Continued from 2012 Tokyo Trip Day 13: Tsukiji.

So, how do you look for a giant figure the size of a two-story building that refuses to be found? Simple — you ditch your GPS and rely on instructions from friends who have seen it. That’s what we did after our initial attempt to locate the Odaiba Gundam failed (on a epic scale!), when a wrong tag on Google Maps was compounded by a bad sense of direction.

      

Our second try at looking for it was much more succesful — we found him in five minutes flat. Surrounded by the still-under-construction shell of Aqua City Diver, the 1:1 replica of Gundam RX-78 stood guard amid rough landscaping and construction barriers. With just a few days to go before the launch of Aqua Diver City Gundam Front, work was in full swing even on a weekend.

We posed for photos (a lot of photos — many of which will never see the light of the internet!) and had boatloads of fun, but I must say that my mental image of the figure made it much, much bigger than what it actually was. Maybe it was built up too much by expectations of what I saw in photos? In any case — it’s still huge, and can crush a human under its feet if it decided to be a nuclear deterrent to North Korea.

      

We stopped by Venus Fort-Palette Town Odaiba for a quick snack before Tokyo Teleport-ing off for ACE. Venus Fort-slash-Palette Town is, for the unfamiliar, a massive outlet complex that is three-fourths shopping mall and one-fourth theme park, so it’s great fun for those with kids in tow. They have a mini Hello Kitty theme park, a cavernous game center, bungee and trampoline rigs, and one of the biggest Ferris wheels in all of Japan — wild!

Continued in Day 14: Harajuku, Redux.