Japan, Part IV
I would like to apologize to my fan for the long hiatus. With moving and such, I misplaced my notebook that had all of my anecdotes in it, but it's been discovered and I can resume my chronicle.
"Electric Town"
Because I am an uncultured slob, I will refer to the next portion of our tour-de-Tokyo as "Electric Town", but I know this is not actually the name of the district. I am confident if you said "Electric Town" to anyone who has been in Tokyo for more than five minutes, they would understand what you were talking about, though, because it is exactly what it sounds like. If you were looking for a robot whore who also has her own line of games and movies, this is where you would start looking.
The station was easily one of the busiest I had encountered in Tokyo up to that point, beating out fucking Tokyo Station in terms of sheer bloody-minded rush hour, and probably beat the whole of Japan except perhaps Harajuku station on our return trip to Tokyo the following Saturday (more on that much later). The rush was overwhelming, and it didn't really stop when we emptied out into the street. I was once again reminded of how glad I was to have Cory with us, preventing me being furiously blended into the pedestrian traffic like a pine cone in a garbage disposal. A number of people clearly thought the station was a very cool place to hang out, which to mean seemed like hanging around an airport on a Friday night. We tried to imagine the conversations. "Hey, where are you? I'm near the stairs. The one with the people."
If you think of Tokyo, especially if you are a huge nerd, this is the place you think of. Buildings just go up and up. Crystal has said she felt Tokyo was like a dirty carnival, and if any place demonstrated that best, it was Electric Town. Bright colors adorn virtually every surface. Contrary to the name, you are not immediately bombarded by flashing lights and bowel sundering noise, though virtually any building you enter or shop front you pass will try to elicit seizures at least once before you pass, like a thug mugging you in the street, except instead of taking your wallet he makes you come inside and spend your money on little naked anime figurines. This is the first place I saw one of those iconic, enormous televisions that you see in movies, and the only thing I could think of is how much money it must cost to keep the thing repaired. There are a lot of drunk people in Tokyo, like any major city, and there are also a lot of heavy things one can throw.
When geeks have wet dreams about Japan, they're dreaming about this place. We hit a few, what I liked to call, "seedy back alley malls", which are these legitimate shopping places that are located in nooks that one usually reserved for the purchase of watches and cocaine in the States. The first store we visited was basically wall to wall anime trinkets. One of the more jarring oddities was this rack of key chains, that... well... They love mayonnaise in Japan. It's fucking ambrosia. I have no idea if there is any branding in Japan - I assume there is - but there's this little baby who's the symbol/mascot for the biggest mayonnaise provider in the country. He's everywhere. He's like the NASCAR of Japan, except instead of providing hillbillies with the slight chance of vehicular homicide, he provides the country with a tasty but suspect white substance to slather over their baked goods/meats/candy. Anyway, these keychains portrayed various anime characters interpreted as the mayonnaise baby. I picked up Asuka from Evangelion for Ian. You know, Asuka as a creepy baby. I felt like I was looking into a Mobius loop of recursive horror, levels of obsessive compulsive fandom that are literally impossible in any other time-space.
We proceeded up the building, each level its own store devoted entirely to some particular niche. For instance, one floor was all large-scale anime toys, the kind you can use to bludgeon bears to death and cost slightly less than a four year education. One was nothing but build-your-own Gundams. We reached a point where Cory neatly told us to turn around, only because he didn't want us to go any higher. I never really heard him clearly, but I believe he told us he thought it was filled with things too terrible to discuss. That worries me in retrospect, because he invited us to explore Japanese sex-shops on a number of occasions, and Cory is not the kind of person to bat an eye at perversion. The kind of things - or people - in that environment still haunt me, even as I write this. It haunts me because I want to know
Another kind of shop we got to experience were these weird "variety shops" scattered throughout the district. You rent a locker from a store, except the locker is made of glass and you put price tags on everything inside. You can find almost anything in there, but they're not really organized in any cohesive manner, and there's no real price control. You can find one thing in unit A for $10 and the same thing in unit B for ten times the amount. You see a lot of figurines, some more risque than others, and there's a lot of Nintendo merchandise. I was hoping I could find a figurine of Mario doing something explicit, but alas, that can only happen on the internet, and not in real life. It's a lot like if somebody took E-Bay - or at least, Ebay for nerds - and put it in a physical locale. Well, there's no bidding. So I guess it isn't like Ebay. It's more like a flea market, only you have to be at least this geeky to purchase anything.
