Super Terrific Happy Fun Shiny Japancation

You know what?

Japan is crazy. In the past nine days, I’ve spent every moment either giggling or being confused at something I can’t understand. Or sometimes both. Naturally, Tokyo’s neon allure has seduced me away from relaying back about my adventures on a daily basis. When you see a pants-wearing monkey performing on a dock, then taking a break by climbing onto a folding chair and drinking a cup from McDonald’s, the last thing you’re thinking is, “Wait ‘til my blog hears about this!” My threshold for weirdness has been pushed to heights I thought never possible. When I get back to Chicago tomorrow (later today for Japan) I’ll try my best not to sniff at every opportunity and say, “You think that’s weird? Well, in Japan…” The last two days were an especially nice respite from Tokyo, as I took the bullet train past Mount Fuji and Kyoto to be in Osaka. If Tokyo is Japan’s New York, then Osaka is definitely San Francisco. But it’s so much more than that.

Osaka is where girls who are told to tell you they 17 years old will dress as a maid, and solemnly tell you in broken English that they are shocked you wandered into their store, and then somberly tell you that nothing sexual will happen during the back rub she was about to give me. My thought? “Great, they’re going to make small talk with me while I get a massage?” Yeah, I saw a maid cafe the other day in Akaihabara, but this place was infinitely creepier. Still, it was easy to linger there for an hour or so when they give you hot tea and slippers—even though those women were all definitely 35. So, yeah. Basically, Japan is weird. It’s a mixture of temples and robots, politeness that verges on rudeness, and the most perverted and most kind people you will ever meet. I can’t think of a single interaction with people here that hasn’t left me smiling, even though I only barely understood what was being said. Karaoke transcends the language barrier. You can hang out at a karaoke bar in Osaka until 3 a.m., and a total stranger will hug you and want to practice their English. (That comes secondary to me singing Huey Lewis songs, though.)  Anyway, Japan: Thanks so much for showing me a great time. I’ll be back some day.

I ♥ Japan’s Subway System

Look, you might think you live in a city with clean and efficient mass transit. You don’t. You can set your watch to Japan’s subway cars. If it says it will be there at 5:42 p.m., it won’t be there a minute earlier or later. That’s just one of the things to love about their mass transit: There are electronic signs on the platform saying exactly when the next train will be there. Cell phones must be silenced, and while just about every inch of the subway car is prime real estate for ads, it’s easy enough to ignore. As if all that wasn’t great enough, every station is its own little mall. Want hand rolls? Candy? Dumplings Yakitori? Sake? Weird edible dough birds? Just pick it up on your way out of the station, or pull up a seat at a small booth in some of the stores and they’ll rush to give you some hot tea. That’s what I did yesterday on the way to Ueno Park.

Shinjuku station, near my hotel, is no exception. At any minute of the day it’s overflowing with people spilling out in either direction. Still, assuming you know what trains you need, it’s pretty simple to find your way around. Getting lost is virtually impossible; everything is in both Japanese and English. And for some reason, when you’re in Japan, a doughnut first thing in the morning sounds like a great way to start your day. Hey, we don’t have green-tea doughnuts back home—I owe it to myself as a world traveler to experience this, even though it’s from a placed called Doughnut Plant New York City. It still seemed exotic, though: Have you ever heard of a square doughnut? Insanity. It was pretty flaky and manageably sweet, and, as a bonus, masked my mouth in what looked like mutagen ooze.



As I’m quickly learning, you can easily spend an afternoon in just one small part of Tokyo. Ueno Park unfolds multiple times over the horizon, every inch of it covered in lush greenery, a few shrines, pagodas, and, as Wikipedia correctly points out, lots of homeless people. (I saw one man taking a leak on some bushes, doing his part to make the park that much greener.) I explored for a solid hour, resting for a bit on Mount Suribachi, which was crawling with massive crows. All one crow had to do to shoo away a group of pigeons was just caw. These things are huge, I tell ya. How huge? Insert your own generic punch line, and they’re even bigger than that. 

