Day 0 - The Saga

April 11, Colorado Springs, CO

Three Years.

Or perhaps, four years, if you count when the idea first came to mind.

The idea first came about when the boy and I pulled open the youtube video of Shigeru Miyamoto giving us a grand tour of the soon-to-be-opened Super Mario World. Elijah had just started playing my old gaming systems (Super nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gamecube) and had enjoyed them as much as I had. And now, we would be able to jump into arguably the most icon game in history – in real life!

Well, maybe if the Covid pandemic hadn’t changed real life as we know it. The world had shut down. People had died. Millions were scared. We had only just started getting adjusted to the new ‘normal’ in 2021, but halfway across the world, Japan was opening a new park that now encompassed both our childhoods.

And we weren't able to go.

The whole world was just learning how to handle this virus. Restrictions were the norm. Places that normally opened their doors in wide welcome were now bolted shut. And Japan was one of them.

Never mind if we could even afford such a trip; Japan had closed its borders and we wouldn’t be allowed to go even if we could afford it. But here, in our living room in Colorado Springs, we were satisfied with a personal tour from Miyamoto himself. And he acknowledged that his overseas fans would “have trouble” making the trip, but promised us that soon, this park would open in other places for all to enjoy.

We were okay with that.

Until randomly, a year later, a post jumped across my feed about Japan re-opening its border to tourists. There would be strict protocols in place, including purchasing a tour through a licensed tour operator, but gag who wants that? Still, the news was enticing. Perhaps we could go? Maybe? Just for a week. Why not?

So I crunched some numbers and calculated. If we went in 2024, that would give me plenty of time to save up for it. Cool. Two years? Why not? I did just that. Opened a high-yield savings account and started dropping money in. I treated it like a bill and if I had extra cash, I’d drop it in there too. And Japan also removed the “tour group only” requirement from entry, meaning we would be free to explore and not bound to a whole group of strangers for a week. That would make it cheaper, certainly.

Then Starwars announced where it's next celebration would take place

Apparently even my best friennd didn’t know we were Starwars nerds. Later in 2023, they announced they would be having the next Starwars Celebration con in Tokyo, Japan in 2025. We HAD to go now. And hey? We could push off our trip for a year. Another year of saving sounded great.

Suddenly, as I researched and planned, my feed was blowing up with all things Japanese. Do this, don’t do that. Try this place, visit here. Even the child began to get out of control – “hey mom, have you seen this museum? Hey, can we go here?” Suddenly, our week long trip was seeming awfully packed. With Mario world, and Starwars, we would need to add a week. That’s fine, I had another year.

Our Watch Buddy had words

We would watch all the new Starwars shows with my friend Juli. And we made a NIGHT of it. Themed food, Jedi robes, light-saber battles in the streets – yeah. All the nerdy stuff that would have gotten us shoved into lockers if we were living in the 50’s. And she was none to happy that we were planning this trip without her. So, I adjusted the itinerary and told her if she could save, she is more than welcome.

Her feed blew up too. “How do you feel about Disney?” love it…but when will we have the time? oh, weird…there’s a world wide expo going on in Osaka aroud the same time that we would be going? I don’t know what that is, but I’m here for it. Okay, seriously, we can’t add any more things. Let’s just go for this.

So began the planning

I didn’t mean to plan as much as I did. Originally, the only reason I did it was to see if the recently price gouged JR pass would be worth it. (The JR pass is a pass that lets you ride all (jk, some) of the trains in Japan.) I wouldn’t know if it was worth the $600 per person unless I knew the routes we’d be traveling.

So I tracked the routes. I planned the hotels. I planned the activities we’d do, the apartments we’d stay at, the routes we would go. (Spoiler, the JR pass is absolutely NOT worth it) But planning everything outright gave me the confidence and knowledge of what I was getting into, so when April of 2024 rolled around, I rolled up my sleeves to start booking dates. First up, the hotel near the convention center. I wanted to get there before they realized a huge event was happening next door and before all the other fans got on, ready to book. I was so prepared, so much earlier than everyone else.

Fun story, that’s not how Japan works.

It was my first taste of culture shock.