I also got to experience a Japanese arcade. Now, I don't want to make any judgments about this being a "Japanese arcade", because calling the place a "Japanese arcade" is like calling Caesar's Palace an "American Casino." The place had to be at least six floors. The first floor was fairly typical arcade fare, except everything in it was completely up to date and surprisingly well lit. You know how every arcade has two machines that were bought sometime in the past decade and people actually want to play it? Yeah, that was the whole first floor. I don't know what they do with bad games. I assume they sacrifice them on some sort of altar. The upper floors were entirely different, however. Halves of floors were dedicated entirely to a single game. You walk into a room, and it's the "Street Fighter room" or "The Crazy Hot Witch Game" room, or "The Completely Nonsensical 30 Year Old Games room". Head to head games are not played the way we play them in America, where you cram two people in side by side on the same interface. No, instead, it's more like watching two people play Counter-Strike, only they're breaking faces open with Ryu instead of tea-bagging a corpse. There are two monitors and two sets of controls, usually placed next to one another. I didn't dare play a game; I was paralyzed with mortal fear. I think we all were. I don't enjoy being anally plowed at an arcade in a country where I understand what's going on, let alone in one where I can't loudly declare a character imbalanced. I want to stress this. Playing a game in this particular arcade against these kids would be like experiencing your first day of high school all over again, except everyone in your high school is also a murderer.
Like, you know, game murderers. They murder you at games. Or maybe with games.
Crystal and Cory found a few more toy dispensers while they were in Electric Town, and while I don't remember all the spoils that were had, I know they both got these tiny keychain flashlights that looked like Wiimotes. That would be mildly cool on its own, except when you used them they did not direct an ordinary beam of boring ol' white light. Instead they would project the image - quite clearly, I thought - of a character from Mario Cart riding like Hell-on-wheels across whatever surface you pointed them at. I thought this was one of the coolest things I had ever seen, and I was prepared to become nine again, just so I could properly enjoy them.
We stopped by a couple of "regular" (meaning, not chock-full of anime, porn, or anime porn) stores so that we could do some other shopping. Eric took an opportunity to look at some cameras, and Crystal looked into buying a hair dryer so she wouldn't have to ask anyone else for one while in Japan, or hope that the object in question did not suck as well as blow. To her credit, she had bravely asked the man at our hotel for just such in object that very morning, with resounding success, but I did not want her or I to go through it every morning. Eric seemed both impressed and discouraged by the selection and pricing of his inquiry, respectively. I stared hopelessly at a row of hair dryers, hoping that one that did what we needed would just jump off the shelf on its own and into our waiting hands. Crystal and Cory managed to work out which one was which and which would do what, but I don't know. Some things are a mystery to me, even in my mother tongue. I always figured, "Is hot, blows air" would be enough, but some of them are too hot, I was informed, particularly in the land of the Rising Sun. They do not do their hair out there. They battle it with the forces of Wind and Flame.
We were getting tired and hungry fast, though, so after a quick stop for posing with the Colonel outside of a KFC, we headed back to the station. It was there that we encountered a large man in a Pikachu suit. Eric and Cory both wanted a picture with him, and the guy was pretty cool. I'm almost positive he's out there on the internet besides just our pictures of him, if anyone's seen him before. He was very nice, and seemed to be perfectly okay with the picture taking. Every time I saw something like this in Japan, though, my mind would do these mental back-flips trying to make sense of it. The first thing you think when you see a large man in a Pikachu costume in the middle of Tokyo is, "Oh, right, I'm in Japan, that makes sense." Then you stop for a second and realize that, no, these people are not aliens, and they do not have wild Pokemon wandering their streets. The second thing you usually think is, "Why is this happening?" I was immediately confused if, perhaps, this is merely how this man usually spends his Saturday nights - that doesn't sound totally implausible, does it? The last stage is something akin to dawning disappointment/rationalization; in this case, he was handing out fliers. We are not so different, Japan. We are not so different.
