Excuse my recent lack of writing on this blog. This is mainly due to me not having a PC for a couple of months, but I’ve finally got one (albeit a very noisy, second hand one, but it was cheap so I can’t complain!)
I may have been about as prolific as J.D. Salinger, but this doesn’t mean I’ve had nothing to write about. On the contrary, my life has reached almost insane levels of weirdness and delirium lately. A five year relationship with my girlfriend has come to a sad end, and I’ve consequently moved to a plush flat in central Tokyo, in some kind of premature mid-life crisis. My love life has become surreal, eventful, unpredictable and disastrous. I’ve been mixed up with, (in one way or another, with varying degress of success) a flight-attendant, a teacher, two nightclub hostesses, a 19-year old bass-player from an all-girl rock band, and a hair-dresser, to name but a few. I’ve been to beaches, parties and music festivals. Hopefully, I’ll have time to start chronicling some of these hi-jinks soon.
In the meantime, here’s an annoying video of a kitten spray-painted pink in order so sell beer to girls.
How do they expect to save lives when they’re fully clothed? And they’re drinking beer on the job! (although they’re not getting much beer in their mouths by the look of it.)
They’re probably the world’s least attractive lifeguards too. Baywatch it aint!
Here’s an ad for Asahi beer featuring a very young Mel Gibson drinking a can of lager in the desert.
he looks so pale and sickly, I suspect he’d had a few bottles the night before, too. (Probably out drunk-driving again.) At one point Mental Mel looks like he’s about to throw up, which is probably not the sensation the advertisers were trying to sell, I suspect.
Steve at Inventorspot has come up with a mind-boggling list of of weird Japanese drinks, most of which even I have not heard of, including a bust-boosting mango-flavoured drink for teenage girls (oh shit, that’s what it is? I think I drank that. Now I know why I’m growing man-boobs!); eel-flavoured soda (Excuse me while I puke. Hey, you could play pranks with this- give it to a friend with a hangover, tell them it’s cola, sit back and watch ‘em spew!) and “Needs” cheese drink (Enough said.)
Yay! Summer is here.
This means that, although I frequently get so sunburned I look like a spit-roasted pig and I wake up every day on a futon so with soaked with sweat that you could sautee it, I can also spend the next few weeks hitting the beach bars and rooftop beer gardens of Japan.
On Saturday I went to Kudan Kaikan, which is a large beer garden on the roof of a building near Kudanshita subway station, with a nice view of Kitanomaru park. But who cares about that when you can drink as much as you like in 90 minutes for 2100 yen, and get served by girls dressed as Playboy bunnies?
Kudan Kaikan closes early, at about ten, but a bit of cheap, al-fresco drinking is a fine way to start an evening before heading elsewhere. The food is expensive and not that special, though, so I’d recommend eating before or after you go there.
I’m also looking forward to hitting the beach bars of the Shonan area of Kanagawa, around Enoshima, Zushi and Kamamkura.
Many of my female friends hate these beaches because they are dirty, cluttered with gaudy wooden beach bars, and overcrowded with drunk university students in swimwear, setting off fireworks. I, on the other hand, like these beaches because they are dirty, cluttered with gaudy wooden beach bars, and overcrowded with drunk university students in swimwear, setting off fireworks. Quite what the beach bunnies make of the pale, bloated, priapic 31 year old foreigner in their midst, I don’t know, but I’m not complaining about a place where I can drink Corona in the company of girls dressed only in bikinis, high heels and cowboy hats.
I’ve discovered a tremendous 80s bar in Tokyo’s Sangenjaya. They play classic music all night long, by the likes of Depeche Mode and the Cure. And it’s a “1 coin bar” which means all drinks and food are only 500 yen, and there’s no service charge. The bar is called Toki’s, after the amiable barman who runs the place. Toki looks much too young to have actually been around in the 80s.
I often round off the night with a drink in Toki’s, and inevitably end up chatting to solitary middle aged women, who were into the cheesy pop music the first time round. (These recurring drunken conversations can only lead to no good!)
