“That’s time.”

One of the weird things about spring break was getting back to Cambridge and realizing I had $0.03 in my bank account. Particularly remarkable because the last time I’d removed cash was at 3am in Rappongi, one of Tokyo’s club districts, and I’d apparently requested the very number of yen that would exactly annihilate my hard-earned dollars.

I’m not a really hard partier in America. But there’s something inexcusable about sleeping in a city you may never see again. And certainly when you’ll never be 22 again. So this March my friends and I spent a lot of nights and early mornings wandering the safe, quiet streets of Tokyo, looking for fun. The subway shuts down around midnight and begins running at 5am, so that means either walking home (taxis are expensive) or staying out (Tokyo’s enormous).

Which isn’t to say that the daytime isn’t great, too. With an understanding that we could never learn everything and would probably gouge each other’s eyes out if we tried, my travel-gang (Taz, Jane, Ben) adopted a somewhat haphazard approach to tourism. Getting lost was okay. Returning to places we liked was fine. It was important to have time to sit in cafés and read, and to fantasize about living in Tokyo for real. We weren’t going to pretend we knew about Japan by going to kabuki shows or sumo matches; instead, we’d make our way through the city as we pleased. That said, even very “Japanese things” can surprise you. There are small, wooden temples on streets full of urban development. The cherry blossoms were beginning to explode in parks and gardens. While sashimi is expensive, other sushi can be bought in lunch boxes to go or from conveyor belts in restaurants for well under $10 a meal (often more like $5). Eating sushi while people-watching in a sunny park is something I do in America: but it tastes better in Tokyo.

Here are some fun things we did and some facts and impressions of Tokyo.

People are generally really polite – almost uncomfortably polite, from an American perspective. Store clerks bow their heads and smile, and I found myself doing the same. More than that, though, people inconvenienced themselves in order to make us comfortable. I asked a woman on the street where the bathhouse was and she walked me several blocks to get there. Taz asked a clerk in a store where the park was and the clerk found his manager, who found her manager, who offered to show her the way. Jane asked a bartender where the nearest cigarette machine was and he went down the street to buy her a pack; when he saw her fumbling with matches he lit her cigarette for her. I don’t know to what extent this is just how people behave or if it’s a generosity reserved for befuddled tourists. Sometimes the politeness manifests itself in a decorum that made me feel like I had my fly perpetually unzipped; you can receive dirty looks for laughing too loudly or blowing your nose in public. Tokyo seemed really fastidious but simultaneously offered up perpetual, often offbeat entertainment – I loved this split personality.

You might be interested to know that cigarettes cost about $2.50-$3 a pack. And they are sold in vending machines. The variety of drinks sold in vending machines is astonishing: coffee is particularly popular, and comes both hot and cold. One of the guide books in our hostel said there were 70 people for every vending machine in the city.

A lot of people in Tokyo wear what look like surgical masks, because they are worried about catching the avian flu. One time in a café I saw a guy enter wearing a facemask, which he promptly removed to smoke a cigarette. I was really curious about couples on the streets, when one was wearing a mask while the other wasn’t. How did they meet? What was flirting like? Or kissing? Did they argue about the efficacy of facemasks?

Arcades have a vast array of games, most of which I couldn’t care less about because they involve cars or wizards. But there is one game – simply dubbed “The Drum Game” by my blockmate Ben – which is spectacular and, while easily described, also ineffably magical. There are two enormous drums (resembling the ceremonial drums we’d seen at Buddhist shrines) that 2 players compete to hit in coordination with the series of lights scrolling across the screen. Hitting correctly results in bangs, flashes, and streams of color. It is the happiest game I have ever played. Even losers are celebrated by the dancing animals on the screen, and the players’ icons – personified drums – jump and giggle in piles of flowers.

There is an Irish pub in Ueno called The Warrior Celt that is open until 5am. There are Irish pubs in every city in the world, but this one is fabulous because a) it’s 4am and Japanese people are singing Irish folk songs and b) there’s something irresistible about lonely expatriates dancing badly to The Clash and The Pogues. Someone apologized to Jane for Japanese persecution of her Korean ancestors. The night we went to the Warrior Celt I discovered a painful blister on my hand at dinner (from overexertion at The Drum Game), which disappeared by the time we took the subway home at 6am.

There is a trance club in Aoyama called Manic Love that opens on Sunday morning at 6 and closes at 11. A cover charge of $10 buys you a free cup of coffee. Priceless things about Manic Love include Jane being bled on by a beautiful, tripped-out raver. And the ambiguously European guy wearing ass-less chaps under his pimp jacket who told us we were too high-strung. “How does he know that?” I wondered.

Slightly ominous names of bars: Gas Panic, 911, Propaganda.

Food I saw that was sold on a stick: chicken strips, chicken lumps, tofu, whole fish with scales et al., squid lumps, corn dogs, chocolate-covered bananas.

The Tokyo fish market opens around 4:30. This is one of those things every tourist does but is still worthwhile. All of the fishermen bring their catch to the market to be sold to restaurant chefs. It’s so enormous and expansive that new species are sometimes discovered there. (Sometimes apparently Steven Tyler can be discovered there, but we didn’t see him.) We wandered the stalls, entranced by the brightly-colored piles of fish and shellfish, and lingered too long watching a young woman chop the heads off squirming, struggling fish the length of her arm. There are shops near the market that sell just-caught, just-killed sashimi; it is expensive but delicious.

Gwen Stefani is teaching America about Harajuku but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still awesome. That’s the neighborhood where schoolgirls go to wear Victorian-influenced maid costumes, white makeup, hundreds of barettes and multi-colored socks. It is a good neighborhood for thrift store shopping and also for buying T-shirts with mangled English phrases or philosophical musings. Ben bought a black shirt with white chess pieces falling poetically across the background and the following text:
“Lucky Adventurer
There is a big difference between leisure time and time spent in haste.
Time can be a strong ally or a crushing enemy. That's time.
The more free time I have, the more I tend to think of bad things.
I want no more time competition. From now I need more leisurely time.
How many well-spent hours do you have in a day?”

Karaoke is fun. It seems mostly to be run by conglomerates that have bought huge buildings (some up to 20 floors high) and filled them with private rooms where businessmen or tourists can sing like idiots while waitresses ply them with alcohol and creamy desserts.

People read pornographic manga unashamedly on the subway. Businessmen buy vintage “art” magazines from vendors at lunch-time. A hostess club – no sex, just talking – can cost $400/hour.

I was often the tallest person on the subway and hit my head on several doorframes.

Richard Gere is currently part of several ad campaigns in Tokyo.

Cool girls in Tokyo are currently wearing long denim shorts instead of skirts. This is the sort of garment that can look good if you are short, skinny and confident. Truly admirable: looking sexy while wearing long denim shorts, knee socks and a red flannel men’s shirt.

There’s a good deal more. Tokyo is expensive if you want to buy electronics, sashimi, high fashion or time with an English-speaking hostess. It’s affordable if you spend wisely. Stay in our hostel, the Guess T House. The owners provide free rice, pasta, spices, laundry soap, internet access and a karaoke machine for the tv. It’s clean, affordable and social, located in the upscale neighborhood of Azabu-Juban. There’s a bathhouse down the street where you can scald yourself pink, a fine stationery shop, a park full of little kids and old men, and a bakery selling delicious red bean-filled pastries and buttery Ginza cakes.


--Sarah Burke