Pokemon are everywhere, though. Like, not actual Pokemon, or even people dressed like Pokemon, but signs for Pokemon, and Pokemon movies. I had assumed that Japan was three fads ahead of us by now, but no, their children love the same dross that ours still do. Cory told me, "I actually start to feel worried when I don't see Pokemon", and now I know what he means. You can almost follow them to civilization, signs pointing you towards or away from trains and shopping centers. You can replace arrows with Pokemon in Japan, and you can also replace destinations with Pokemon. And money. Just Pokemon.
Shibuya and Roppongi
Cory got us back on a train and took us...somewhere. I'm not really sure. I know we weren't in Roppongi, and I know that eventually we wound up in Roppongi, or at least Cory and Eric did, but I have no idea what district we spent the remainder of our evening in. I think it was Shibuya. Regardless, we took a train to a nearby district and immediately looked for food.
We found a nice little place (and by little, I mean expensive and on the 7th floor) in sort of a shopping center, with faux wood everything. Floors, benches, walls, windows. We were seated on a long bench, with about 8 seats on it. The worrying part was that the last four seats on the end clearly had "Reserved!" signs posted on them, and I couldn't help but feel like I was intruding on the party. I half expected a family of four to wander in and then turn around when they saw the four loud, half-drunk foreigners at their usual table. Some tiny paranoid part of my brain - somewhere between the lizard-brain and part that loves cheesy movies - feared/hoped a gang of Yakuza would come in and wonder who was at their usual table. It turned out to be four people about our age and they barely paid any attention to us, but I continued to pretend that they were violent criminals.
The menu was not as English-friendly as Jonathan's had been; there were very few pictures, though Cory ably helped us through it. We got these vegetable dumplings whose real name escapes me (Cory told me they are not, in fact, dumplings, but neither me nor you would be able to tell the difference), which turned out to be a group favorite over the course of the trip. I also got breaded/fried zucchini, which was fucking delicious. It was basically salt and zucchini, but it managed to be one of the best things I ate while in the country. They tasted like the most delicious french-fries I'd ever head, complete with full seasonings. I also got this blueberry drink of some kind. It was weak on the berry but surprisingly alcoholic. We settled in nicely.
Which is a shame, because we really needed to find a place to sleep, something we realized about halfway through the meal. It had already gotten dark out by this point, when we remembered we hadn't really looked for, or indeed talked about, where we would like to stay. Now, the thing is, the weekend we were in Tokyo, there was some kind of holiday going on where you're supposed to visit your home town. I'm not sure how the logistics worked out, but to put things simply - the city was booked. No vacancy. We whipped out some of the tourism books we had on hand to check what was available, and we thought - or at least, Crystal and I thought - this might be a great night to try out at a Love Hotel, as we were just a few blocks away from what is know as Love Hotel Hill.
Love Hotels are interesting creatures. They have two modes, generally - a "Rest", which is about three hours, and a "Stay", which is overnight with a standard checkout time. They are very reasonably priced - presumably because they have little overhead aside from a team of Has-Mat certified maids who must steam down each room with boiling water after each visit - and require minimal interaction. In fact, the entire industry sprung up because Japanese people are so ashamed of having to let other people know they are hooking up, that they developed automated systems to keep the process entirely anonymous. You take some keys or push a button off of a wall that has a detailed picture of your room; you are directed to your room, either by a voice or lights; you open your room, which then locks behind you and will not open until you pay via an automated system. The rooms are sometimes themed, and are sometimes extravagant for their price range. Crystal and I were both exhausted, and the thought of a real bathtub was extremely tempting, though obviously neither of us had any need for anonymous sex.
We stopped briefly so Cory could get some directions from an internet cafe, both so we could for real find Love Hotel Hill, and so he and Eric could make plans for later. We made plans to split up; Crystal and I would take a love hotel, and they would go to Roppungi to party with some of Cory's friends, and figure out their sleeping arrangements on the fly. We left - optimistic, as this was an iconic moment for us, something we wanted to do in Japan - and found our way to Love Hotel Hill. True to its name, it is an extremely steep hill with dozens of these love hotels located all around it. We saw faux-Roman architecture, faux-Victorian architecture, Tiki, whatever. We found a place we really liked, and Cory checked for vacancy. Happily, they had some, so we set our plans in motion; the boys changed quickly and then they would leave their things with us. Eric had like twenty pounds worth of equipment with him, so this seemed a minor courtesy. We bid them farewell, and proceeded into what we thought would be a relaxing room. It was a fucking military operation.
