The place was called "En" restaurant. The luncheon was supposed to start at 12 noon, and I was a bit late. The restaurant serves modern-traditional Japanese cuisine. (See "Speed Racer" photo album on this blog, on the right column.) RinRin has reserved a small tatami room. From the glass walls, we could see Tokyo Dome, where the premiere event would be taking place.
When I arrived, most of the people were already there. Some familiar faces were there. I have met RinRin and Akira before, and I also met Ayayan and Yuki at AEGIS events. We sat along two long tables, with RinRin and Akira facing Emily, Yuko and Neko - the three Taiwanese amigas. RinRin was distributing the "SHIN" fan that she made. They were so beautiful!! (I will take a pic later and will put it up on the album.)
After this, my memory is quite fuzzy. The sequence of events were not accurate AT ALL....
We all toasted for this happy event, as well as to wish happiness and health of Sanada-san. Food was great.
Akira showed off her special art nails. She took a "Musha" pic and a checker flag design, shrunk it down to a nail size, and printed out on a special "temporary tattoo" paper. Then stack it on her nails. It was UNBELIEVABLE!
We all had a small name tag on the table, and everyone wanted to have Akira draw her "cat Akira" character on that tag. So she kept on drawing.
Sakura came over to Taiwan team table from the other side. She studied Chinese, prepared and practiced a greeting in Chinese specially for that day. I guess Taiwan team understood (because I had no idea what she was saying...) and everyone clapped loudly. It was SO SWEET!
RinRin and Neko were talking with a mixture of English and text language (Chinese and Japanese share some common kanji characters, and even though they are pronounced differently, the meaning of the character is the same, so we can somewhat understand each other by writing kanji characters) about "Shin Hanshichi Torimono-cho". It is a NHK TV drama series in 1997 and relatively unknown among Hiro's works, because it is not made into video/DVD and is VERY hard to obtain the copy. But IT is the most favorite piece of RinRin's. Hiro plays Edo-era (18th century) civilian detective - smart, sexy and cool. RinRin found out that Neko knew about it, and that its original novel was translated into Chinese and is published there, and were SO excited.
I asked the Taiwanese team what they were doing since they got to Tokyo. They did relatively typical sight-seeing, such as Asakusa at first - and then on the second day, to my surprise, they went to Ashikaga city. OMG, they are SO DEEP..... Ashikaga is the location for another NHK TV drama series "Taiheiki" (1991), about the first Shogun of Muromachi Bakufu, called Takauji Ashikaga, circa 14th century. It was a year-long HUGE scale historical drama, but also has been relatively unknown because only the digest version was available on DVD until recently. (I understand the full-version is now available.) Even in Japan, the ones who recently became his fan recently usually don't have much access to this piece, so I was SO SURPRISED that the team knew about it, and even chose to go to Ashikaga!! And even more surprisingly, it was the second time that Yuko had been there! Yuko told me she has been Hiro fan for 25 years!! WOW!!
So many different Hiro topic filled the air, but I was mainly talking to Taiwan members so I did not have much chance to talk to ladies on the other table - unfortunately. Then our 18th member of the lunch meeting appeared - the Brother Chikuwabu, hero of the day, arrived late.
He is the collector of movie memorabilia, and was a popular figure at AEGIS blog, so many people knew him already. He has brought his TREASURES. First off, he showed us the poster from "SUNSHINE" - the picture of "IKARUS II" crew, all wearing Santa Clause hats - which was used in the movie. We all could not help but SCREAM and all gathered around the photo - then the restaurant waiter guy came appologetically to tell us to quiet down - they got complaint from the next room! ^^;
Then he took out actual costumes that Hiro used in SUNSHINE - Capt. Kaneda's jacket, shirt, pants, boots etc...that he got from eBay. Some things were missing, tho - he got out-bid by reiko for sunglasses! Everyone took turns to put it on (or some people sniffed it...) and again took pictures. Some even bursted into tears!
Then other people started to pass around their other treasures as well - old magazines, photos, other memorabilias about Hiro - and again, everyone got so excited.
Time passed so quickly, and we again took some time to decide how to take photo in the restaurant - but at the end, we took the group photo, all holding up the SHIN fan made by RinRin.
I took so many pictures, but some people don't like to have their photos made public, so I had to limit my photo showing only to the ones without people's faces. I am sorry about it, and I hope you understand.
At around 3pm, we got out of the restaurant and started to walking towards Tokyo Dome. A bit nervous time was approaching.
(to be continued)
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