This is a picture from the day we went to the Gyoza funpark. Alex remarked, "All this time, we were trying to find goyza and we could have just been having a bite at Café Spazio."
We are getting close to the end of our journey and I have loved the feeling of Japan and the craziness of the frenetic cities we've been in. I have to admit I'm looking forward to being back in a city that understand what I'm talking about and how to make a good coffee rather than an average coffee served cold in a vending machine.
Engrish on t-shirts and signs we have loved over the past few days include:
Do you remember in Kill Bill where Uma Thurman killed a whole lot of people (ok, Cress, narrow it down a bit) - it was in a restaurant which looked remarkably like the restaurant called Gonpachi which is in Tokyo.
My research on the web suggests there is conflicting advice about whether it was the actual restaurant or a set modelled on the restaurant. It's also complicated by the fact that Gonpachi has several different sites including in the US.
But the most impressive one is said to be the one in Nishi-Azabu in Tokyo which is where we went on Friday night. The prices are quite reasonable and it was absolutely BRILLIANT. Amazing atmosphere and there were people being turned away and asked to wait an hour and a half (which they were happy to do). The lovely Leonie had made a reservation for us so we had no trouble getting our table. We were seated on the upper area so we had a view of the whole restaurant.
All in all, great food, fantastic service (including a very large South African man called, "Sonny" who introduced himself as our host) and a crazy experience.
I highly recommend it if you're coming to Tokyo but be sure to book well in advance.
Today we visited Akihabara
and made a brief foray into a manga shop which was extremely porn and a
trip to the Mac Shop and a couple of other electronics stores.
Akihabara
is a great place to go if you're looking for discount electronics or
you are a single gal on the go who would like to pick up a geek who has
never before spoken to a woman.
After cruising around for a while, I suggested we go to a Maid Café.
We went to At Home Café
which in the site we were at, had four floors of cafés. We got in the
lift and selected the sixth floor because it had English speaking
maids. When we got to the floor, it was so crowded that the line went
well down the stairs so we decided to try the seventh floor which also
had English speakers but the maids were in regular (?) maid costumes
rather than kimonos.
Once we arrived, we still had to wait for a
while, then the maids greeted us with "Welcome home master and
mistress!" in Japanese of course, then after a short wait assigned us
to an English speaking maid but not until they had run through the
rules:
No touching the maids.
No photographs.
No asking the maids about themselves.
Maids cannot leave the café. Do not ask them to.
You must order at least one thing off the menu and pay a cover charge of 700 yen.
We sat down and our maid, who spoke English like a Valley Girl, ran
through the menu of sweet and savoury treats, (none of which will
feature in Gordon Ramsay's next book) before leaving us to ponder in the
frighteningly pink kawaii surroundings. I ordered a sweet pancake and a
caramel café latte. Alex ordered a coke and waffles. I also ordered a
photo, but decided not to order any of the other entertainment items
such as playing cards with a maid, playing checkers or playing the Japanese
equivalent of rock, paper scissors because I was fighting off a rising sense of panic like any natural person would be.
The atmosphere was entirely
bizarre. There were about 15 women, probably under 20, running around
in chocolate brown and white maid's costumes with large pink bows
around their necks, many of which featured a brooch in the middle of
the bow such as a 10cm Mickey Mouse doll or a sequined red heart as
well as numerous scrunchies round their wrists and bags in the shape of
Tweety Bird or unidentifiable fluffy animals. My head was
spinning. Alex had lost the power of speech.
To my left sat a young man who seemed painfully shy and
who ordered the cheapest thing off the menu (a black coffee) before
playing a game of Uno with our Valley Girl. To our left sat a couple.
When
our maid brought our drinks, she made us play a game with her to cast a
magic spell over them. We had to form our hands into a heart shape then
say, "Miu Miu, Kyu!" The same went for the food. Part of the price of
the pancakes covered the maid drawing a picture for me in chocolate
topping on the plate. She drew a cat. Sweet Felix on a Stick.
But the most disturbing was yet to come.
For
my photo, I had to choose which maid I wanted to be photographed with.
I said, "Oh really, it's fine, you choose, you all seem like lovely
intelligent, capable women, who will no doubt one day have Masters in
IT" but they weren't having a bar of that so I had to pick someone at
random.
The odd thing was, the whole thing was at once surreally
bordeline fetishistic but not at all sexual. The maids are not sexy;
they're deliberately very cute and girlie. There are couples there and
women in twos and threes who seem to have come just as friends and get
photos altogether with the maids. There are lonely guys and groups of
five or six guys who just seem friendly and don't at all harrass the
maids.
Without warning, the lights dimmed and a disco colour ball
started scrolling. The maids did a wacky cute dance that seemed to be
to some sort of well known nursery song. Several of the guys in the
audience (who would have been at home at Forrest Gump's bus-stop bench)
got up and started dancing and doing actions during the chorus in an
unsettlingly enthusiastic way. The girls looked slightly concerned but
kept fixed smiles on their faces; they're professional maids, people.
Alex and I tried to work out where security would come from if it was
needed.
Finally the sing song was over and I was called up for my
photo. I resisted the maids' entreaty to put a pair of bunny ears on my
head. They nodded undestandingly but insisted I made a heart symbol
with my hands. They took a polaroid which they eventually presented to
me (heavily transcribed with cute scribblings) when Alex and I asked
for the bill. With the bill, they also gave us a loyalty card which
said we had reached Level 1 of our Licence of Your Majesty but if we
kept coming back, who knows where we might end up?