Or that would have been great, but it didn't work out that way. Thankfully, Cory lingered behind us, both to help with bags and out of some intuitive feeling that something was not quite right. I saw a nice picture of a vacant room on a wall, along with a button I was clearly meant to press and keys I was clearly meant to take. A voice enticed me to head to my room (In Japanese, but it was pretty easy to figure out the context), and I headed off with some of the bags towards the room. Apparently a woman who worked there said something. Now, like I said, these places are designed so you don't have to talk to anyone. This woman was better protected then tellers are at big banks; she was behind a black screen behind a piece of glass. You cannot see her, and if she can see you, she doesn't say shit about it. Cory responded to her, which I vaguely heard as a distant muffle, as I was already down the stairs. Cory told me to hold up, at which point I turned around. He said, and I quote,
"Apparently, if you don't speak the Japanese, you gotta leave."
Later he told me she said something more along the lines of, "If you go in there without talking to me, you are a very inconsiderate person" and some other nasty things about us, but it didn't really matter. I know my heart was broken, since this pretty much threw off both our plans to stay here, as well as at love hotels in general Now angry and emotionally exhausted as well as physically in need of a shower (seriously, have you read how much we did in one day?) I went into a panic. There wasn't any vacancy in Japan, and these places didn't want to have us. Cory and Eric had shit to do, and I wasn't prepared to confront a bunch of crotchety old ladies at invisible desks behind black curtains who didn't want me in their anonymous sex hotel on my own. The thought of sleeping on a park bench or simply not sleeping at all seriously occurred to me, wandering around Tokyo in a manner not far removed from the living dead.
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. There was a large hotel at the end of the alley - "Shibuya Hotel", I believe - that happened to have vacancy somehow, even though Cory had searched for vacant hotels online only an hour or so prior. They sold us a pretty expensive room, but Crystal and I were glad to have it. We took up everyone's stuff; Cory and Eric went off to Roppongi, and we went to bed. I passed out without even taking my shoes off, woken only once as Crystal came to bed after a much deserved shower.
It was a hard end to a long day, but better things followed.
"Electric Town"
Because I am an uncultured slob, I will refer to the next portion of our tour-de-Tokyo as "Electric Town", but I know this is not actually the name of the district. I am confident if you said "Electric Town" to anyone who has been in Tokyo for more than five minutes, they would understand what you were talking about, though, because it is exactly what it sounds like. If you were looking for a robot whore who also has her own line of games and movies, this is where you would start looking.
The station was easily one of the busiest I had encountered in Tokyo up to that point, beating out fucking Tokyo Station in terms of sheer bloody-minded rush hour, and probably beat the whole of Japan except perhaps Harajuku station on our return trip to Tokyo the following Saturday (more on that much later). The rush was overwhelming, and it didn't really stop when we emptied out into the street. I was once again reminded of how glad I was to have Cory with us, preventing me being furiously blended into the pedestrian traffic like a pine cone in a garbage disposal. A number of people clearly thought the station was a very cool place to hang out, which to mean seemed like hanging around an airport on a Friday night. We tried to imagine the conversations. "Hey, where are you? I'm near the stairs. The one with the people."
If you think of Tokyo, especially if you are a huge nerd, this is the place you think of. Buildings just go up and up. Crystal has said she felt Tokyo was like a dirty carnival, and if any place demonstrated that best, it was Electric Town. Bright colors adorn virtually every surface. Contrary to the name, you are not immediately bombarded by flashing lights and bowel sundering noise, though virtually any building you enter or shop front you pass will try to elicit seizures at least once before you pass, like a thug mugging you in the street, except instead of taking your wallet he makes you come inside and spend your money on little naked anime figurines. This is the first place I saw one of those iconic, enormous televisions that you see in movies, and the only thing I could think of is how much money it must cost to keep the thing repaired. There are a lot of drunk people in Tokyo, like any major city, and there are also a lot of heavy things one can throw.
