Day 1
We stumbled off the shinkansen and into Tokyo station's nearest park, blinking in the light. As I went through the ticket barriers I made a mistake and had to be helped through by the station employee. Already I looked like a tourist, which felt like a great indignity despite the fact that in Tokyo I am one. The nearby 'park', wide and manicured, turned out to be the grounds of the Imperial Palace, which appeared to be shut, but had plenty of tourists milling about it anyway. Having a lot of white strangers around me felt a bit surreal; I look forward to having a freakout when I arrive back in the West and realise we're everywhere. The vague stress that comes with going on a trip to a new place was soothed by an ice cream from a vending machine and taking a good, hard look at this brilliant statue of the honourable samurai Kusunoki:
We lounged around on the lawns for a bit, probably both secretly imagining ourselves as samurai but not telling each other about it. After finishing our ice creams and saying goodbye to Kusonoki, we crawled into the massive spiderweb that is the Tokyo underground system. Our first proper stop was to be a museum of pre-16th century ceramics famous for the extremely fine detailing on the ahahaha actually we went to a Mexican restaurant.
This was a lot more exciting than it might sound. For visitors to Japan, one of the highlights might be getting to be experience good, authentic Japanese food. But I'd been in Japan for two-thirds of a year at this point, and for me Tokyo was a chance to get my hands on some good non-Japanese food. Frijoles is a burrito restaurant tucked into a square of Roppongi, a district known for its heavy concentration of expats. The awkward experience of ordering food in a mix of English, Spanish and Japanese, switching in and out of them mostly at random, is really quite something to go through.
This was followed by a trip to the Pokemon Centre, naturally.
I found myself getting childishly hyped up in here, despite it being a) essentially just a gift shop and b) being mostly dedicated to shit bazillionth-generation Pokemon drawn when everyone had got really tired of the whole idea and gone "oh just make it a spider and put a triangle on its head or something". A lot of the designs were a bit odd as well, despite this being the official store; note the horrifying stretched-out Pikachu (not Pikachus, I guess, since you don't pluralise in Japan). Amongst the nightmares I found a rather tasteful Raichu notebook, and my significant other got a pencil case from the limited-edition Hallowe'en-themed "Spooky Party" collection. I love spooky parties. Spooky parties all year, I say.
By the time we left, our toys clutched in our warm chubby hands, it was dark. We decided to head to Shinjuku, the business district, in order to find the Park Hyatt hotel bar, which we'd heard had a wonderful view (and also happens to be the hotel from Lost in Translation, for those of you who like films which end with a man saying a thing and you don't know what he said because he said it really quietly).
Despite being a big deal, the Park Hyatt hotel bar follows the grand Japanese tradition of bars holed up in creepily empty buildings that you're not sure you're supposed to be in. (You come across this a lot in Nagoya, I think due to the scarcity of land space. There are a lot of small bars and restaurants which are set up in random office blocks, which means that going to a new place for the first time usually goes hand-in-hand with feeling like you're walking into an elaborate setup for a kidnapping.) The building's deserted, echoing lobby turned creepy cold corner after corner until we found someone who told us in unnervingly mannered English how to get to the bar. The place itself had a stunning view, was very classy and abhorrently expensive. Also any time you left the confines of the bar someone asked to know where you wanted to go, very politely but with undertones that suggested you might try and rob any room that wasn't the toilet.
We finished the night by woozily slurping up ramen and then spending the night in a capsule hotel, or rather, capsule hotels plural. Japanese infrastructure is built around dealing with two things - natural disasters and drunk businessmen. There are quick-and-cheap eateries on every corner designed to feed businessmen late at night, and vending machines full of coffee and weird energy drinks every eight feet designed to heal businessmen's hangovers first thing in the morning. For the inbetween stage, there's the capsule hotel - a cheapo dormitory where you can catch a few hours' sleep in a Spartan pod not much bigger than your own body. You know, the kind you might use to go into 'hypersleep' if you were in a film set on a spaceship. Unfortunately hardly any of these hotels cater to women, but we found his-and-hers matching hotels next to each other in Shinjuku. The women's building only had a handful of actual science-fiction-style capsules and the rest of the sleeping spaces were just crappy little ledges with blankets on them, like something out of an orphanage in the 1940s. But for around a tenner you can't really complain, and the rest of the hotel was surprisingly nice, with a sauna, dressing tables and even a little library where you could read manga. I desperately wanted to join the three middle-aged women watching TV in the corner, smoking in their dressing gowns, talking in voices like vintage boxed wine and clearly not giving any shits whatsoever, but I was far too in awe. And using 'not-giving-a-fuck' grammar forms is a good ten or twelve lessons away in my Japanese textbook.
Day 2
After dodging lots of grumpy women in robes, I got out of the hotel and met up with my Significant Beloved Lovely-Faced One so we could get breakfast and then go to the legendary Akihabara.
Akihabara is Tokyo's geekiest district, littered with arcades, electronics stores, and anime posters. It's somewhere I've wanted to go since I was about twelve and finally being there was a little bit odd - I was excited to finally be somewhere so legendary, but due to already having spent many months in Japan there was nothing that individually seemed strange or new to me. I'd been to all these places before, there was just...more. A lot more. I wish I'd taken it in better, but I was feeling pretty ill after a few nights of poor sleep and bad food decisions. It was also around here that I got bit by a mosquito and became paranoid that I had contracted dengue fever, since a small outbreak had recently occurred in the city. But we did manage to put all that aside and crawl up the five-storey all-round nerd emporium Mandarake, poking around at the figurines, combing through the games, and gently sidestepping around the porn. To be honest it was a little overpriced and I've seen better deals back in Nagoya, but I'm glad to know that there's somewhere in the world I can buy a Dreamcast for £1000. Also their motto is "Rulers of Time", which is a touch grander than "Every little helps" or whatever.
We spent the evening in an arcade, of which I have few photos due to running low on battery after desperately Googling "dengue fever symptoms" every two minutes, but here's a game where a professor challenges a deadly mech/beast hybrid with a series of maths questions:
We played a few rhythm games, a RUBBISH Transformers rail shooter, a bizarre beat-em-up featuring the cast of Persona, a side-scrolling bullet-hell shooter on the biggest screen I've ever seen and some other odds and ends. I forgot about deadly disease for a bit and rounded off the evening with some comfort food (burgers at Bebu, a fancy-but-not-too-intimidating restaurant in the middle of yet another uncomfortably massive hotel building).
Again: in Tokyo, good Western food - i.e. Western-style food which hasn't been bathed in mayonnaise for some reason - is a salve on the little hangnail of my soul, the part that gets homesick for semi-detached houses and train delays and Walkers crisps. This Ceasar salad, and the burger I had with it (teriyaki chicken with cabbage - see, cultural) was so achingly good I brought my parents back here when they came to visit a couple of months later. The staff were accustomed to foreigners and spoke a lot in English, leading to yet more awkward slipping back and forth between languages. This is one thing I think I prefer about Nagoya - most of the time you will be spoken to in Japanese, and when you say you don't understand someone, they will either just say the exact same thing at the exact same speed again, or decide you are incapable of anything more than basic bodily functions and give up. You know where you are with that. It gives you more opportunity to practice, and feels like you're being given a bit of credit and not like you need to be pandered to. It feels better for my ego, even if it means I sometimes end up being given diarrhea medication instead of hayfever tablets.
Coming soon: The City That Sometimes Sleeps In Pods: Part 2
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