The Tokyo Trilogy - Return of the Finn

In a land far, far away..

After my first trip to Japan I wanted to write a blog about the sheer awesomeness of it, but I'm too lazy. Instead I put my excess energy into something more creative, like nagging my wife into giving me my travel pass and planning my next trip to Japan. I'll do the blog after the second trip.. promise.

But after returning from my second trip I fell into a familiar pattern of begging the powers that be and looking for cheap tickets.

Having exhausted my vacation days and my wife's patience, it's now time to take a little break in planning my next wasabi vacation and write something about the ones gone by. Being me, I can't be bothered to write three blogs or to stick to any timeline (it's all relative anyway), so i'll just write about events as they pop up in my head...

That said, let's start in the beginning:

Land of Rising CC Lemon

First thing I notice when getting off the plane is that everyone's bowing. The airplane crew is bowing, the airport crew is bowing. At the airport end of the jetway, there's a person whose job seems to consist of bowing and greeting people. Naturally the train terminal seems to have it's own greeter as well.

One of the first expected things I notice are the ubiquitous vending machines, which seem to be everywhere, even on the express Skyliner train (you can score a cheaper local express which is 10-20 minutes slower, I was in a hurry though).

I grab a quick can of CC lemon and even manage to hassle some locals to taking a very touristy picture of me digging into it, but I made an executive decision and decided people would probably rather see a picture of a vending machine on a train than my ugly face.

Meeting drinks and people

During Episode VI (yes, i'm using Star Wars numbering and i'm not counting the Sithy I-III, deal with it) my German-American travelling companion and myself were making a down payment on the next day's hangover in one skyscraper or another and we ran slapbang into a Tamago (her real name is Tamaki, but it has been changed to protect her innocence), who spoke reasonable english and joined us in our Quest for the Holy Hangover. She turned out to be a real hoot as she couldn't understand our jokes, and therefore could not be offended by them. Love ya toots!

Now, it must be said that having a local show you around Tokyo is much more informative than bumbling around on your own.. however, when you go to Omoide Yokocho for Yakitori,.. well, maybe it's better if you don't necessarily know what exactly it is you're eating. Just stuff your face and wash it down with beer & sake.

That reminds me:

Beer and Sake

Everyone says you have to drink some Sake in Japan.. sure, it's like having to visit the colosseum when in Rome. But once you get there it's just some old moldy ruins that the italos flog to the tourists as the biggest thing since sliced bread.

Same with Sake (except for the moldy part), the name covers everything from braindeath inducing moonshine to the divine nectar that makes your tastebuds bubble and all food taste great. This doesn't mean we went for the most expensive Sake's around.. loads of times we just drank mid-end with the food, but not before we'd already had a few rounds of beer.

Speaking of beer, the best place in Tokyo to have beer is everywhere.. but you can totally splurge yourself on decent specials at the Beer Museum Ebisu. I've been there a few times and the destruction wrought on my braincells was magnificent, especially considering the otherwise civilized decorum. Especially on the day I was drinking off my hangover from the Hanoi Rocks farewell gig...

Scotch on the Hanoi Rocks

My friend and me are rushing back from the scalding pools of Hakone back to Tokyo at Amazing Race speeds, we have 45 seconds to make the train and the f***ing turnstile is not accepting my ticket.. M*THERF*CKER!! It all comes down to entering the ticket in the right way and then running down the escalator at breakneck speed to just make it, Japanese trains don't wait for slowtards.

We have a reason to end our tranquil stay in Hakone with undue haste as we're meeting our friends in a few hours and the meeting is in Ginza. And from there we have to hustle to Akasaka, where the "famous" Blitz club is hosting Hanoi Rocks on their very last concert in Japan.

We make the train, dump our stuff at our new "hotel" and rush to Ginza, where we find our two friends already deep into their beers, we have catching up to do, but not before we relocate to Akasaka, so we can see if anyone showed up for the concert.. who knows a Finnish 80's glamrock band in Japan anyway?

We arrive at the concert and I see so many Andy McCoy's that I think I'm riding a tram in Helsinki.. but wait, they're all walking and standing up straight! They're not the real McCoy! They're sober!

<-- Our friends have backstage passes, the bastards!

While Japanese fans are dedicated enough to wear their idols clothing and learn all the right dance moves for each song, they're not hardcore enough to do booze and hard drugs for 30 years to reach that final level of true fandom. Still, I feel like I should've brought my pirate outfit.

After the concert we head for the afterparty. Our friends know people in the crew so they get a ride, my friend and I have to haul ass on the metro, destination: Rock Inn Current in Shinjuku.

This place turns out to be one of those oh-so-japanese places that's totally impossible to find, so once we arrive we're ready to drink the house dry. Luckily tonight is a very Finn friendly night, so all the drinks are doubles to start, quadruples or more later in the evening. It must've been one helluva party!

