Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe
Let’s talk about the Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe in Japan! Are you a fan of Card Captor Sakura? If you are, you have to check out this post! ^ ^
Update: Good News! Animate Cafe is having another Card Captor Sakura (CCS) Collaboration from 23 June 2021 to 26 July 2021 in Ikebukuro, Japan! They also had a Kero-Chan Donut Pop-Up Store in May 2021. Check out the “sneak peek section” for more info.
I was looking through some of my travel photos (since we still can’t travel in 2021) and I realized that I never did share about my fabulous experience at the Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe in Japan. ^ ^ So here’s a post to remedy that!
So back in 2018, I had the good fortune to snag reservations for *TWO Card Captor Sakura themed cafes in Tokyo. The first was the Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe and the second was the Kero-Chan Cafe at Sky Tree Tower.
I had a lot of fun at these two cafes because I was a CLAMP fan since I was a kid. (RG Veda was my first CLAMP series!) I had read the CCS manga back in the day as well. AND what made the experience even sweeter was that I made a new friend at the cafe!
*Do note that the two cafe collaborations were held in 2018 and has since ended.
Page Contents
Overview
To celebrate the long-awaited anime sequel to Card Captor Sakura, Animate Cafe held a themed cafe collaboration from 23 March 2018 to 13 May 2018.
The Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe was only held in 3 Animate Cafes in Japan:
- The Good Smile X Animate Cafe Akihabara (Tokyo)
- Good Smile x Animate Cafe Osaka Nipponbashi
- **Animate Cafe Fukouka. (Permanently Closed)
Since I was heading to Tokyo, I decided to try to get a reservation for the Akihabara branch. I’ve actually never been to the Animate cafe in Akihabara so it’s an added incentive for me. Most of the animate cafes I’ve gone to were in Ikebukuro.
Anyway, as with most Animate Cafe Collaborations, the 2018 CCS Clear Card Animate Cafe required prior reservation via balloting. No walk-ins were allowed or entertained. Check out my guide on Animate Cafes for more information on reservations and tips.
What was extra special about this CCS collaboration though, was that each of the 3 cafes had an exclusive special design coaster not found in the other cafe branches!
Note: Good Smile x Animate Cafe is a special collaboration cafe between Good Smile Company and Animate for anime and game titles. Yes, that Good Smile Company that specializes in Nendoroids. You can read more about them in my nendoroids guide.
**Note 2: The Animate Café in Akihabara is currently closed until further notice from April 2021 due to the Pandemic. The branch in Fukouka has been closed since 2020 and there seems to be no plans to re-open one in the region.
Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe
Did you know that there’s a sequel to Card Captor Sakura? If you don’t, now you do! The sequel, Card Captor Sakura Clear Card, starts a couple of years after the events of CCS where you see Sakura in secondary school (Junior High).
Yup, Sakura, Syaoran and Tomoyo are now officially teenagers! ^ ^ Check out the section on “Card Captor Sakura Clear Card Manga” for more information and my thoughts. 🙂
Okay, let’s get back to the cafe. ^^
The Goodsmile x Animate Cafe in Akihabara is housed in a building with lots of anime good shops. This was a pleasant surprise to me but I’m pretty sure my wallet was crying. LOL
As with all Animate Cafes, you are required to do a verification check before you enter the cafe. I was pretty early so don’t be fooled by the empty queue.
Oh and My Table number is 21! ^ ^ I love how they had the table tag in the form of a “clear card” like the Sakura cards in the CCS sequel. And no you don’t get to keep the tag. You have to return the tag as you are settling the bill for the food and drinks ordered.
Inside the Cafe: My Table
Table 21 turned out to be Kero-Chan’s table. ^ ^ Seeing how I had brought *Kero-chan along for this trip, I was quite happy to have Kero-chan’s placemat for my dining experience. Unfortunately, Animate Cafe doesn’t allow you to bring back the placemat unlike Capcom Cafe and Detective Conan Cafe.
Note: My Kero-Chan plushie was won from one of the CCS Ichiban Kuji. Isn’t he just the cutest? He has since become my travel buddy and I have brought him on all my travels for the past few years. ^ ^
If you are interested to find out more about Kujis, check out my guide here. ^ ^ I’m pretty sure you will find some useful information.
Considering how my day of visit was in the last few days of the themed cafe + on a weekday, there was still quite a fair number of fans in my designated time-slot. The Akihabara Animate Cafe is surprisingly large. There’s even a stage area! Check out more photos in the “Highlights of the Cafe” section.
Do note that this was back in 2018 so everyone could still mingle freely in the cafe. (I miss those days!) As of 2020, new measures were introduced (e.g. seating arrangements) to ensure safety distancing among the customers and staff.
