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.
