Oct 3 - Oct 7 水始涸 Farmers Drain Fields

This year I didn't really feel like going to the same onsen I went to last year for my birthday, and Kurama onsen seemed way too expensive to justify, so I decided to check out the Touken Ranbu 2.5 Café instead.

Fun fact: The café store sells all the pamphlets from the 2.5 D musicals that have happened since, which according to my notes is 5

different stagings. 6 if you count the Trial performance, 7 if you count the one show they remounted in Paris this past August.

According to my colleague (and Wikipedia), the game released January 2015. The first Trial performance took place October 30 - November 8 2015. They moved really fast to capitalize on the popularity of this IP and turned it into a live stage performance. That's about 10 months between the wide release of the IP and the first live performance on stage. That is an incredible turn-around for something brand spanking new. Followed up by consistent shows every year since, at least 2, with special concerts sprinkled in near the years end.

I've never played the game myself, and have no intention of ever doing so, since it sounds like a lot of grinding and collecting, and I really do not care to give this property any more of my time than I have already given it.

However, it has clearly hit a desired market, as the musicals have been put on consistently, there are concurrent limited-run theme cafés running right now throughout the country, and girls are flocking to these events to rain their hard-earned cash in exchange for collector coasters.

Yeah, round pieces of coloured cardboard. The paper isn't even a good weight for real coaster use.

Like most collecting items in Japan, these are all in blind packs, and you only get a pick when you order an item off the menu, at about ¥680 a pop. True, you get your incredibly over-priced non-alcoholic beverage, but the thrill apparent is to collect (and trade) the coasters with the pretty boys.

Case in point: The café currently running in Kyoto by the Heian Jingu Shrine has limited seating (I think it was around 40 seats? 48 seats? Not large), set time intervals for dining (75 mins max), and a maximum order of 3 items off the menu (not including the 1 meal + 1 drink that came along with the pre-purchased ticket online). I bought a ticket online Sept 26, and by Oct 3, all the allotted tickets for October were sold out. The café "event" happened inside what I can really only describe as a storage building (Japanese Kura style, not North American storage facility style), with no washrooms attached. The ground floor was basically nothing but an entrance and holding area for guests to line up in a mannerly order to take off their shoes and place inside a locker. (Thinking back, I must have only been 40 seats, as I think there were only 40 shoe lockers...) Then you would walk up the tiny narrow staircase up to the second floor, where there were (most likely 10) small round tables, each seating 4. Since I went by myself, I sat down at a table with free seats and got to meet some strangers. They were very nice, and tolerated my poor language skills and really tolerated my lack of knowledge of everything else. They were definitely there to collect the coasters, and I ended up selling two of my allotted drinks (therefore coaster pulls) to the two girls who were there first. The 3rd girl came late because she had gone to the museum in Kyoto that is currently also doing a Touken Ranbu collaboration exhibition. She had also come from some other part of

Japan, I didn't catch where, but it warranted the other girls to ask her if she was overnighting in the area since it was so far away.

They all pulled out their sets of coasters they had been collecting to trade with each other, and I got a rare opportunity to just watch this interaction between true fans.

There were also two costumes on display from one of the performances. These two costumes were made for a special performance at a shrine and were only used once. There was also a signed baseball mitt and baseball from when some of the actors did a collaboration performance at a baseball game on display.

All the drinks were named after the sword characters, which meant I didn't know how to read any of them. I resorted to pointing to the photos on the menu that was a rolled up scroll.

The bento wasn't all that memorable, but the packaging was cute, and now I have some cute packaging paper because I felt like I should keep it? The Japanese style bento came in the red paper, the Western style bento came in the blue paper (girl beside me let me photograph her bento).

In all honesty, I don't even know if this building had running water. It most definitely did not have a fully functional kitchen, and for certain did not have attached washroom facilities. Something like this would never fly in North America. It felt a lot like kids playing tea party in a treehouse...