My feet are killing me!

When you weight over 125 kilos and walk 15-20 kilometers per day in Tokyo your feet will eventually start complaining. If that happens, there's only one thing to do: take a bath.. there's plenty of good bathhouses around. My favourite one is east of Ueno station.. I can't say more of the location as some of the people I met there state their main fear as "..this place ending up in a tourist guide". Can't blame 'em either, after some recent renovations the place is an oasis of rest that soaks up the wear & tear of the day's walk, giving you a good platform to kick off even the roughest of evenings.

The etiquette for these places is ages old and thrown around in all the tourist guides, but you still find people who manage to flaunt it. Like these two ozzie douchbags who enter the place while my friend and me are soaking up some heat in one of the jetstream pools. From seeing them enter the shower room to having them stepping into the same pools not 2 minutes goes by. A subtle hint to wash properly works real well: they go "we've washed" and dunk in. Locals disappear faster than booze at a finnish wedding.

RANT: If you can't be bothered to wash properly, use the shower in your hotel! Don't bring your funk into the common pool.

Asking for directions

In short: Don't!

I was walking around this neighbourhood during Episode IV, trying to find this very elusive spa. I finally acknowledge I'm a wuss and ask for directions, which is my second mistake (the first being trying to find a spa that's no longer there). Now don't get me wrong, Japanese are some of the most friendly people you'll ever meet. But sometimes they can be.. misguided in their efforts to help you, as I was. Misguided, that is. I was standing in front of the boarded up entrance to the spa, trying to hard to understand did my local helper mean "go 4 blocks straight, 1 left, then 2 blocks straight and you'll find the spa" or "go 4 blocks straight, take 2 flying f*cks, and I'll never see you again".

I suppose it's my fault for asking, doubly so for asking when I knew I probably wouldn't understand the answer. Then again, had I not kept asking I never would've found out the spa is closed. Later I ran into one of my earlier helpers who spoke some english and he asked me if I found the spa. I said "Yes, but it's closed", he replied "yes, it is", clearly wondering what that had to do with anything.

Izakaya - The Way of the Exploding Gut

Japan is the land of cheap and delicious eats, noodles in oodles and beefbowls bursting with calories are available for less than half the price of your average pint, but in no place does good times meet good eats like in the Japanese Pub: Izakaya.

My friend Yuhji took me to my first Izakaya somewhere in the business district of Tokyo and I was blown away. You just keep ordering stuff, more and more of it, in small dishes and keep washing it all down with beer or later with Sake. They make fishes in so many different delicious ways that you start seeing the wisdom in Gollum's choice of diet. But that's just scratching the surface: there's so many dishes on offer that this is the one place where you'd need to have a native speaker at hand, just so you don't have to try to work your way through all the dishes to find your favs.


A yakitori starter, are you salivating yet?

Once you've eaten all you can, order some more Sake. Once you've downed a few more glasses you'll start to feel hungry again.. go for it, you only die once and there's no better way to go than by bustin' your gut.

Zen and the art of bar decoration

There's a lot of bars in Tokyo, big bars, small bars, reggae bars, hidden bars, irish pubs and S&M Cafe's. Whatever ambiance you feel is most fitting for the funeral of your braincells can be found here.

Since I like my bars small and scruffy looking, I found myself and my friends in Ghetto bar in the Golden Gai area on more than one occasion. Sure, it may seem like a small attic with room for a bar, 4 chairs and a tiny closet in the back that could only be described as a toilet for underdeveloped midgets. Just the stairway leading up is so narrow it'd cause lawsuits in the fatlands of America. But once you're up there, the rest of the world is closed off and you can live for a few hours in this alternative corner of the universe. After seeing bars in Japan, I no longer wonder why some businessmen opt to stay out drinking and then sleep in a capsule hotel rather than risk the long train ride home, where your beer-breath may evoke a dubious welcome.


The decor is as relaxed as the space is cramped. Lovin' it!

And while Golden Gai is a themepark of boozing delight, it is also slightly on the expensive side. So to keep this section more balanced, I shall introduce a runner-up from the cheaper side of town. The elusive bar Beat Cafe in Shibuya, which I was introduced to in Episode IV, failed to find in Episode V and rediscovered in Episode VI is another example of "dingy by design".


Lost & Found @ Beat Cafe

Open whenever the owners feel like opening and sporting such amenities as Self-Service Drink Vending, Eat-Me-If-You-Dare Curry and Bang Your Head On The Doorframe Toilet, it serves as a shining example on how to perform the last rites on your cerebral cortex. For this reason, I name Beat Cafe the Runner-Up to the coveted Black Out Trophy.


To be Continued...
Future parts may or may not include such episodes as "Burger Panic", "Any way you slice it - Sushi vs Sashimi", "Day of the Tentacle Porn" and many others...