Japan doesn’t book out as far as we in the US do. Hotels, park tickets, AirBnB, dinner reservations, nothing. All of the dates in or around our April 2025 range were listed as ‘unavailable.’ After the initial panic of I was already too late settled, I found that I was actually too early. Japan does things pretty last minute for my delicate sensibilities. Using some classic detective work (checking random dates to see how far out I could book) I found that the earliest I could reserve things was 9 months out, but most things were in the 3-6 month range. Some reservations couldn’t be made until 3 weeks before, and two of them would have to be made WHILE we were in country. As someone who’s ever so slightly A-type, this was a BRUTAL reality.

So I set my clock (calendar)

Every place that I needed to book had a special place on the phone. I was ready.

I thought. My first mistake – severely underestimating how ready everyone else was. I had literally ZERO idea of what I was getting into. First hotel right next to the convention center date came up. I didn’t really want it because it was Japanese size and I didn’t want too much of a culture shock the first week there. So I muted the reminder, and looked ahead for 8 months out when a hotel down the street with bigger bedrooms would open up.

The time came to book the first hotel and that evening, I jumped on and gasped to find that they were sold out.

The. Whole. Hotel.

Gone. Nothing. Nada.

Any combination of rooms I tried, Any number of people – no. There was nothing left. In a panic, I went back to the first one close to the convention center. Also gone. Nothing left. Any hotel that had opened up within a 5 mile radius of the center was gone. And I had missed it.

That was a wakeup call.

So, I began to search for hotels further out. Some closer to Disney since we wanted to go there early on. Problem was, those hotels wouldn’t open until closer to 6 months out. So it was really hard to plan an itinerary when we didn’t know where we were going to stay. So I picked a hotel and two backups just in case. I thought I had a handle on it. Okay, there’s a big convention coming, that’s my bad for assuming I was the only one who thought the way I do. It won’t happen again.

It happened again.

This time with an apartment in Osaka. Cheap, close to the action and gone within hours of it going live. It happened again with another house in Kyoto. Clearly, this was not something I could just be flippant with. I was slightly discourage, but also slightly intrigued by the challenge at hand.

I’m I.T. I can do this.

So, I set up website trackers on each of the hotels I was interested in, including the one next to the convention center in case people dropped reservations. I went back into my calendar and added alarms (properly adjusted for time change) and jumped on Reddit to see what other people had done in the past. I joined a FB group for the Starwars convention, and watched all the videos of past celebrations. Turns out, Starwars tickets go fast too, and after two years of planning, I was NOT going to lose those too.

May 2024

I don’t remember the exact date because I was STRESSED, but it was almost time for Starwars to open. I read that they didn’t allow “whoever logged in first” into the line, but it was a lottery-based system where they would chose your place in line randomly. You could be let in in 10 minutes, you could be let in in two hours. Well, if its random, then I’d like to increase my chances. So late that afternoon, I brought every computer, phone, tablet, Chromebook I had in my house, and remoted into 4 computers at my work giving me 10 screens to work with. I watched the Facebook group and we waited.

At 4:59 pm, I started clicking refresh. Refresh. And there it was….a terrible green walking man going across my screen. 52 minute estimated wait.

Don’t panic yet. Screen 2 finally refreshes. 48 minute estimated wait. Next one – 32 minutes. Better, but hopefully we’d get something sooner. 20 minutes. 40 minutes. 19 minutes (ooo!) 63 minutes. 16 minutes…

12 minutes.

No way. No way. Facebook group posts that all the VIP passes were gone (not that I could afford the $1000/person passes, but it was still disappointing)

Next to go would be the three-day passes. My passes. I’m telling you, that was the longest 12 minutes of my life.

Once inside the store, you had 10 minutes to get your crap and get out. There were exclusive items that you could only buy at registration. (probably not, but I was stressed) I’m on the phone with Juli, screaming ‘what do you want’ while Elijah is demanding T-shirts in Japanese only and Nate’s just confused about all the excitement. I just start adding things to cart – I don’t know how much they are, its all in yen; I don’t know what that is, but it says ‘key art’; I don’t know what I’m buying but I only have 5 minutes left…!

