Ikebukuro
Today, Debbie and I woke up at the same time!
The first order of business was to sort out our rail passes for next week, and book tickets to Hiroshima. We took the Metro to Tokyo station, and found our way to the JR office. Getting the passes was simple enough, although we got a little confused at the expiry date of 3.4.19. It turns out that they used the Heisei date system, where 1 is 1989.
A Japanese lesson I had dealt with booking rail tickets, but it was elsewhere that I picked up the tip of clearly writing down what you wanted on a piece of paper before joining the queue. This strategy worked like a charm. Unfortunately, our train was sufficiently booked up that all we could get was separate seats on the smoking carriage. We’ll see how that goes. We don’t travel until Thursday.
It was lunchtime — and we had skipped breakfast. We looked around Tokyo station’s food offerings, but there were queues for most of them. Instead, we took the Metro to Ikebukuro. We looked around for a while, being a little fussy. Debbie became a little impatient — “I thought you said you were hungry”. Yesterday, without me, she had taken less than a minute to decide on a lunch venue.
We finally plumped for a vending machine lunch. This isn’t quite how it sounds. In any other country, a vending machine meal is a packet of crisps, a Pepperami and a can of Tango. Maybe a Twix. Not in Tokyo: you put money into a vending machine and push the appropriate button, for which you get a ticket. Then you go in, and a servile man leads you to a table and gives you a refreshing glass of cold green tea. He takes your tickets, and a few minutes later, brings you the food you ordered.
Having ordered from pictures, we weren’t quite sure what we would get. Debbie’s turned out to be beef teriyaki. Mine turned out to be a burger, fried egg and chips! Both came with rice, Japanese pickles, miso soup and salad. At 450 yen each (about £3) this was incredibly cheap, and if we’d been more hungry, we could have helped ourselves to unlimited rice.
With that done, we continued our exploration of Ikebukuro. On our way into the Sunshine City mall, we popped into a Toyota showroom, on a whim. A new Toyota car is dishearteningly cheap compared to prices in Britain. There was also a robot and some kind of futuristic wheelchair on display.
We moved on, past a few colourful shops, to Namco Namjatown. This is basically a theme park for young kids, and the draw for us was Ice Cream City, a section with at least 6 different ice cream vendors. We settled for a small cone delivered by a faux-Italian with a clever ice cream stirring stick.
The rest of Namjatown was a world of confusion. It seemed to be somehow to do with a cat with a monocle and pocket watch, and another cat who might have been a detective, since he had a magnifying glass. There were children running everywhere. There were dioramas and animations that made no sense whatsoever to us.
A coin-op game called Princess Training 2 appeared to involve putting on a tiara and posing for photographs…
Today it has been raining, so we have had the privelege of seeing Tokyo’s umbrella support infrastructure. Most shops have some sort of umbrella stand outside. Some have locking umbrella stands, where you exchange your umbrella for a key. Others have umbrella wrap dispensers: push your umbrella vertically into a hole, pull it out sideways, and your umbrella is wrapped in plastic so it can’t drip on the shop floor. The umbrella support infrastructure is almost entirely built for full length umbrellas. Double-fold umbrellas are therefore far less popular here than they are in Britain, although they are available.
Namjatown had the largest collection of left umbrellas I have ever seen.
Leaving this world of confusion, we went in search of the Tokyo fire department’s emergency safety education centre. Apparently there are earthquake simulators there. Our search took us to a police box, where the attendant (who’s only job, I believe, is to give directions) had never heard of the place.
Eventually, with the help of four of his colleagues, we worked it out. On the way, we passed a small shop with conspicuous nonsensical English t-shirts. I came away with three (they were cheap). The best one reads “Free&Feel. Greatful hopes. The noise of the wind is heard, favor received blessing of the earth. Fly higher. Unmeasured. Left to the flow of the river.”
When we got to the spot where the emergency safety training centre was meant to be, it was nowhere to be seen. We could have looked harder, but it was fast approaching its closing time, so we gave up, and went back to the hotel for the kimono hour.
In the evening, we ventured out into Akihabara. We had explored Akihabara on our first day, but at the time we were just off the plane, tired, dirty and had our minds mostly on food. This time we were able to fully absorb the experience of Akihabara in the evening, teeming with shoppers. The tat you can buy is astonishing. We knew Japan had a market for giant robot merchandise. It’s just surprising to find out how big that market is. The saucy cosplay outfit floors were an eye opener, too.
We tried to eat at a yakitori restaurant that had been full on Saturday night. It was full again today. We reverted to the “Gourmet floor” in the enormous electronics shop, Yodobashi. We chose a ramen restaurant, then discovered that it was a vending machine driven restaurant — making it two in a day. I had ramen with sliced pork, while Debbie had miso ramen with deep fried garlic and hot minced meat. Cheap and delicious again (although mine was over-salted).
Outside the ground floor lifts in Yodobashi, they play the Akihabara song. It reminds us of Akihabara. The tune is “John Brown’s Body”, the words are in Japanese, but the chorus is mostly the word “Akihabara”.
On the way home, we tried to find out what pachinko is all about. The first two places we looked in were all about video games — and interesting enough for it. Whole floors were devoted to Virtua Fighter 5. 2D fighters had their own floor away from the vulgar 3D affairs. Shoot ‘em ups were poorly represented, while crane prize games were very common indeed. I was surprised not to see any of the fighting cabinets being used for two player games. Maybe Tuesday night isn’t the time for challenges.
One floor was devoted to card based games. It seems as if the collectable cards have some kind of ID embedded in them, and the game has a sensor in its playing surface which can identify each card and its position. We watched a man play a football based game, in which each card represented a player, and he dictated the squad and their positions by placing them on the table. Then, he would make them play, with the results showing on a video screen.
The third place we went into was a pachinko hall. It had a similar “slot drone” to Las Vegas casinos. We stood in dumbstruck confusion at the sight. There were baskets of ball bearings lying around. Were we allowed to take them to use somehow, or were they currency of some sort? We watched some people playing - ball bearings were flying around in large numbers, with some related activity on the screens in the middle of each playfield, but we couldn’t make any sense of it. We tried the next floor, to see if the machines there were any easier to understand.
The next floor was just as mystifying. It’s criminal that none of the guidebooks have a section on how to try out pachinko — it is, after all, a Japanese obsession. We failed to even work out how to put money into the system.
With that, we went back to the hotel. Our tiny bathroom looks like a Chinese laundy, since Debbie has been handwashing things. The bath has a retractable washing line above it: useful.
Tonight’s bedtime convenience store beer: Asahi Munich-Type Black. It tastes a bit like Guinness.