A nice touch in Toki bar is the big, phone-book-sized list of songs from which you can make requests. It’s fun picking out old favourites, singing along, and wallowing in nostalgia. There’s all sorts of obscure stuff to choose from in that mammoth-sized catalogue, pretty much any tune you could imagine from the 80s. They’ve even got songs by New Order and the Police- sung in Japanese! Sting singing “Do Do Do, Da Da Da” in Nihongo is quite a mind-mashing thing to hear after too many cheap cocktails. I thought I was suffering from some kind of incurable brain-disaster.
Best of all, Toki has an unbelievably cheap happy hour everyday between 7 and 9PM (even on weekends.) Drinks are only 300 yen, which is a Godsend to a poverty-stricken wretch like me.
Lou Fattorusso has sent me an email about an bizarre development at KFC in Japan. Thanks Lou!
Read on…
So Im strolling along the streets of Tokyo when I duck into a KFC…I place my order and sit down…when I open the bag, I examine a mysterious piece of paper inside…I wonder…is this the underground vault where the keep the secret recipe? As it turned out it is the direction map for where the bones are located in my chicken part…the things I LOVE about this town
I’ve finally moved to the Big Smoke! I’m now living in the throbbing heart of Tokyo and can stumble through the bustling, neon-lit alleyways of the sprawling metropolis whenever I feel like it. I’ll soon have plenty of amazing new bars and exciting drinking escapades to write about. That is, once I can afford to leave the house (the extortionate rental deposit has left me poverty-stricken).
It shouldn’t be long before I can get some cash together (I might get round to buying a new computer, too, and actually start blogging more often).
Staying in isn’t a problem- the apartment is brand new and very plush. It’s full of electronic gizmos which I can’t figure out how to use. There’s even a video intercom so I can see who’s ringing my doorbell downstairs in the lobby (and ignore them if they’re religious fanatics, cuckolded husbands or TV license fee collectors.) Shortly after my arrival, the gas-man came to connect my gas, and appeared on the intercom monitor in my flat. I had yet to use this contraption, and didn’t know which of the buttons to press (they all had obscure Japanese kanji on them). I selected one at random and, instead of opening the door for the gas-man, an alarm bell went off. I must have pressed an emergency button because, 10 minutes later, a beefy security guard arrived, wearing a helmet and a bullet-proof vest. He began berating the terrified gas-man, who he’d caught fiddling with the gas-meter in front of my flat.
After about an hour of me being reprimanded, having lengthy negotiations with the security company over the phone in mangled Japanese, painstakingly filling out forms in kanji, the disgruntled security guy finally left me in peace.
I’m surprised my flat even has a panic button- it’s not exactly a dangerous neighbourhood. They could have at least made the button red! Now I’m scared to touch anything in case I set off an ejector seat or a hidden trap door. It’s like being in the movie, “Cube.”
Often the coolest Japanese bars and restaurants are in the most obscure locations. Such is the case with the groovily-named Virgin Sunset, a loosely Hawaiian-themed joint down an obscure side-street in Yamato City, Kanagawa. You can find it by looking out for the flaming torches outside.
It’s one of those uniquely Japanese places that mixes up various international elements and puts them through the old Japanese filter. Here you can sit among fish tanks and palm trees, and eat Italian pizza and Jamaican jerk chicken, whilst watching surfing videos and listening to 70s disco and funk hits being spun by a DJ in the corner, and drinking pina coladas served by waitresses in pretty Hawaiian dresses. A charmingly mental mish-mash of madness. Also, for some ungodly reason, the door-handles in the toilet are shaped like penises, but I try not to think too much about that.
I once stumbled into Virgin Sunset on Halloween night, and the additional Mexican Wrestlers and Wonder Woman costumes were enough to make my head spin.
If all this character wasn’t great enough, Virgin Sunset has a half price beer and pizzas every day from five to seven, including weekends. Try finding a deal like that in Tokyo!
After taking advantage of the happy hour, I tend to head to a cheap and cheerful games center a few doors up from the Virgin Sunset, called “The Big Bang”, which has darts, pool, batting cages and go-kart racing. An ideal place to continue the shenanigans (although the staff are reluctant to let you try the go-kart racing while totally shit-faced.)
I suspect this bathroom cleaning spray is supposed to be called “Sanitary”, not “Sanity” (unless they were trying to convey the idea that buying any other product would be madness.)
Posted by roaf
