My final day in Tokyo and so I did the grand tour of "Electric City". Unfortunately I have far less pictures than I hoped for. There are signs in every second corner that taking pics with people is forbidden, which I understand. With todays technology like face recognition and "find similar image" it is a real nuisance if you turn out, playing videogames while you called in sick or are supposed to be in school or something like that.
Today there were so many people that it was hard or even impossible with certain motives to take pics without clearly visible faces.
In Akiba omnipresent with prices up to 600 €: Anime-Figurines. Often hand painted. Angel Beats has good music by the way. Google "Angel Beats, My Song" or "Angel Beats, Ichiban no Takaramono".
The whole display.
And the do it yourself kit.
More memorabilia.
On the bottom floor of Bandai Namco you the those crane games. The normal ones are hard enough but they found even harder ways. In this one you have to somehow make the box fall between the bars. Interestingly enough it was mostly Japanese girls and women playing these crane games.
On the upper floors you had a variety of fighting games and also something like Guitar Hero, but with big Kodo drums. It was pretty loud there, but also impossible to take pics without faces.
No passage is narrow enough that you can't somehow put some life size card board figures inside 😀
After exploring all 5 floors of the venue (the top floor had tables for trading card games). I went to the Starbucks on the other side of the road. I have never been to Starbucks before and this visit was 2 in 1, the first and the last. Man.... that cold brew tasted awful. I'm not a picky coffee drinker, but this bilge water was so bad I just couldn't drink it. In comparison the coffee you get from the vending machines is heavenly.
I stumbled over this directly under the railway. The Japanese letters actually read Da-N-Ke, but it's a bit weird, since it is the usual Hiragana/Kanji mix while foreign word would be normally written in Katakana. Japanese kids have to learn 4 "alphabets". Hiragana and Katakana are syllable based with around 100 signs plus modificators EACH. The 2 litte strokes over the first sign change it from Ta to Da for example. Then the learn "Romaji" (roman letters) which is their name for the English alphabet and lastly they learn Kanji, which are essentially Chinese signs. There are > 100.00 of them but at the end of High school they should have learned 2000 and most daily newspapers are restricted to ~1000. You can write all modern Japanese words with Hiragana, but they often use a mix with Kanji, since Kanji have 2 different readings (pronunciations) each, a more Chinese and a more Japanese one and they subtly shift the meaning of the word. For example you could write a given name with 2 different Kanji which would be spoken identically but one could have an intrinsic meaning of "beautiful" and the other one of "diligent". I don't want to sound too negative, but I think the large and meaningful scripts and language are reasons why China, Japan and South Korea usually take the top spots in PISA tests, while in Germany they introduce "Simple Language" and discuss lowering education standards yet again....
This is just there to illustrate how many fish and shrimps and roe etc. they put on Sushi here. And the list is by no means extensive.
A small impression of the bustling life. When it got dark there were around triple the people, Love Merci is btw. a Sex Shop on 5 Floors.
The typical verticality in Japan. Only very few shops and brands have a whole building. Usually you have one shop or restaurant per floor. Here video games, 2 things I don't know, a dental clinic and 4 different restaurants.
I can appreciate that much better after the last few days. Also a nice idea by the shop owner. It was a Karaoke venue by the way. I read about drops you can eat against heat stroke and bought some today. They seem to have worked. Not much dizziness today, with the same weather as yesterday and walking around a lot.
Just another impression.
Since it is my last day in Tokyo I wanted to eat a late lunch in a Teppan Yaki restaurant where the sear the Wagyu beef on a hot plate right before your eyes. Asked Google maps and like unfortunately pretty often lately it was wrong. Google has a real quality problem. Anyways, it was a Yakiniku restaurant where you can grill your meat at the table yourself. Mostly on gas, in same venues also with charcoal.
I went to the 4th floor with the elevator and got my own closed compartment. Unfortunately the self grilling starts at 2 persons only and I was really not hungry enough to order for 2. So i went for the limited premium Wagyu lunch special: A5 Wagyu cutlet in a Panko crust. Only deep-fried hot and short to make the crust crispy but leave the meat raw. On the tablet was a small hot stone to get it to medium or so if you like.
