RECENTLY, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I stared down a Gundam robot, came face to face with a talking Hello Kitty and rubbed shoulders with Doraemon.

I was in manga heaven and it was in - where else? - Japan.

My divine sojourn began one afternoon in the rather worldly city of Tokyo, where grey buildings crowded out the sky and suited-up salarymen and women carrying designer bags jammed the streets.

Far from the madding crowd was a modest four-storey hall sited in a sleepy two-lane road, its wood-panelled façade embellished with anime characters and a cartoonish green sign: Suginami Animation Museum (SAM).

SAVE THE CHEERLEADER: The writer 'meets' her childhood hero Doraemon at the Tokyo Anime Centre.

Suginami, one of Tokyo's 23 wards, is small in size but big on anime. Out of Japan's 450 animation studios, 70 are concentrated in the quiet district's 34 sq km, giving it the name "anime town".

As my companions and I walked up the stairs to the museum's reception, squeals of laughter and excited chatter drifted down from a group of elementary students running circles around Pa Pa, Gundam and other stand-up exhibits of anime - Japanese shorthand for animation.

"Uh oh," we shuddered.

Thankfully, a battle between the young and the young at heart for territorial supremacy was averted. Perhaps intimidated by the appearance of 10 alien-looking adults, the children scampered out of sight, presumably to catch an anime movie at the museum's 42-seat theatre.

That gave us free rein over the rest of the museum, all three floors of it. There were floor-to-ceiling panels, figurines and other artefacts telling the history of Japanese anime from its birth in 1917 to the cultural phenomenon of Pokemon.

Can't read Japanese? Let your hands do the talking by creating your own animation at the museum's workshop.

Bitten by the shopping bug? Satisfy your material lust with such goodies as a 500-yen (S$6.70) illustrated toilet roll.

Toys galore for grown-up kids at a manga hobby shop in Akihabara.

Have a yen for the dramatic? Unleash your inner thespian by dubbing an anime clip at a purpose-built booth - evil laughter optional.

SAM made me a happy woman indeed. But there was plenty more bliss to come.


Hello Kitty robots

SOME of it came in the form of Akihabara and Nipponbashi, the famous "Electric Towns" in Tokyo and Osaka respectively.

The two places, 550km apart, are long-lost twins. Both are the Japanese equivalent of Sim Lim Square plus Funan Centre plus Toys 'R' Us packed cheek by jowl, replete with a dazzling profusion of neon lights and billboards.

Both have morphed from centres of household appliances into havens for otakus, or geeks, with their myriad computer and manga stores.

Both attract hordes of tourists, buying anything from talking Hello Kitty robots to rice cookers.

So it was on one fine day in Akihabara that I found myself studying body parts. CSI: Tokyo this was not, but a DIY doll counter in a two-storey manga hobby shop called Kotokibuya.

Miniature rubber heads, torso, impossibly long legs, eyeballs, even eyelashes, no part of the female anatomy had been overlooked.

One could even choose from three bosom sizes, starting at 1,050 yen for the smallest. Outfits are not included.

Vintage 'sports' manga from the 1970s

Need professional help? Take your pick from a bevy of manga figurines - in all their Xena-meets-Barbie glory - displayed in a locked glass case, or place orders for limited-edition dolls. Expect to pay upwards of tens of thousands of yen.

Nipponbashi is likewise a men's world, if a little less glitzy. Taking pride of place there is the Mobile Suit Gundam store along the main street, fronted by an 18m billboard of the archetypal RX-78-2 robot from the evergreen anime series.

It seemed ready to spring to life any moment and zap jaywalkers on the streets below with its beam rifle.

And it will have no lack of reinforcement, for in the 330-sq-m shop - the largest Gundam merchandise outlet in Japan - is the entire Gundam universe of robots lurking in plastic model kits, DVDs and card games, among others.

Prices range from 82 yen for an eraser to 175,000 yen for a 1.5m-tall HY2M Hyper Hybrid Gundam, one of only five models made for sale.

By now overdosed on machismo, we popped into a nearby cosplay "maid café" for lunch and experienced an instant sugar rush.

"Irashaimasen," chimed three young women in cute maid uniforms as they ushered us into the magician-themed restaurant with Hogwarts-esque decor.

PLAYTIME: Funky role-playing at a cosplay convention at Kyoto International Manga Museum.

Charming, but I couldn't say the same for my teriyaki chicken though.

As it happened, role-playing was also the main course of the day at Kyoto International Manga Museum (Kimm) on the Sunday we visited.

Dozens of cosplay aficionados dressed up as their favourite manga characters milled around in the open-air field of the museum, mingling and taking pictures, or simply basking in made-believe kitsch under the afternoon sun. It was a sight at which mere mortals like me could only gawk.

SPACED OUT: Toons have replaced stewardesses in airline emergency videos.

Cosplay conventions are but one of the side attractions at Kimm, which is fast becoming one of the must-visit destinations in Kyoto since it opened in the heart of the ancient city a year ago.

Converted from a 19th-century elementary school that closed in the late 1990s due to dwindling enrolment, the three-storey museum is a manga fan's wonderland of endless shelves of comic books - 50,000 volumes, to be exact - and six exhibitions on the history of manga (from the very first painting in 1814) and foreign manga works.

Best of all, like SAM, Kimm is more playhouse than stuffy museum. Simply grab a book, find yourself a cosy spot - at reading desks, on the stairs or even out on the grass - and read to your heart's content.

Or be enthralled by kami-shibai, the nostalgic art of storytelling performed to effervescent perfection by Mr Yuushi Yasuno, a sprightly 63-year-old, in one of the classrooms complete with a bicycle-mounted picture "screen" and a snacks stall manned by his wife.

My group and I also got our hands dirty at a hands-on workshop on the basics of manga drawing. Traditional fountain pens and brush pens, we discovered, are the tools of the trade, and we grappled with ink pots and smudges as much as we did motion lines, object-framing and hair-shading.

When we were awarded certificates at the end of the one-hour class, my bliss had reached its peak.

Even Ms Mayuko Fukasawa, our long-suffering tour coordinator saddled with the unenviable job of taking care of 10 grown-up kids, was smiling with contentment.

"This is like paradise," she said dreamily as a group of giggling faux samurais walked past us.

On the flight back aboard Japan Airlines, I noticed that even the standard video about emergency instructions had gone manga, with toons taking the place of comely stewardesses to show the right way to pull on oxygen masks.

seokhwai@sph.com.sg

ST Photos: Lee Seok Hwai

Top photo: TELL 'N' SELL - The nostalgic art of story-telling performed to effervescent perfection by Mr Yuushi Yasuno, 63, at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, where his wife runs a snacks stall.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on January 22, 2008.