I wake early and call Daniel, who isn't quite ready. We agree to meet near my hotel in an hour or so and I arrive about 45 minutes early. I appear to be in a shopping area (which is going to be the focus of today's activities) so I pop into a Levi Store. It's kind of a cop out, but I figure having the Levis brand as a common point of reference should help highlight the differences between Japanese culture and our own. Plus, the girl I saw through the window was J-hot.
The shop attendant asks me something in Japanese, which I can't reply to with anything other than "sorry, I don't speak Japanese." He goes back about his business. I pick up a gorgeous black t-shirt with gold roses on the front and proceed to the changing room. Seeing me, the shop assistant jumps in front of me and forbids me from trying it on. I am mystified and assume Daniel will explain to me why later (he can't), so I leave. I pass a sports shop and head inside looking for rare trainers. No fewer than six men are lined up at the doorway and they scream something at me. I will hear this same scream (though at a pleasingly lower volume) at every shop I go into from now on, but for now I'm stunned. I mean that literally. I try to at least acknowledge the first one, but they start bowing and repeating the scream. I really don't know what to do. I want to run past them but I don't want to offend them. I don't know what the right thing to do in this situation is so I stand there, staring at them, mouthing the beginning of words that I haven't decided on yet. After about an hour (or a few seconds) I gather my wits and run past them. The shop is a loss, so I turn to look at the front door. They're ALL STILL THERE, STARING AT ME. I run past them, really quite scared, and they shout something else. I shout back, "bye!" and make a highly undignified exit. I rush off to meet Daniel and we hit the shops, never once finding one as completely batshit insane as the this one.
We go to a regular high street footwear outlet and they have the sickest, rarest trainers you can imagine. Later on we go to a more exclusive trainer shop and I find that the trainers the Japanese covet are actually just the ones you find in our Foot Lockers here. In fact, the trainers I have worn to Tokyo are on sale, labeled as "Very Limited Edition". In
English, that's how cool they are. I don't buy anything, so we hit the arcades.
The arcades! MAN! Where do I even begin? Ok, for starters, the arcades that I visited there were huge. They all had several floors, each devoted to a specific genre or title. Usually the ground floor would be UFO catchers (which are all fixed, by the way - the strength of the claw is determined by how much money the machine has collected) and at least one other floor would be devoted to fighting games. Some arcades had entire floors devoted to Virtua Fighter 5. If they didn't, their fighting game space was dominated by VF5. Why anyone would want to play anything other than VF5 I don't know, but I guess they have to give the chicks something to do. During my three day stay in Tokyo I will spend around £75 on VF5, at 50p a go. If I lived there, I would easily spend more than that, forgoing things like food and water to play The Greatest Video Game Ever Made. My Lion card racks up a 40 per cent win ratio, which is about 30 per cent higher than I was expecting it to be.
At some point I must have left the arcades (why, Daniel, why?) because I also managed to visit Akihabara, where I had the Best Noodles In Japan, as endorsed by the emperor and the prime minister. I know a PR stunt when I see one, but I also know good noodles when I taste them, and BOY those noodles were the best I'd ever eaten. Even better than my step-mum's pork ball noodles, and she's been working on that recipe for decades.
Akihabara is often name-checked by geeks in the know (such as myself), and I was super-excited by finally being able to say "oh yeah, I've been there. It's shit." And I'd experienced Asian shopping before, in Hong Kong and Malaysia, but I figured that being Japan, things would be different. And they are, kind of. You still have poorly organised shops, and you still have over-eager shop assistants who call you in to shops from the front door, but in Akihabara they have megaphones. They will shout through their megaphone at you, at point blank range, and you won't know what the fuck they are saying. Even if you speak Japanese. The only way to stop the painful noise is to get behind them, which means into the shop. Quite clearly the tactic is an effective one.
My Akihabara side quest (the main quest being to pick up an amazing DS Lite case and something to hold the carts in) was to find the sickest, most depraved Hentai imaginable, and preferably on UMD, since my PSP is Japanese. Ideally, I'd have found aliens with 10 penises raping eight-year-old boys who look like they're in pain but secretly enjoying it (it's no secret to me, obviously). What I found was much, much worse.
I'm quite down for the whole rape fantasy. I mean, it doesn't get me off, but I kind of understand it. And I know girls who are also down for it. And I understand that the average Japanese male treats his girlfriend really badly. I also understand that they must, as a natural by-product of their shy and respectful manner, be quite sexually frustrated. I'm generalising, but the nastier side of Hentai seems like pretty good evidence that I'm right about at least some of the Japanese men. But how frustrated they can be, and how angry about sex and women, can only really be understood by visiting a Hentai store. You see, I thought that the raping of sub-teenage girls was at the end of the scale, and I was right about that. What I wasn't right about was which end. By the time I reached the sick end of the shelves I'm picking up boxes with pictures of young girls covered in cuts, lyingunconsciouss in a pool of blood and semen.
I'm sure there's a goodargumentt for allowing this sort of thing to release sexual tension in a safe way, but when it gets to the point where you need to be nearly killing a girl to get off, you are in WRONGLAND. And these things are available in shops that anyone can shop in. I saw several teenagers shopping who were definitely under 18, even taking into account how young oriental people can look. I can't imagine how sex would be for a kid losing his virginity if his main exposure to sex has been these images for the last year or so. I wouldn't like to be the girl, that's for sure.
Then I buy infinity capsule toys, go to more arcades and then go back to my hotel. I need to get changed because tonight Daniel is taking me to a Dazed and Confused party (super-trendy models galore). But more on that later. This post is now huge.