One cool thing about the 2018 CCS Animate Cafe was that Animate actually had a wall lined up with various scenes of the CCS Clear Card anime. This means we get to see again some of the sweetest scenes in the anime.
Case in point:
If you have watched the anime or read the manga, you would know that the sequel has so many sweet moments between Syaoran and Sakura. ^ ^ Syaoran has really grown into someone that’s absolutely a gentleman with super boyfriend/husband material.
Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe Menu
Here’s the food and drinks menu for the 2018 Card Captor Sakura Clear Card Animate Cafe:
As with all Animate Cafes, every food/dessert and drinks ordered gets you a random coaster. Refer to the sections “My Loot” and “My Food and Drinks” to see which coasters I got! ^ ^
(For more tips and a guide on Animate Cafes, check out Animate Cafes (How-to & Tips) for more information.)
Doesn’t the food, desserts and drinks looked positively enticing? I have to say, this collaboration has one of the prettiest designed food I’ve seen in my anime cafes escapades. Everything looked really lovely. One extra special addition to the 2018 CCS Clear Card Animate Cafe is that the bento set (2500 yen) comes with an actual bento box that you get to bring home!
As usual, I would love to order EVERYTHING but alas there was only 1 of me and I could only secure one reservation, so hard choices had to be made (again!).
Fun Fact: I actually over-ordered and I couldn’t finish the food. I had wanted to get two of the bento boxes but Animate Cafe refused to just sell me an empty box despite offering to pay the full price that included the food. So I ended up giving the extra bento order to the CCS fan that shared my table with me! ^ ^ Full details in the My Food and Drinks section.
My Food and Drinks
Having tried quite a few anime cafes in the past few years, I must say the food menu for the 2018 Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe was indeed one of the better ones for Animate. Everything was so pretty and the food actually tasted pretty good. Well-worth the prices paid.
For my 1st main, I ordered the ケロちゃんにおまかせ！かっこいい わいのハンバーグプレート(Leave it to Kero-chan! Cool Hamburger Plate ). Since Kero-chan was with me, and I had a Kero-chan placemat… how could I not order Kero-chan’s themed food?! ^ ^ Although… it was really the hamburger patty that sealed the deal for me lol. At 920 yen a plate, this was actually surprisingly tasty.
The “Leave it to Kero-chan! Cool Hamburger Plate” included a Hamburger (patty) + chicken rice + kero-chan monaka + salad + star potato + takoyaki. Delicious-sounding right?
Oh and I got Touya for my random coaster! ^ ^ Yay.
For my second main, I ordered the 仲良しさんと食べるともっとおいしいお弁当 (A more delicious bento when you eat with a good friend). This beautiful bento consisted of Onigiri (Rice) + Sausages (shaped like octopus) + edamame + tamagoyaki (egg) + asparagus wrapped in bacon + fried chicken + strawberries + ham.
What was extra special about this particular bento was that you get to bring home a brand new bento box! ^ ^ So at 2500 yen, it’s really pretty worth it, considering how you get a bento box as well. And erm … I ended up ordering 2 sets. (Don’t judge me! Look at how pretty the bento box is. )
For my drink, I went with Sakura’s hot latte or as the menu names it: 「きっとまた会えるって信じてたよ」木之本桜のほっとラテ ( “I believed I could meet again.” Sakura Kinamoto’s Hot Latte). This was obviously a reference to Sakura’s feelings for Syaoran, so how could I not drink up the sweet feelings?
The Hot Latte was priced at 500 yen and, not surprisingly, came with sakura flowers latte art. What came as a delightful surprise was that the sugar cube had a sakura motif on it too! For my random coaster, I got Tomoyo.
For the full menu, you can access the 2018 Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe’s official webpage here.
Fun Fact: For some reason, the names of all the food, drinks and desserts for the 2018 CCS Animate Cafe are really long. LOL. I think they were probably trying to do a literal manifestation of the emotions from the anime to the menu items.
Fun Fact 2: I ended up trading Tomoyo’s coaster for a Syaoran’s coaster with my new friend at the cafe. It was perfect because she was a super Tomoyo fan and my favourite character in CCS is actually Syaoran. ^ ^ The stars were aligned!!
Bonus: Meeting a new friend
To sum up, I ordered a total of 3 mains and 1 drink: 1x Kero-Chan Cool Hamburger Plate; 2 x Bento sets; 1 Hot Latte.
Yes, that’s a lot of food for just 1 gal. So naturally, I couldn’t finish the food by myself. Animate Cafe does not allow you to takeaway left-overs for safety reasons. They also did not allow me to just order the bento set without the food. (The staff told me it was against company policy, which I understand. It’s to probably prevent scalpers from buying and reselling the bento box in bulk).