There are also a lot of statues here (including one of Saigō Takamori, the samurai whose dog memorably inspired a Futurama episode—he’s not known for much else) and in all just a general, pleasing stillness. In the park, at least. Ueno Park is just part of Taito City, a place buzzing with everything that comes with the standard city: traffic, shopping, its own Lourve, a T.G.I. Friday’s (thank heavens!), adorable pastry shops, and a porno theater helpfully titled “Adult Movies.”

I was jolted out my language isolation in Ueno Park suddenly when a man asked me if I knew where the zoo was. I pointed him in its general direction, which was probably the first time I spoke English all day, until, later I oddly bumped into Kyle and Sally. Tokyo is a pretty huge place, so, the odds of this happening are pretty remote. They were on their way into the park while I was on the way out to hop on the Ginza line over to Kappabashi, a.k.a. Kitchen Town, a street in Tokyo almost exclusively populated with stores to supply restaurants with cookware, restaurant furniture, and sampuru—the indispensable plastic food on display that entices you at seemingly every restaurant in Tokyo. If you’re starving, eat before coming here. It’s torture to be surrounded by seemingly edible food, only to find it’s hard as a rock and preserved in plastic.





All this fake food was making me hungry, so I headed back to Shinjuku and grabbed dinner at a noodle shop on a side road. There were scads of salarymen inside, in full three-piece suits slurping on noodles while wearing bibs. The air was punctuated by the sounds of slurping followed by satisfied aahs, and after I got my order of curried udon, I joined them. My bib was rendered a sloppy yellow mess without even trying by meal’s end. On the way back to my room, I treated myself to a green-tea stuffed frozen waffle at a nearby Family Mart. Its wrapping made it seem like it also had chocolate in it, but it was instead some sort of red honey—which was delicious, but not what I was expecting. But, hey, I had just eaten dinner in a bib, I couldn’t start getting picky now.

“Big Deuce, comin’ straight outta crib-town!”

Is it wrong that I want this? It was just sitting in a random store.

Alf in any language is funny

The Alf where he bores holes in avocados was on tonight, and it was a humdinger. I didn’t understand a damn word of it, but its hilarity transcends the language barrier. Their next-door neighbor swears there’s an alien in her midst—how else could there be holes in the avocados? Anyway, she makes a federal case out of it, going on public-access TV to debate something-or-other. She shuts her big yap after Alf hacks into her home TV set and talks spookily while wearing a scuba suit. Earlier in the episode he wears a trench coat and a fedora, which presumably foreshadows how sneakily he’ll eat an entire pumpkin pie later in the episode. If this was in English, it would have been cheapened. In Japanese, a run-of-the-mill Alf episode is like theater of the heart. Priceless. 
The only reason I know all of this was because I was konked out after exploring Akihabara all afternoon. I’m still adjusting to the time zone, which meant I thankfully slept in a little today, before hitting Shinjuku station at 11 a.m. and finally made sense of the subway systems here. There are two separate systems (JR and Suica) which hit many of the same areas, but don’t necessarily stop at convenient locations if you’re trying to get to a specific place. I suppose it’s handy, but it was confusing as hell before hitting the ground here. Now it makes perfect sense. Then again, you also need three loaves of bread to leave crumbs behind you to find your way back—you can walk a good 10 minutes before needing to present your pass. Anyway. Akihabara. I was told by a co-worker that if there’s even an ounce of nerd in me, I would need to check it out, and he was right.

Akihabara is the Electric City, or the shopping quarter of Tokyo for all things electronic. If I remember correctly from my endless hours of tour-book readings, the area blossomed after World War II when the Japanese had a surplus of parts from gadgets used in war time. It’s since transitioned to an outdoor Radio Shack, but 10 times as big and awesome. There seems to be a big demand for security cameras and neon lights, so heads up on that, America. There are tiny shops after tiny shops all crammed into about a city block—you have to look closely to see the shop keeper to plunk some yen down on something that catches your eye.