When geeks have wet dreams about Japan, they're dreaming about this place. We hit a few, what I liked to call, "seedy back alley malls", which are these legitimate shopping places that are located in nooks that one usually reserved for the purchase of watches and cocaine in the States. The first store we visited was basically wall to wall anime trinkets. One of the more jarring oddities was this rack of key chains, that... well... They love mayonnaise in Japan. It's fucking ambrosia. I have no idea if there is any branding in Japan - I assume there is - but there's this little baby who's the symbol/mascot for the biggest mayonnaise provider in the country. He's everywhere. He's like the NASCAR of Japan, except instead of providing hillbillies with the slight chance of vehicular homicide, he provides the country with a tasty but suspect white substance to slather over their baked goods/meats/candy. Anyway, these keychains portrayed various anime characters interpreted as the mayonnaise baby. I picked up Asuka from Evangelion for Ian. You know, Asuka as a creepy baby. I felt like I was looking into a Mobius loop of recursive horror, levels of obsessive compulsive fandom that are literally impossible in any other time-space.
We proceeded up the building, each level its own store devoted entirely to some particular niche. For instance, one floor was all large-scale anime toys, the kind you can use to bludgeon bears to death and cost slightly less than a four year education. One was nothing but build-your-own Gundams. We reached a point where Cory neatly told us to turn around, only because he didn't want us to go any higher. I never really heard him clearly, but I believe he told us he thought it was filled with things too terrible to discuss. That worries me in retrospect, because he invited us to explore Japanese sex-shops on a number of occasions, and Cory is not the kind of person to bat an eye at perversion. The kind of things - or people - in that environment still haunt me, even as I write this. It haunts me because I want to know
Another kind of shop we got to experience were these weird "variety shops" scattered throughout the district. You rent a locker from a store, except the locker is made of glass and you put price tags on everything inside. You can find almost anything in there, but they're not really organized in any cohesive manner, and there's no real price control. You can find one thing in unit A for $10 and the same thing in unit B for ten times the amount. You see a lot of figurines, some more risque than others, and there's a lot of Nintendo merchandise. I was hoping I could find a figurine of Mario doing something explicit, but alas, that can only happen on the internet, and not in real life. It's a lot like if somebody took E-Bay - or at least, Ebay for nerds - and put it in a physical locale. Well, there's no bidding. So I guess it isn't like Ebay. It's more like a flea market, only you have to be at least this geeky to purchase anything.
I also got to experience a Japanese arcade. Now, I don't want to make any judgments about this being a "Japanese arcade", because calling the place a "Japanese arcade" is like calling Caesar's Palace an "American Casino." The place had to be at least six floors. The first floor was fairly typical arcade fare, except everything in it was completely up to date and surprisingly well lit. You know how every arcade has two machines that were bought sometime in the past decade and people actually want to play it? Yeah, that was the whole first floor. I don't know what they do with bad games. I assume they sacrifice them on some sort of altar. The upper floors were entirely different, however. Halves of floors were dedicated entirely to a single game. You walk into a room, and it's the "Street Fighter room" or "The Crazy Hot Witch Game" room, or "The Completely Nonsensical 30 Year Old Games room". Head to head games are not played the way we play them in America, where you cram two people in side by side on the same interface. No, instead, it's more like watching two people play Counter-Strike, only they're breaking faces open with Ryu instead of tea-bagging a corpse. There are two monitors and two sets of controls, usually placed next to one another. I didn't dare play a game; I was paralyzed with mortal fear. I think we all were. I don't enjoy being anally plowed at an arcade in a country where I understand what's going on, let alone in one where I can't loudly declare a character imbalanced. I want to stress this. Playing a game in this particular arcade against these kids would be like experiencing your first day of high school all over again, except everyone in your high school is also a murderer.
Like, you know, game murderers. They murder you at games. Or maybe with games.
Crystal and Cory found a few more toy dispensers while they were in Electric Town, and while I don't remember all the spoils that were had, I know they both got these tiny keychain flashlights that looked like Wiimotes. That would be mildly cool on its own, except when you used them they did not direct an ordinary beam of boring ol' white light. Instead they would project the image - quite clearly, I thought - of a character from Mario Cart riding like Hell-on-wheels across whatever surface you pointed them at. I thought this was one of the coolest things I had ever seen, and I was prepared to become nine again, just so I could properly enjoy them.
