Ikebukuro

The shop had a shelf and a little table in the back, where we saw about 100 notebooks filled with visitors’ comments and drawings. Some people wrote for pages and pages, some people drew huge, pro-quality fan-art, and some people even stapled in original, full-color, astounding works that they probably spent hours working on at home. Most entries had some sort of little drawing at least, like the Sakura-donating-blood in the entry above ours. My entry, in the middle, reads: “I came from America to visit this shop! It’s even better than I’d imagined. I’m not very good at drawing, but if I was, I would draw Kouran and Hanabi. Sakura Taisen is the greatest; keep up the good work. -jetfuel” Andy took like half an hour to draw his huge ST/USA flag, featuring stars in the colors of the characters from each game. While he was drawing I made my way around the store about ten times and agonized over which goods I wanted to buy. Eventually I decided on a nice Sakura Taisen t-shirt, Kouran pin, file, and zipper-dangle-thing, and a Hanabi laminated card with a love-detector thingo on the back, which I use for a bookmark. We then drew ourselves saluting the flag, made our purchases, and headed across the way to the Sakura Cafe.