It sounds funny, but you can spend a good four of five hours in Akihabara and not go very far. There are multi-storied arcades (a.k.a. headaches in four walls), game shops (that hard-to-find game you’re looking for in America? Yeah, they’ve got four copies of it just left out in plain sight—oh, and it’s on sale), and 10-story malls one after another. Not only that, but you can wander in these malls and get lost. No wonder there are taped-off arrows on the floor. They don’t really steer you back out, just along to a different part of the store. Like everywhere else so far, it’s damn hot in these stores, and I also felt my height more than ever: I’d repeatedly have to lift my messenger bag and duck down to maneuver from one corner into another, saying “excuse me” in my broken Japanese as I tried not to topple the merchandise. I guess I’d be sorta embarrassed if I had to re-shelf that porno tape advertising how increasingly drunk the woman in it gets, but no one else was making too big a deal out of it in the first place. Also, too bad I’m rusty at my skill-crane, uh, skills—it’d come in handy at the arcades in Akihabara. (Though I managed to resist trying my luck on the skill crane that lets you win ordinary rocks.)



Think it’s only the women figures that strike such sexy poses? Guess again:

I had heard how arcades are still thriving in Japan, and it’s definitely true. It’s too bad they’ve all but disappeared in America—true, it’s Golden Week, but all the arcades I saw today were bustling on a Monday morning. (Maybe if we had Rambo: The Game in America, it’d be a different story.) There are even arcades in buildings that have nothing to do with arcades. One vertical mall had a grocery store, a clothing store, DVD store, comic-book store, and then suddenly on the top three floors, boom, an arcade. Perhaps I was mistaken when I heard that the higher you climb in the arcades, the more hardcore the games become. On all the arcades I saw in Akihabara, the top floor was designated to football games. Those floors have a stony silence that stands in stark contrast to the sheer walls of noise what lay below it, punctuated only by the lighting and smoking of cigarettes. On the way down in the Don Quijote building, I saw the “@Home Cafe,” a “maid shop” that pampers the inner “master” in you. Yeah.




After all this assault on my senses, I decided it was time to feed my sense of taste. It seems like parts of Japan are just big neon blasts of stimuli all the time, so it was relieving to hoof it to an takoyaki shack just down the street. Takoyaki are octopus balls, or dumplings made from fried dough and whole or parts of baby octopi. My buddy/colleague Scott told me about these a few months ago and they have lived up to the hype, though it’s best to pace yourself with these, as they’re made from 95 percent molten lava, 2.5 percent dough, and 2.5 octopus. Wait too long, and it’ll congeal into a lumpy mess. I downed my eight while leaning against a fence, watching the flakes of pickled ginger undulate in the breeze as they adhered to the sweet, savory sauce. 



After eating, it was back to the shops, which sharpened my rough Japanese to now include “Do you speak English?” and “Do you take American credit cards?” I’m doing my country proud, even if I avoided resisted buying the following products:





Heading back out, it was getting pretty gray and cold for 5 p.m., and seemed like it was going to start raining so I headed back to my hotel to rest a bit and grab my jacket. The TV was awful distracting, especially when James Brown songs were being used to teach Japanese, but I finally managed to pry myself away to pump some yen into the Japanese economy by grabbing dinner and getting some bizarre albums at Tower Records before completely calling it a night.

This one’s for the ladies

The day of many noodles

You wouldn’t get up at 6 a.m. in Chicago and just wander around the city, right? Somehow, in Shinjuku, it seemed like a good idea this morning. As day turned to night, though, it seemed like a poor decision, as it felt like I’d fall asleep if I held still. It’s still hard to tell if Golden Week—a rare time of year where most of Japan gets paid time off from work and, like me, goes on vacation throughout Japan—has really started. At 6 a.m. there’s still a fair amount of people out and about. Maybe I wasn’t as nuts as I thought. After all, KFC was open!

Plus, as long as I had been up, it didn’t seem quite as long as a group of people I saw camping out in front of one of three pachinko parlors near my hotel, simply called “Pachinko & Slot.” This easy-does-it titling of stores seems to be omnipresent. I also saw “Amusement Karaoke,” three “Starbucks Coffees,” and one “Krispy Kreme Donuts” (which smelled absolutely delicious, even with a sign posted outside that there would be a 15-minute wait, which did nothing to deter the consdierably longer line out front). Come on, Japan! You can’t come up with a better name than Starbucks?