We stopped by a couple of "regular" (meaning, not chock-full of anime, porn, or anime porn) stores so that we could do some other shopping. Eric took an opportunity to look at some cameras, and Crystal looked into buying a hair dryer so she wouldn't have to ask anyone else for one while in Japan, or hope that the object in question did not suck as well as blow. To her credit, she had bravely asked the man at our hotel for just such in object that very morning, with resounding success, but I did not want her or I to go through it every morning. Eric seemed both impressed and discouraged by the selection and pricing of his inquiry, respectively. I stared hopelessly at a row of hair dryers, hoping that one that did what we needed would just jump off the shelf on its own and into our waiting hands. Crystal and Cory managed to work out which one was which and which would do what, but I don't know. Some things are a mystery to me, even in my mother tongue. I always figured, "Is hot, blows air" would be enough, but some of them are too hot, I was informed, particularly in the land of the Rising Sun. They do not do their hair out there. They battle it with the forces of Wind and Flame.
We were getting tired and hungry fast, though, so after a quick stop for posing with the Colonel outside of a KFC, we headed back to the station. It was there that we encountered a large man in a Pikachu suit. Eric and Cory both wanted a picture with him, and the guy was pretty cool. I'm almost positive he's out there on the internet besides just our pictures of him, if anyone's seen him before. He was very nice, and seemed to be perfectly okay with the picture taking. Every time I saw something like this in Japan, though, my mind would do these mental back-flips trying to make sense of it. The first thing you think when you see a large man in a Pikachu costume in the middle of Tokyo is, "Oh, right, I'm in Japan, that makes sense." Then you stop for a second and realize that, no, these people are not aliens, and they do not have wild Pokemon wandering their streets. The second thing you usually think is, "Why is this happening?" I was immediately confused if, perhaps, this is merely how this man usually spends his Saturday nights - that doesn't sound totally implausible, does it? The last stage is something akin to dawning disappointment/rationalization; in this case, he was handing out fliers. We are not so different, Japan. We are not so different.
Pokemon are everywhere, though. Like, not actual Pokemon, or even people dressed like Pokemon, but signs for Pokemon, and Pokemon movies. I had assumed that Japan was three fads ahead of us by now, but no, their children love the same dross that ours still do. Cory told me, "I actually start to feel worried when I don't see Pokemon", and now I know what he means. You can almost follow them to civilization, signs pointing you towards or away from trains and shopping centers. You can replace arrows with Pokemon in Japan, and you can also replace destinations with Pokemon. And money. Just Pokemon.
Shibuya and Roppongi
Cory got us back on a train and took us...somewhere. I'm not really sure. I know we weren't in Roppongi, and I know that eventually we wound up in Roppongi, or at least Cory and Eric did, but I have no idea what district we spent the remainder of our evening in. I think it was Shibuya. Regardless, we took a train to a nearby district and immediately looked for food.
We found a nice little place (and by little, I mean expensive and on the 7th floor) in sort of a shopping center, with faux wood everything. Floors, benches, walls, windows. We were seated on a long bench, with about 8 seats on it. The worrying part was that the last four seats on the end clearly had "Reserved!" signs posted on them, and I couldn't help but feel like I was intruding on the party. I half expected a family of four to wander in and then turn around when they saw the four loud, half-drunk foreigners at their usual table. Some tiny paranoid part of my brain - somewhere between the lizard-brain and part that loves cheesy movies - feared/hoped a gang of Yakuza would come in and wonder who was at their usual table. It turned out to be four people about our age and they barely paid any attention to us, but I continued to pretend that they were violent criminals.
The menu was not as English-friendly as Jonathan's had been; there were very few pictures, though Cory ably helped us through it. We got these vegetable dumplings whose real name escapes me (Cory told me they are not, in fact, dumplings, but neither me nor you would be able to tell the difference), which turned out to be a group favorite over the course of the trip. I also got breaded/fried zucchini, which was fucking delicious. It was basically salt and zucchini, but it managed to be one of the best things I ate while in the country. They tasted like the most delicious french-fries I'd ever head, complete with full seasonings. I also got this blueberry drink of some kind. It was weak on the berry but surprisingly alcoholic. We settled in nicely.