If travel is about experiencing an entirely different world, the Maid Café is a must have experience for travellers to Japan.
If
you're interested, just take the subway to Akihabara, look for the
girls handing out flyers, and make your way to a nearby café. The @Home
franchise is pretty large but I'm sure the others are just as insane. FYI: the girls on the street handing out don't like being photographed either.
Below
is a video which doesn't have much but is at the same place we went to
so you can get a feel. Goodness knows how it was filmed given it's
prohibited but anyhoot:
Today we went to the Edo Tokyo museum in Ryogoku which as a fantastic museum with full size replicas of some buildings from the Meji and Edo period as well as artifacts and lots of information. It even has things you can participate in and touch (eg check out how heavy it would be to carry pails on your back, sit in a palanquin).
The museum building itself is also really impressive. This is a picture of the massive escalator on the way up.
All of the disorder of the Tuskiji Fish Market is more than balanced out by the freakishly well ordered nature of the imperial gardens which are perfectly manicured and cannot be used, walked on, camped on or touched in any way. We planned to go to the East Garden which is the only one open to the public, but even it is for no apparent reason, closed Fridays.
The Royal Family do actually live here so maybe that's their day to stroll. Who knows?
I hope you will particularly enjoy this shot of me in front of the bridge looking belligerent for no apparent reason. I think it nicely highlights my Japanese fried food belly and my lovely new green umbrella.
Alex hardly slept as he wasn't feeling well so we (paradoxically) decided we may as well get up at 5.30am and check out the Tsukiji Fish Market.
It is the biggest wholesale fishmarket in the world and handles around 400 different types of seafood, some of which were completely unidentifiable to me.
What they hint at but cannot adequately convey in guide books is that you take your life into your hands when you step onto the market floor. There is a WorkCover ad just waiting to be made here. Forklifts whiz by at 15km/h while people hurl enormous frozen tuna towards unguarded bandsaws. It is off the charts. To give you some idea what I'm talking about:
Eventually, we realised that the way to manouever is just to set out and not really look at the forklifts but make sure they have seen you so they avoid you. This is what the locals seem to do.
The people working at the market regarded us with a mixture of tolerance and "What are these crazy gaijin doing here?"
This picture is the view from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices which have a free observation deck which is well worth the visit and is right near our hotel.
Alex and I headed for Shibuya which has the mad five way crossing that everyone associates with Tokyo. We went all over the shops which were insane. Particularly Shibuya109 which is where you go if you want to dress like 109 different insane teenagers.
It's like teenagers laid out the store and chose all the stock and music for it. If there was at any point in the creation of it a person who said, "Do you think that might be enough if we have four different soundtracks blasting at full bore and maybe we could have a wall which is just plain-ish, maybe without 17 frills on it?" then that person received an emphatic, "No thank you."
In the various department shops we visited, the floors all had various synonym names (ladies casual, ladies street casual, ladies fashion, casual ladies street fashion) which may to some expert observer meant different things but to us just seemed to be different brands of just plain crazy.
Some of our favourite shops were:
and
which despite their names, merely sold casual young women's clothing.
Having built up quite a thirst, we toddled along to the beer museum in Ebisu which had very few English subtitles but did have a room filled with various beer ads:
Well it's 12 days til Japan in July actually starts and naturally I am preparing myself both physically and mentally for the trip.
Today I have been looking at music so that I am prepared when we arrive to hum along to the tunes. The first one I have looked at is this fabulous hit by the band SCANDAL. I think they capitalise their name permanently - who wouldn't? This hit is called Shoujo S and the lyrics are fantastically poppy:
I guess I'm trying to say thank you? I only let a tiny bit of honesty show through As the days wind down trying to blame someone else is just running away Anyways, I'm sorry. Goodbye
I wanna hold your hand when your gone. I'm selfish like that. (Never gonna let it go. Never gonna give it up) I wanna know what love and friendship mean (I don't dig how. It's always so vague)
Someday you will bust the lock on my heart The door to my heart is closed up tight Waiting for you to knock
I don't need anything else I wanna believe in tomorrow
No, I want to hold YOUR hand when you're gone. I'm selfish like that too.
These girls also have a cracking stylist - I mean school uniforms with doc martens does not date. Another tremendous feature is the random school groundsman who appears at the start of the film clip (concerned about the apparent flooding in the school caused by the girls' video clip producer wanting to wet them (although note no close ups of their wet shirts) and also at the end (to laugh hysterically with the girls for no apparent reason).
In all, a tour de force of wackiness.
But it's not just the girl-bands getting in on the act. My new favourite Korean boy band charting in Japan is Big Bang (first letters only capitalised) who not only sing; they rap. Yes indeedy. In this film clip for "My Heaven", you will also note they are quite interested in cleanliness, highlighting the lipstick marks their "eternal lover" has unfortunately left on their white tea cups.
Controversially, one of the lines is "even though our making love is great, why have you gone" which is apparently quite racy for J-Pop (see this English translation). It's hard to know what to make of the clip. Certainly there seems to have been some sort of unfortunate incident involving a bridesmaid's posy and the object of the singers' affections may have been involved in some sort of housefire involving a smokey get away before she went to work in a light house. Emotional stuff.