Something else I noticed: There are vending machines just about everywhere. It seems you can’t pass two city blocks without also passing two vending machines, selling all kinds of drinks we don’t have back in the states like C. C. Lemon (the televised ads of which prominently feature a space family with lemon-looking helmets), various iterations of the Boss coffee brand, and countless others. I eventually broke down later in the day and tried a Mitsuya Cider. It tasted a lot like a Brisk Iced Tea, though the labels assertion of being around since 1884 clearly puts it ahead of the game. Plus, the label was also correct in saying the drink is “refreshing and sparkling.”

As the morning progressed I finally gave in to my growling stomach and stopped in a nearby noodle shop. America could stand to take a cue from places like this: Rather than place your order with a cashier, get a ticket, take a seat, and then wait to be served, it was mostly automated. Simply punch in your selection from the dishes preserved in plastic outside on a machine located right as you enter, pay, and then give the receipt to the sole employee in the restaurant: the cook who immediately prepares your order and hands it over. The udon, a dish I have over and over again in America, was on par with the best I’ve ever had.

Exploring more, I found a store called Gamers. Best I could tell, it was a pornographic manga shop where people selected a book they wanted to “borrow” for a spell and then wander into a private booth. All I know for sure was that it smelled like sweat, was intensely warm, and had multiple ash trays, and one microwave. I’m kinda glad I wandered around more, then, and stumbled upon Shinjuku Central Park, a small green area to the west. There was a sizable playground but it was mostly empty, save for a man practicing his croquet swing.




It was peaceful, but not as peaceful as the Meiji Jingu Shinto Shrine I stumbled upon. Alas, I didn’t have time to enter the shrine (hey, I had nosebleed Yomiuri Giants tickets), but I did wander the small forest around it, which was the cleanest and crispest air I’ve ever had the pleasure to breathe.




It got more serene the more I wandered in, but I had to head to the Tokyo Dome and watch the Chunichi Dragons slay the Giants 9-0 after a grueling three-hour game that was over before it started. I kinda figured when the Giants missed a pre-game pitch thrown out by a kid there wouldn’t be much of a game. (However, the Big Dancing Egg Festival advertised outside sounded pretty enticing—even though I’m not sure if it’s the dancing, the egg, or the festival that’s big. I’d like to think it’s all three: why else advertise it?)




While the game wasn’t too riveting, the Tokyo Dome was sweltering. It felt great to file outside with the masses and be exposed to the cooling air. Nightfall came quick, which also meant it was time to find dinner. Eventually. Kyle, Sally, and I wandered Shinjuku, which got more and more crowded as the night went on. One place mysteriously turned us away, claiming to be full, even though they obviously weren’t. There was a Tex-Mex place, a Wendy’s, a Sri Lankan restaurant, and another KFC—none of them really what we were in the mood for. We also passed an especially spooky and spiky merengue prominently displayed in a shop window before finally hitting another noodle shop  (which seems to host some sort of online game) which thankfully had a menu in English. Well, only technically. There were pictures, but none of them seemed to sync with the item names, most of which had the word “tendon,” in them, making us think the word meant something else to them. Vegetable Tendon? I don’t know how that’s possible. I settled for the humbly named Excellent Tendon, a large bowl of white rice with shrimp, pumpkin, and sweet-potato tempura. It was so delicious, and incredibly cheap at $5. Did I mention that the tempura is somehow better here than in America? It’s crisper and more buttery. Again, service is super-fast, and it came with a complimentary coffee-flavored green-tea concoction. All I know was it was edible, so I ate it. The Aretha Franklin MIDI files piping over the PA did nothing to deter me from enjoying my warm sake. Oh, how it warmed my heart when I ordered sake and the waitress asked me in broken English: “Hot? Cold?” My answer is always, always hot sake.  


The air was cool and comfortable on the walk back from the restaurant, so we took a different path back to the hotel. There was some sort of music school whose mascot was apparently a duck playing a Wood-brand keytar, but I don’t think I’ll have time to become a keytar prodigy in the next week, so I’ll have to keep it in mind for my next visit. Same goes for this store:


Goodnight, Japan.