First, thank you for not being a dick about this...Invariably when you portray ANY real world place, some expert is going to lose their minds and be obnoxious if there are any errors at all (or even if it's not an exact match for their subjective vision). Your letter is a very nice example of how to point this stuff out with civility and it's appreciated! Somehow, even though stuff is vetted by natives, by the time things get drawn and edited, there are always little inaccuracies.
This WAS vetted by a Japanese native friend of mine, too, dangit.
Okay, let me cover them..."It's just Ginza, not THE Ginza." I should have checked that, but when we went there, our guide's English was only fair, and she said "THE Ginza" more than once. Cross-language thing, maybe?
No toy shops in Ginza? Are you absolutely positive? I got the idea for this scene from a big happy toy shop sign that I was pretty sure WAS in Ginza. I think I have a picture, but maybe we had just moved out of that district. It wasn't a low-rent place as shown in the preview, but that was artistic license on my part.
The ramen shop, hmmm. We ate buckwheat noodles in a shop a lot like this, and we didn't have to sit with anyone else. My son is still raving about the duck soup, he ate all of his and part of mine! And there was more stuff on the table, definitely, but I wanted to focus on the soup for the slurping gag, which is meant to say a lot of stuff that would have been complicated by other elements.
That smoking thing, wow, I did not know that. We saw so many people smoking everywhere, I guess I just didn't notice that they didn't smoke while walking in Ginza. Mea culpa!
Thanks for this post, it's fun to see where we could have done better. Sometime I'll do another story in Japan and if you're up for it, I'll run everything by you first to see what we can fix, cool?