To be perfectly honest, the Bento set was actually what I had planned to order right from the start. The Kero-Chan Hamburger plate was a spur-of-the-moment impulse but somehow, it came much earlier than the bento sets. So I did manage to finish as much as I could for these 2 mains… but I simply couldn’t eat anything inside of the second bento box I ordered.
Thankfully, with the help of a new friend I made at the cafe, no food went to waste. ^ ^
Animate had assigned me to share a four seater table with another solo diner, with both of us sitting on opposite sides (diagonally). This was actually pretty rare. I usually get a two seater table all to myself when I’m at the animate cafes.
Since we were both not Japanese (She’s Korean) and we were both at the cafe by ourselves, somehow we ended up chatting. I then offered to share my second bento which she kindly agreed to. (Yay! The food didn’t go to waste.) Turns out we were both Sailormoon fans as well! She’s a really sweet gal, a huge Tomoyo fan and she has long beautiful hair, just like Tomoyo (CCS) too. I had a lot of fun chatting with her.
Although when I say chatting, it was more of me attempting to speak in my broken Japanese and she in her perfect Japanese LOL . She didn’t speak much English and I couldn’t understand Korean, so the common language was Japanese.
Knowing that my favourite character in CCS is Syaoran, she has also been sending me several Syaoran presents via mail since I’ve known her. On my part, I send her some of the Tomoyo goods and CCS items that I bought at special events.
Meeting a new friend from another country in an anime cafe truly was one of the best thing that happened in this trip.
It’s always fun to chat with fellow anime fans. I also ended up chatting with a My Hero Academia fan from the Philippines when I visited the My Hero Academia x Animate Cafe Shop in 2018 as well.
So if you spot someone with a Kero-Chan plushie at an anime cafe in Japan, come say hi! 🙂
Exclusive Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe Goods
One of the highlights of going to an anime cafe are always the exclusive goods that you can buy only at the cafe. This is especially so for Animate cafes because they typically only allow dining-in customers to buy the goods.
Other anime cafes like Ufotable Cafe (e.g. Kimetsu no Yaiba and Fate) and Capcom Cafe (e.g. Ace Attorney; Street Fighter) does not have such restrictions.
Note: Please excuse the quality of the photos in this section . I was slightly rushing and probably didn’t adjust my camera settings well so a lot of the photos came out rather blurry.
Snapshots of the actual goods on display in the cafe:
Kero-Chan’s clear storage box. This comes with a packet of strawberry cookies and a rubber strap charm (Sakura). Sadly, the Tomoyo badge, Syaoran acrylic stand and the coaster is NOT INCLUDED. They were just there to show what you can put inside the box. The general idea is to keep the CCS animate cafe goods you bought inside.
I bought the “sticky notes” tape. This actually turned out to be pretty useful. I often used it as a “gift label” on my presents to my friends. At 750 yen, it isn’t cheap but its so cute! There’s about a 100 “sheets” with 6 different designs inside.
Did you know that Animate Cafe actually sells “coaster files” so that you can protect and keep your coasters? At 600 yen, it isn’t cheap but it does help with the collection experience. I myself bought 2 and I’m happy to share that they are completely full! ^ ^ Looking forward to filling up a third file once the global travel situation improves.
Highlights of the Cafe
Here’s some random snapshots of the 2018 Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe:
For the 2018 CCS collaboration, Animate Cafe provided some photo props for fans/customers to use for taking photos. The props were mostly cut-outs resembling Sakura’s Clow cards but with the label, “Cafe” on it.
However, I personally still prefer the chibi character standees that some animate cafe collaborations have (e.g. 2018 Hunter x Hunter Animate Cafe ) to this. I also miss the mini games that they had many years ago (e.g. 2015 Nintama Rantaro Animate Cafe) but were since discontinued. Nevertheless, the props do still add to the whole cafe experience.
My Loot
Because I had already bought 2 bento boxes and spent quite a substantial amount on the food and drinks (3 mains and 1 drink!!), I decided to be a tad more prudent on buying these CCS exclusive goods. I also had to watch my budget because my 2018 trip had a lot of anime cafes that I had reservations for. Do remember to check out my other posts to read about them,
Yup! I ended up getting both the CCS boxes. ^ ^ My second bento box is not pictured because I had planned to give that as a gift to someone (hence having to order two Bento Sets).
Interestingly, the clear storage boxes seems to be a rather popular item to buy at Animate Cafes. When I had visited the Hynopsis Mic Animate Cafe in 2019, the HypMic storage boxes were super hot-sellers, with most designs selling out.