The table with the BBQ in the middle.
The menu: Shredded cabbage, the breaded meat, a bit of Kimchi, rice, pink salt and two condiments and a small cup of bone broth.
Detail. The meat is mostly raw and I left it like that. It is so succulent it literally melts in the mouth and you can suck it up without even chewing. Very flavorful on top. The menu was like 3200 Yen (19 €)
Because it was so good I ordered 2 Wagyu "Sushi" and wolfed down one before remembering to take a picture. I understand perfectly well now why this meat is so famous. Melts in your mouth is true with this one.
The dessert. Creative serving. A pudding with Earl Grey flavor in a flowerpot with chocolate powder as "soil", a mint leaf and a little shovel.
I dig it!
Full, content and still sweaty as hell I went back to the hotel to shower and relax for 2 hours and hit the streets again after dark. I wanted to at least once visit a concept cafe. Maid cafes are too pink and girly for my taste, so I wanted to go there:
Well... That was a disappointment. The photographer who made the pics for the homepage is a true artist or has MAD photoshop skills. Anyways, when I arrived it had none of the moody lighting and (also because of too much light) appeared a bit shabby. There were no cosplay girls in sight. The throne was there ins a corner of the pretty small room but looks like a toy chair for primary schoolers. They must have hired really small girls for the picture. The woman behind the bar had bleached hair and no cosplay and was talking to the only other customer, a middle aged Japanese man.
I took my seat at the bar and she spoke not a single word of english. She used Google translate to convey the fineprint that the cost is 660 (shouldn't that be at least 666?!) Yen per hour and one obligatory drink. So I ordered the house special cocktail for 1100 Yen. All in all ~ 10 EUR. In the hope that something, anything interesting might happen. There was not even music or fog. Nothing.
Halfway through my cocktail a second girl came up with the elevator and lo and behold! She was in a costume. She also went behind the corner and asked me from where I come and when I said Germany, she made some strange noises which probably were a word, but the hissing because of her braces. Made it all but unintelligible. She obviously said the word also in Japanese and the helpful other customer for whatever reason drew a picture. It was ... a sausage... of course... Germany, Sausage... haha.
There was no promise of improvement, so I finished my cocktail, which was actually decent and left. These cafes are usually only open in th evening and close between 10pm and midnight. This one especially has hours from 5pm to 11pm. I arrived ad 7pm and there was ONE guest. On a Friday evening. A very bleak business outlook. If they would turn down the lighting, close the doors to the fucking staff rooms (or at least make them a bit tidy), keep the bar clean and do some renovation, maybe there would be more guests. But all in all the target audience for most of these cafes is definitely Japanese people and foreigners are only an afterthought. Fine by me, but why make a partly English website then?
It is a bit of a scam or at least false advertising, but since the prices are very OK (most cocktails are only 880 Yen) and the drink was good I wouldn't call it a real scam like on Reeperbahn in Hamburg.
It was too early to go back to the hotel, so strolled around a bit more. Akiba is very different after nightfall. There were dozens of cosplay girls in different costumes from maids to warrior, advertising the equally numerous maid and theme cafes. Maybe it was a mistake not sampling another one, but the disappointment of the first one was enough.
After all I found a stall where they had freshly grilled large meat skewers. A Fantasy trope!
I took the beef tongue skewer for 600 Yen. Was really good.
And whille writing this I had a canned Highball with ice cubes you can get from a vending machine for free here in the hotel.
And those: Dried squid is one of my favorites. They other one, Cheese and Cod sounded so perverted that I had to try it. Works actually pretty well. It is cheese in the middle with a thin layer of dried cod on top and bottom. I guess they produce that similar to Surimi.
So... Tomorrow I have to check out and catch my train around noon to get to Hakodate. I'll go with the Hayabusa Shinkansen which does the 900 km in a bit over 4 hours with some stops included. I forgot the reservation for my luggage today and hope the friendly service workers of JR can fix that in Ueno tomorrow.
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