Checkout. Success.

By 7:12, the three day passes were gone. But I had ours. I had no idea what I bought or how much money I spent, but the passes were ours. My confidence had returned. I understood now. I understood the game. And I would be really good at it.

My trackers found opened rooms for two days in the hotel next door. I double checked the cancelation policy and booked them. I DIDN’T check the price on them however until I got the confirmation email. It had TRIPLED. After gagging and dying a little on the inside, I called for a meeting with Juli. “Hey. What’s more important to you? Price, or convenience?”

The dinner conversation was tense. We talked about the pluses, the minuses. The good. The bad. (yes, even the ugly) We all wanted to cosplay, but traveling on public transportation in cosplay is really frowned upon in Japan. SWC would provide changing rooms, but bruh. After what I just went through getting the tickets? Did we want to go through that again to get a spot? What if we get lightsabers? Backpacks? Legos? We could carry them all day, but wouldn’t it be nice to take it all back to the hotel?

I had used our credit card miles for flights and ended up only paying $1100 dollars (total!) out of pocket for the three of us. I had originally budgeted $1400 each. So, we could do the hotel. As much as Nate freaked out when he learned the price had tripled, it still technically wouldn’t put us over budget since I saved so much on the flights.

Juli chose convenience.

Two days later, my tracker alerted me of the other half of our week opening up. Booked.

So, I just set things up early. For the lightspeed lane at the convention store, I opened my computer and incognito tabs for all of us and logged in. Once the link went live, I was instantly in line for all of our accounts. Reservations, nabbed. 12 minutes later, FB posted they were all gone.

When it was time for Disney restaurant reservations to open, I went into the restaurant booking page, logged in and kept trying to book the unavailable date until it opened. Nabbed. 14 minutes later, the restaurant was unavailable.

Coveted fast passes and guaranteed entry to Super Nintendo world? Nabbed. Prime spot on the Shinkansen headed to Fuji? Nabbed. Exclusive tea date in kimono with a geisha? Nabbed.

Feeling pretty confident.

Until it was time to get our panel reservations. I set the time in my phone, set an alarm and went off to visit my very sick mom in Washington.

I put the wrong date.

Japanese date. 15 hours ahead of us. I just so happened to be on my computer doing other stuff when I saw the email from Reed Pop. I was 10 minutes late. I jumped into the line and waited, and my heart sank with each post of a panel being full. I didn’t make it.

I’d like to say I didn’t cry over something so silly, but I did. My emotions were raw trying to be there for my mom and handle her business and from my lack of sleep and food. I just wept. The shame. I had gotten so good at the game, every reservation, autograph, photo op, AirBnb, whatever, I had gotten once I understood how to do it. But I didn’t get this one.

My son was so gracious.

It seems silly now writing it, but I was truly apprehensive of returning home to tell the kid I had failed to get a single panel. Like, I had let him down in some way. But when I told him on the way to school, he was so nonchalant about it. “Oh that’s fine, there’s plenty of other panels.”

And that was the end of it. I was definitely harder on myself than anyone else. Juli was cool with it too “eh, you know someone will record it” and we were all now able to attend some of the smaller panels what we liked that we wouldn’t have been able to attend if we went to the major ones. Honestly, I’m still a little disappointed, but it’ll be good to see how it pans out once we get there.

Four days out after four years

Or perhaps, three years, if you count when I first started saving for this.

All the plans, all the research, all the language learning, all the deep dives on Reddit, all the Facebook conversations have culminated to this. Its just around the corner. It’s been a wild few years, and in my personal life, a wild few weeks – making this trip sort of “sneak up” on me. The A-type side of my brain can soon rest, and the creative, adventurous side can take over. Everything is done.

Truly, I didn’t intend to write a backstory for this blog, (I was only doing it to get sample text while I built this website) but I’m glad I did. Its been good to reflect on everything. And it’s crazy to think that later, the future for me now, will be the past of me later and I can see how everything played out.

Will it all go according to plan? Probably not. But will it be the trip of a lifetime?

I certainly hope so!

Thanks for sticking to this for so long, and I hope you will enjoy reading about our trip!