When Japanese people travel, they often take tours. Travel agents offer an array of packages from simple all-inclusive air-plus-hotel to bus guided tours complete with bus lady. This tour is a little different.
No, it's a lot of different. It's a fishing tour (okay, normal) for otaku (huh?) with a famous voice actress (bwah?).
The event is called "Go with Ai Shimizu, The Experience Lure Fishing Tour". Ai Shimizu is a voice actress with roles in a slew of anime and dating games. Most recently, she was in Rune Factory Oceans.
Like many popular voice actresses, Shimizu releases music. She's even broken into the top fifty on the Japanese charts—pretty good for a voice actress singer.
But unlike other popular voice actresses, she's participating in a fishing tour and hoping to lure fans along.
Slated for October 23, the tour will take a limited number of fans from Tokyo's Shinjuku to Yamanashi Prefecture. Whatever you catch, you can eat. And the event, which ends in the evening, culminates in a BBQ. It costs —22,800, and includes an "itakkuru set" (痛ックルセット).
(TLC)
Those familiar with "itasha" or "painmobiles", which are cars covered in otaku imagery, can perhaps guess what it means: That's right, you get a tackle set with tackle covered in anime characters. Geek fishing is becoming increasingly popular, and otaku, who like to cover everything in otakudom, are not hesitating to show their nerd pride while snagging the big one.
This tour isn't as odd as, say, the Love Plus tour, but it's unusual, especially if you didn't know how much Shimizu loves fishing. She's quite the fisherwoman. One of her early singles was fish themed, and her Twitter is wall to wall fish pics.
Other idols shake hands or pose in embarrassing clothes to promote their games and music albums. Shimizu does that, too, and even went on a one day date with a diehard. If you're going to do something with fans, it might as well be something you also enjoy.
(Top photo: Lantis)
You can contact Brian Ashcraft, the author of this post, at bashcraft@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.