More Tokyo — The road liss traveled

Well another night in the capsule. I woke up to more cloudy and drizzling weather, so back to sleep for a bit and then another dazzling breakfast of raw egg and rice. This is considered comfort food in Japan! It stopped raining around noon so I was off to another park. Although the word park isn’t heavy hitting enough, it’s a park on steroids. On the menu today would be the Meiji Jingu shrine and encompassing grounds, which were dedicated to the deified spirits of the very famous Emperor Meiji and his wife. In Japanese history the Meiji period, or the Meiji restoration was an extremely important time in Japan when the mostly isolated and feudal society began to industrialize rapidly develop with many western ideas and influences. So here’s some shots of the place, the fall colors still just hanging on…

After that I was off to Harajuku, the ostentatious fashion capital of Tokyo, which draws a bold, young crowd. You can see girls dressed in doll-like outfits (called Lolita) with lots of whites and pinks, plenty of lace. Often with dyed blond or maybe pink hair. There’s also the more edgy goth version of that as well, which is kinda cool. And there’s a good amounts of schoolgirl outfits to boot, which Japan seems to be quite fond of.

It’s the capital of Kawaii, which the easiest translation is ‘being cute’. So it’s definitely an interesting place to walk around. It’s a fashion hub, so tons of clothing stores as well as sweet shops. I bought candied strawberries. Cute. And a coffee with foam art. Super cute! You could pay even more and get 3d foam art, whoa. Walking around I didn’t really take many pictures of the outfits because it felt too weird aiming my camera at groups of young girls, but it really is one of the more unique places in the world to have a gander. Oh and speaking of unique, I also went to a café where you can hold hedgehogs and chinchillas!

Photo stolen from the internet, girls on Takeshita street

me holding a hedgehog. The novelty doesn’t last long!

this is what candied strawberries look like. Pretty tasty!

Then it was back on the train back to my hotel in Shinjuku and after another dip in the hot spring, then back to the free drinks lounge. I pieced through their collection of anime books, which seem to delve into softcore porn every 10 pages. Hmm. Another white guy chatted me up, a guy from LA, named Steve, who’d been to Tokyo many many times. So we ended up going out in Kabukicho for a bit. I played pachinko for the first time, which is kinda like a less skilled version of pinball where you fire off metal ball bearings through a bunch of metal pins and hope to land them in the middle gate, which triggers a jackpot reel (basically like a slot machine) where you’re hoping to get three of the same numbers to send your machine into overdrive. This of course never happened to me, but I was told that’s what would happen! Your winning are the amount of metal balls you collect in your basket and then eventually you can call the attendant and exchange your basket of balls for prizes. It’s crazy popular, there’s literally rows and rows of people playing this game in the arcades!

Next we went to get some ramen, and then it was off to the Golden Gai area, which is that stretch of a few blocks of narrow alleyways packed with tiny bars, jammed in one after another and on top of one another! It’s a super cool spot. I was really glad to go with someone else, who knew spoke some Japanese, as each bar is usually only 6-10 seats at the bar and that’s it! There’s not a lot of English spoken, although the so it’s kind of intimidating for a first timer. Although the bartenders seem to know enough. First we went to a whisky bar, where I learned the highball is an extremely popular drink in Japan, which is just whisky and some soda water.

We ended up hopping around to a few different spots, with whisky certainly being the drink of choice, and if you want cheaper you’ve got shochu, some sort of grain alcohol. I noticed that the only time local people will actually try and converse with you in English is when they’re a bit tipsy, so that was kind of a nice change of pace. Normally when you’re walking around Japan, even though you’re a foreigner, nobody pays you any mind, at all. Of course it’s great that nobody is bothering you or trying to sell you stuff, but compared to other Asian countries, China in particular, it’s like you’re invisible. In China it sometimes get’s a bit annoying having people come up to you to practice their English, that doesn’t happen in Japan! So it was nice to actually to actually chat with some Japanese guys, even if it was not exactly the best English. It was a nice little night out.