The Journey Begins

Imagine a mummer's parade of excessive proportions and with better behaved drunks, and it will resemble the August drum and dance festival in Koenji, a neighborhood near the famous Shinjuku train station in Tokyo. Nobody seemed to know what or why they were having the festival. Apparently, these events are such long-held traditions that even the locals forget their origins sometimes.




The streets were packed on both sides and the spectators retained their trademark Japanese politeness as they silently pushed their way through the clusters of bodies to get a better view of the action. The most effective infiltration techniques came from the older Japanese women, who, in their wizened years of experience with foreign "gaijin" must have realized that we claustrophobic Americans have much different personal space, and would walk into foreigners like me, knowing we would move to accommodate them rather than feel awkward.

It would be just a taste of the madness to come. As my group of friends and I left midway and headed for the subway, the rest of Japan was still arriving in unrelenting thousand-person waves from the station. Police and subway workers cordoned off most of the station to accommodate the masses as they exited the subway and entered the streets of Koenji. There was a smaller but still dense crowd packed like gumballs all vying to pass through three or four ticket entry points. Boarding the subway took a while.

I arrived in Tokyo on Thursday afternoon, excited but delirious from a restless thirteen-hour plane ride. Our living quarters is in the financial district of Minato city known as Akasaka, a strip of bright lights, with tight streets shared by people in business attire and Mercedes'. A big hobby for Japanese business men and women visiting Akasaka video games known as Kochinko. They are a mix of pinball and electronic slots, and the massive arcades that house the machines, said to be ran by the Korean mob, are filled with locals staring intently into the flashing colors and jarring noises.


The best way to eat cheap in Tokyo, the world's most expensive city, is to become quick friends with ramen. Even ritzy places like Akasaka have noodles restaurants that sell succulent, filling meals for a reasonable $3-$6. One such bar caught my attention because the prices were cheap and all of its patrons were locals, so I knew it had to be a bargain. I ate beef broth with a raw egg and soba (buckwheat) noodles. Microwavable noodle meals sold at convenience stores are also palatable and a better alternative than some of their attempts at fusing Asian cuisine with staples of the west, like the Lo Mein sandwich.



Roppongi is a ten minute walk from Akasaka and is packed with hundreds of bars, night clubs, and the probably the highest concentration of foreigners in the country. Thus, it also has a reputation for all kinds of Russian, Chinese, Nigerian and Japanese mob activities. Many new arrivals in Tokyo who hang out in Roppongi without researching legitimate establishments are prey for being lured by promises of free drinks and happy endings into seedy clubs and bars only to wake up a few hours with a traces of dissociative drugs in their system and empty wallets and bank accounts. But Roppongi's negative connotations have not dissuaded the locals from parking their bikes on the sidewalks without locks.



I did my homework on Roppongi and spent my first full night out on the town in a dive known as the Mistral Bar. It is also called the train bar because it is styled after a subway car, but the interior is truthfully more like a crawlspace. Crammed inside were foreigners and a few local girls rocking out to the AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Megadeth songs playing on the sound system. Everyone was quick to laugh at the space constraints at the with one another and tip their glass, so there was an air of closeness and camaraderie. The bar really showed how Tokyoites make the most out of minimal space. Every inch wall space save for the bar counter and the liquor shelf lining was scrawled in tipsy signatures and pictures of patrons from over years.

Across the street from the Mistral Bar was Gaspanic, a dance club with a ton of local girls and enough fog machines and strobe lights to induce an epileptic fit. Japanese youth are into American hip hop, even the outdated kind. It was an unexpected flashback to the frat parties of my freshman year of college to hear disposable rap anthems like "Ballin'!" once again booming from the speakers of the DJ booth.

By midnight I was quite worn from representing USA boogie woogie on the dance floor and the jet lag so I left the club and walked home with a friend. It is a fifteen minute walk from Roppongi to my hotel room. It took us over an hour to make it back, and we were sober. Tokyo can be extremely confusing for those unfamiliar with the language and the land marks. Along the way we spoke to a convenient store attendant, a tipsy business man, two police officers, a parking attendant at the Ritz Carlton whose property we somehow stumbled through and an old drunk enjoying a Heinekin in one of the many shrines dotting the city.

Being lost is one of my biggest fears, but in Tokyo it is an exercise in Zen.