibuya.

Day three was mostly spent getting our paperwork from the American Embassy for our marriage, which was highly boring and not much of a different experience than you would expect from a trip to any government building. Therefore, I won't bore you with the experience, other than to say we went, we saw, we received marriage paperwork. This was all accomplished by the early afternoon, and we found ourselves with many free hours with nothing to do. Exhausted from our previous days journey through the nerd capital of the world, we nevertheless decided to set out for another game-related holy place: The SquareEnix store.


SquareEnix is one of my favorite game companies, makers of my beloved Final Fantasy series. I had always wanted to go to their store in Tokyo, as they sell a lot of merchandise there that you can't buy anywhere else. So, we headed to the Shibuya district with high hopes, expecting to spend a good part of the day wandering around there, after we were done with the SquareEnix store. Unfortunately, we were unaware that the Shibuya district would be better served if it were known as the "Business District". We saw very few shops of any kind, and the few we did see were restaurants. Most Japanese companies have their company headquarters in Shibuya, and as such it is a place of tall, imposing looking skyscrapers, with businessmen scuttling about in their suits or cooped up in their offices. However, in this deserted business land, we did finally find the store.


Aaron was less than impressed with its size, and indeed the whole store was probably about the size of our house. It's actually the bottom floor of the SquareEnix company headquarters, and I'm sure just a few dozen feet above us people were working diligently on the next iteration of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest series. In any case, there was a lot of awesome merchandise inside, and I walked away with a stuffed Tonberry, a mini, chirping, baby Chocobo, an umbrella with Final Fantasy animals on it, and a Mandragora cell-phone strap. I was quite pleased with my haul, even if I also shared Aaron's opinion of it being much smaller than I imagined it would be. However, even though there was nothing else in the area of interest, it was worth the whole journey just to see the floor of the store. Yes, you read that right. The floor was the best part of the whole journey. That's because the floor is made of black, shiny tiles, with a certain portion of it being see-through glass displaying a recessed space, in which an eternally sleeping, life-sized Sephiroth lies in repose.


Sephiroth is one of the more popular villains in the Final Fantasy series, and the statue they have displayed in their floor is absolutely gorgeous. It was, hands-down, the coolest thing I saw in Tokyo. Luckily, I was able to restrain myself from breaking the glass and taking the statue home with me, so we were able to go back to our hotel after this, instead of into the nearest police station.