Which is a shame, because we really needed to find a place to sleep, something we realized about halfway through the meal. It had already gotten dark out by this point, when we remembered we hadn't really looked for, or indeed talked about, where we would like to stay. Now, the thing is, the weekend we were in Tokyo, there was some kind of holiday going on where you're supposed to visit your home town. I'm not sure how the logistics worked out, but to put things simply - the city was booked. No vacancy. We whipped out some of the tourism books we had on hand to check what was available, and we thought - or at least, Crystal and I thought - this might be a great night to try out at a Love Hotel, as we were just a few blocks away from what is know as Love Hotel Hill.
Love Hotels are interesting creatures. They have two modes, generally - a "Rest", which is about three hours, and a "Stay", which is overnight with a standard checkout time. They are very reasonably priced - presumably because they have little overhead aside from a team of Has-Mat certified maids who must steam down each room with boiling water after each visit - and require minimal interaction. In fact, the entire industry sprung up because Japanese people are so ashamed of having to let other people know they are hooking up, that they developed automated systems to keep the process entirely anonymous. You take some keys or push a button off of a wall that has a detailed picture of your room; you are directed to your room, either by a voice or lights; you open your room, which then locks behind you and will not open until you pay via an automated system. The rooms are sometimes themed, and are sometimes extravagant for their price range. Crystal and I were both exhausted, and the thought of a real bathtub was extremely tempting, though obviously neither of us had any need for anonymous sex.
We stopped briefly so Cory could get some directions from an internet cafe, both so we could for real find Love Hotel Hill, and so he and Eric could make plans for later. We made plans to split up; Crystal and I would take a love hotel, and they would go to Roppungi to party with some of Cory's friends, and figure out their sleeping arrangements on the fly. We left - optimistic, as this was an iconic moment for us, something we wanted to do in Japan - and found our way to Love Hotel Hill. True to its name, it is an extremely steep hill with dozens of these love hotels located all around it. We saw faux-Roman architecture, faux-Victorian architecture, Tiki, whatever. We found a place we really liked, and Cory checked for vacancy. Happily, they had some, so we set our plans in motion; the boys changed quickly and then they would leave their things with us. Eric had like twenty pounds worth of equipment with him, so this seemed a minor courtesy. We bid them farewell, and proceeded into what we thought would be a relaxing room. It was a fucking military operation.
Or that would have been great, but it didn't work out that way. Thankfully, Cory lingered behind us, both to help with bags and out of some intuitive feeling that something was not quite right. I saw a nice picture of a vacant room on a wall, along with a button I was clearly meant to press and keys I was clearly meant to take. A voice enticed me to head to my room (In Japanese, but it was pretty easy to figure out the context), and I headed off with some of the bags towards the room. Apparently a woman who worked there said something. Now, like I said, these places are designed so you don't have to talk to anyone. This woman was better protected then tellers are at big banks; she was behind a black screen behind a piece of glass. You cannot see her, and if she can see you, she doesn't say shit about it. Cory responded to her, which I vaguely heard as a distant muffle, as I was already down the stairs. Cory told me to hold up, at which point I turned around. He said, and I quote,
"Apparently, if you don't speak the Japanese, you gotta leave."
Later he told me she said something more along the lines of, "If you go in there without talking to me, you are a very inconsiderate person" and some other nasty things about us, but it didn't really matter. I know my heart was broken, since this pretty much threw off both our plans to stay here, as well as at love hotels in general Now angry and emotionally exhausted as well as physically in need of a shower (seriously, have you read how much we did in one day?) I went into a panic. There wasn't any vacancy in Japan, and these places didn't want to have us. Cory and Eric had shit to do, and I wasn't prepared to confront a bunch of crotchety old ladies at invisible desks behind black curtains who didn't want me in their anonymous sex hotel on my own. The thought of sleeping on a park bench or simply not sleeping at all seriously occurred to me, wandering around Tokyo in a manner not far removed from the living dead.
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. There was a large hotel at the end of the alley - "Shibuya Hotel", I believe - that happened to have vacancy somehow, even though Cory had searched for vacant hotels online only an hour or so prior. They sold us a pretty expensive room, but Crystal and I were glad to have it. We took up everyone's stuff; Cory and Eric went off to Roppongi, and we went to bed. I passed out without even taking my shoes off, woken only once as Crystal came to bed after a much deserved shower.
It was a hard end to a long day, but better things followed.