Notice anything different with the coasters? Some of you eagle-eyed readers would have realised that my Tomoyo coaster is missing from the photo. That’s because I trader her coaster for a Syaoran coaster with my new friend at the cafe. ^ ^
As mentioned, I also bought the “sticky notes” tape but because I’ve been using it pretty often… there’s no photo of it. If you happen to buy something from my shop, maybe you’ll see the label on your package. ^ ^ I do have some extra CCS items on sale from time to time, so do take a look if you are interested.
Card Captor Sakura Clear Card Manga
I first read Card Captor Sakura back in the 90s. Back in the 90s, CLAMP was (and still is) a powerhouse and one of the the leading shoujo manga authors. I’ve always been a CLAMP fan and I have almost all of their books (those that I don’t, I had borrowed from my friends to read).
I’ve always wanted to see Sakura and Syaoran develop into a proper couple (Yes, I know there’s Tsubasa Chronicles, but that’s another complicated can of worms lol) but at the same time, I was kind of okay with how the original CCS ended. Why? Because if you are a CLAMP fan, chances are you would have realized that Sakura and Syaoran were perhaps one of the few (if not, the only) couples in CLAMP manga that has kind of a happy ending.
So when CLAMP decided to start a sequel for CCS after about 15 years, I was both happy and a little apprehensive. However, having read the manga and watched the anime, I am happy to share that CLAMP still has it. ^ ^ If you are a long-time CCS fan, chances are you won’t be disappointed.
There are so many sweet moments between Syaoran and Sakura that it really gives you warm and fuzzy feelings. Plus a chance to delve deeper into Sakura’s family history is another incentive. And did I mention how even more comfortable Touya and Yukito has become with each other? Go read the manga!! ^ ^
S1 of the anime really only touches the surface of the new mysteries surrounding Sakura and her new cards, as well as her mother’s mysterious past. And did I mention again how warm and fuzzy Syaoran and Sakura’s relationship is?
So whether you are an old or new CCS fan, I highly recommend you to read the manga. ^ ^
Where can I buy the manga?
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English Translations: Paperback and Hardcover Collector’s Edition
- Book Depository (free delivery worldwide)
- Amazon
- Your local comic book/manga store (Support local!)
Note: I like to get my English books and Graphic Novels from Book Depository because they ship worldwide and more importantly, there’s free shipping ^ ^ Their selection is pretty good and packing usually is not bad. However, delivery may take some time though, depending on your country.
Chinese (Traditional Chinese): 庫洛魔法使 透明牌
For those who read their mangas in Chinese, the publisher for the Card Captor Sakura Clear Card manga is 東立 (Tongli). The Publisher often bundles their manga volumes with special postcards and they also have a collector/first print editions that comes with an assortment of exclusive CCS items.
Note: I read my manga mainly in Chinese (traditional chinese); Japanese and English
Sneak Peek of Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe 2021
Animate Cafe will be having another Card Captor Sakura collaboration from 23 June 2021 to 26 July 2021! ^ ^ This time around, it will be held at the Ikebukuro Cafe 3 (Tokyo) and Nagoya Cafe 2.
Unlike the 2018 Card Captor Sakura Animate Cafe, only the first two days of the cafe and every weekend would require prior reservations via balloting. On all other days (i.e. weekdays), it’s free entry so walk-ins are allowed. To find out more about the Animate Cafe reservations system, you can refer to my guide on Animate Cafes (How-to & Tips).
For more information on the 2021 CCS Animate Cafe collaboration, please refer to the official website here.
Some Final Thoughts
And that concludes the sharing of my visit to the Card Captor Sakura Clear Card x Animate Cafe in 2018. ^ ^
Thank you for reading! I hope you found the post interesting and maybe even inspire you to visit an anime cafe yourself one day. If you have a chance, I really highly recommend you to go for an anime cafe in Japan. I’m pretty sure you will find it enjoyable. I have been to quite a few already in the past few years and yet every single visit is still delightful.
Hopefully my Animate Cafe (How to & Tips) guide would be useful to you too. If you have been to one, or are planning to do so, let me know in the comments.
If you found this post useful or interesting, I’ll appreciate it if you could share it with your family and friends too. ^ ^
Oh and if you would like to be updated when there are new posts, do join my mailing list for updates. ^ ^
Check out my other Posts
Geeky Good Guides
I’ve also done up a few guides on purchasing anime goods/figurines and the list will continue to expand. Do check them out as they might be useful for your own fan- collection journeys!
- Geeky Goods Spotlight: Forwarder, Buying Service & Proxy Bidding (Anime Goods)
- Nendoroids – A Guide on Buying Nendoroids
- A Kuji Guide: All You need to know and more!
Other Anime Escapades and Reviews
- Mister Donut: Pokemon
- Attack on Titan x Aniplus Cafe
- Mob Psycho 100 Anime Review & Thoughts
- Pikachu Sweets by Pokemon Cafe
- Genshin Impact x Aniplus Cafe
