Yokohama’s Pokémon Card Art Walk is a stroll fans won’t ever forget.
Yokohama is hosting this year’s Pokémon World Championships, and the city is definitely getting into the spirit. We recently took a walking tour through the port town, 30 minutes south of downtown Tokyo by train, to track down its brand-new Pikachu manhole covers, but they’re far from the only pieces of Pokémon art currently on display in Yokohama.
The spotlight is especially bright for the art of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, with a number of exhibitions going on under the overarching event name Pokémon Card Art Walk. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of awesome illustrations to see, so get your shoes on and let’s get started.
Our first stop is the Sky Building, a shopping/dining/entertainment complex that connected on its bottom floor via a pedestrian corridor to Yokohama Station.
▼ Sky Building location
The Sky Building is where you’ll find Yokohama’s Pokémon Center megastore, a must-visit for fans in its own right, but today we’re taking the elevator up to the 10th floor, where inside the atrium we find the Pokémon Card Art Museum exhibit, which is going on until September 30.
This is a selection of over 1,000 Pokémon cards, chosen from the 27-year history of the game. While that doesn’t account for every card ever printed, there’s a lot of variety here. At each case, fans young and old could be heard gasping and murmuring as they spotted their personal favorite Pocket Monster, most faithful game-winner, or the one card they’d always wanted but never happened to find in a pack.
▼ It’s kind of surreal to hear elementary kids saying “I remember this from way back when!”, but that’s the power of Poké-nostalgia.
▼ Some extra-cool two-card illustrations
The display was even teasing a few as-yet-unreleased cards by showing just their backsides, with their reveal ostensibly coming sometime before the exhibit ends.
If you’re of a mind to check all the stats and read the flavor text for every cards, you could spend hours here, but if/when you’re ready to leave, let’s head on over to Grand Mall Park, in Yokohama’s Minato Mirai bayside district. Grand Mall Park is a tree-lined plaza that sits in between the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Mark Is shopping center, with Mark Is connected at its basement to the Minato Mirai Station on the Minato Mirai subway line. If you’re feeling energetic, though, it’s about a 17-minute walk from the Sky Building to Gran Mall Park, and if you follow the route shown here…
…even before you arrive at Grand Mall Park, you’ll start seeing the Pokémon Art Walk displays.
Set up at various points along these pedestrian plazas are posters and signboards with jumbo-size versions of Pokémon cards. There’s no strict order, but a lot of the Gen-I stars seem to be in this section to the northwest of Grand Mall Park, including Pikachu.
▼ Fittingly, Raichu is on the back of the Pikachu block.
▼ Pikahu/Raichu are located in front of the entrance to the Welcia drugstore.
As an added bonus, all of these outdoor displays are left out overnight, so you can visit them even long after sundown.
Navigating your way towards Grand Mall Park is easy – just keep going straight, and if you need to, you can use the 70-floor Landmark Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Japan, as, well, a landmark.
At the park, you’ll find more Pokémon scattered among the trees and sticking to the walls of Mark Is.
Inside Mark Is are displays of these cards’ illustrations themselves, with the feel of an art gallery.
The displays are found on various floors around the central atrium, but the coolest section is on the fifth floor, where the paintings are displayed in a winding corridor and the Pokémon species grouped by habitat.
We’ve got one last stop to make. Across the street from Mark Is is Landmark Plaza, which connects to Landmark Tower at its base.
▼ Walking route from Mark Is to Landmark Plaza
Here you’ll find even more big Pokémon cards.
Except, these are actualy the smallest cards in the building, with the biggest being…
…the massive Pikachu card in the center of the first floor!
Unlike the other cards, this one is made of colored sand, wood chips, and artificial flowers, and the combination of materials makes it interesting to look at both from afar and close-up.
Not quite as big, but still dynamically large, are the cards of the Pokémon Card Legendary Corridor, which can be found on the third floor of Landmark Plaza.
These are reproductions of Legendary Pokémon cards, each about as tall as an adult person.
As the most powerful Pokémon in the franchise, the Legendary cards also have some of the most luxuriously detailed artwork, and seeing it on such large canvases, so to speak, really helps you appreciate all the fine details.
There’s also a bit of cuteness, though, with the Pikachu and Zekrom Tag Team card.
Though the Pokémon World Championships wrap up on August 14, Pokémon Card Art Walk runs through September 30, so all of the displays shown in this article will be around until then.
And if this somehow still isn’t enough Pokémon card art for you, Queen’s Square, the building next door to Landmark Plaza which also connects to Minato Mirai Station, has even more cards, of the same size as the ones in Gran Mall Park, on its floors. It’s also just a few minutes’ walk from Landmark Plaza to no fewer than three of Pikachu manhole covers, as we showed in our walking tour model course here.
Related: Pokémon Card Art Walk in Minato Mirai official website
Photos ©SoraNews24
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