pantstributor

Asia Pants – A week in Tokyo

Hey everyone! I didn’t get up to much in the last week.

EXCEPT FOR WHEN I WENT TO TOKYO!!!

Okay, the horrendous use of all caps must be explained. I have talked about going to Tokyo for years, and it was always blocked by one thing or another. The one thing usually being money and the other being time. This trip finally gave me an excuse to go. I HAVE to go. I have to look at Japanese primary sources.

Well, the work went alright. It was mostly beneficial to get to Tokyo and see the Baseball Hall of Fame and museum. The people there were really friendly, and only to happy to photocopy books for me. It’s a weird sensation as a graduate student for others to do the crappy work for you, but I won’t complain too much! I even got over the expense, as everything in Tokyo is crazy expensive anyway. More importantly, it gave me a chance to look around the special room set up to honour Sadaharu Oh, Japanese baseball legend and part-time Derek Zoolander enthusiast.

Go on, guess which one he is.

The rest of my trip was consumed with shopping! I need to come to Tokyo about a year after I graduate, when in theory I’ll have a decent amount of disposable income. I still had a bit of money to spend, just not enough to blow around a hundred dollars on some utterly ridiculous stuff.

Sorry about the profanity in the image, but I had to post that. I just don’t know what Mickey Mouse would think if he saw it. To be fair, it’s a classic example of people from a different culture just completely failing to get it. I’m still allowed to find it funny.

Unfortunately, I also had to pass on less offensive and much more awesome stuff, like this guy:

He was sitting there in Super Potato, a famous retro game store in Akihabara. This store pretty much summed up my regret at not abandoning education in favour of a steady salary earlier: if possible, I would have walked out of there with this guy, another cushion, a Sega Saturn and possibly, just possibly, a Wonderswan Color. The Wonderswan Color, a handheld console so awesome and rubbish at the same time it overrides my natural instincts to spell things correctly in order to pay it due reverence. Next time, Super Potato. Next time.

I was mostly confined to window shopping therefore, including with the food.

Ok, I mostly went in and ate food. I’m not sure if you guys know, but it’s very common for Japanese restaurants in Japan and the rest of East Asia to display fake versions of available dishes in the window. A true godsend for foreign visitors, and the complete opposite of China, where you’re left to guess what Seven Emperor Treasure might be. I still got into trouble though, at one place in particular where it took the young lady working there five minutes to make me realize I had to place my order at a vending machine at the front of the restaurant. Then she brought me my pork and rice.

Yup, my Japanese needs some work, it turns out. Here’s another example, taken from my attempts to ask a lady at an information desk in a shopping mall for directions to an ATM:

Lady: Hello sir, how can we help you today?
John: Hello, I am sorry, I don’t speak Japanese very well. Is there a bank/ATM in this building?
Lady: Which bank would be acceptable to you sir? (Using the Japanese word for ‘good’)
John: Yes, banks are good.
Lady: Yes, sir…. There are four banks available in this building. Which bank would be acceptable to you?
John (recognizes there are four ATMs, just wants directions to one): Yes, banks are good!
Lady (takes out chart listing all the ATMs in that building): Which bank would be acceptable to you sir?
John (notes the list): Yes, banks are good!

The lady repeated herself one more time, and I finally got it. The core problem, apart from my woeful Japanese, was that she was being extremely helpful and making sure I got precise directions to the exact ATM I wanted. I just wanted directions to the nearest ATM. It all worked out. She and I laugh about it now.

So, mostly I wandered in and out of stores, checking out ranks of Doraemon figures…

… or perusing famous types’ tributes to stores that apparently only sold overpriced videos of live music concerts…

… or taking pictures of advertisements that were being cute just for the sake of it:

That last image was taken from my sole trip on the Oedo Line. I think that myself and the three Japanese people there were the only ones who didn’t realize the Oedo Line charges three times the amount of anybody else to get you across short distances. I relied on the Japanese subway system very heavily during my trip, particularly on my last full day, when I wisely decided to go strolling around Shibuya, Japan’s most famous shopping district, on a national holiday.

There were people EVERYWHERE. That photograph represents my view everywhere I went in Shibuya. I miserably failed to find Loft, a store that apparently features awesome stickers (thanks anyway Meredith!). Although I did find a really cool place that I thought might be one of the many arcades I had passed by in Tokyo…

… but it was just a pachinko hall. Pachinko is enormously popular in Japan. Think of it as pinball, but with money. Also, it’s excruciatingly boring. I mean, REALLY boring. The cultural gap, man. Sometimes there is no crossing it.

I considered buying some Japanese pop, but the asking price of thirty dollars for a CD deterred me, as did my lack of knowledge of who was good and who was just ridiculous.

I’m going to go ahead and put this guy in the ridiculous category. At least he’s proud to be glay.

That was Tokyo! I’ll see you all soon!

© 2009 Poshdeluxe.