Searching Asakusa for Drums and...Plastic Food?

Today we decided to stay close to the hotel and spend our time checking out Asakusa, an area known for it's enormous, ancient Sensouji Temple (built 648AD) food service shopping district (more on that in a minute) and, most recently, the Sky Tree (aka the New Tokyo Tower), the tallest structure in Japan, though it is not set to open until next month.

After a very brief コンビニ (convenience store) breakfast, we walked outside to Sensouji, quite convenient, as it is directly behind our hotel. The last two times we were here, Sensouji was undergoing restoration, so we weren't even able to catch a glimpse of the main gate, Kaminarimon. But this morning was cold, but bright and cheerful...and crowded!

All the gold trim literally gleams in the sunlight

...LOTS of sunlight

Newly restored gilded lanterns. They are about 12 feet tall.

A view looking down the bustling Nakamise (inner store), which is the ancient market road that leads up to the temple.

 Nakamise has all sorts of stall and shops, making food and snacks right in front of you. We bought some amazing mochi (rice flour) sweets and fresh senbei (sesame rice crackers) to enhance our pizza bread from 7-11 (breakfast of champions!), then had to escape the crowd. We walked a short way down the main busy street in Asakusa towards Orange Street, which is an old road filled with vintage shops, cafes, restaurants and what have you.

Sign reads "Orange Douri(Street)"

A prime example of "what have you". Magurobito translates, literally, to Tuna People.

We continued towards the train station in search of something Sumi had wanted to see for years, the Taiko Drum Museum. It is not a museum like you would expect. First of all, it's on the fourth floor of a Shinto Goods and Taiko store. Second, the entrance looks like this:

Hm. The store itself was pretty fascinating, with all sorts of things needed for Shinto ceremonies, processions and such. And some very elaborate, very pretty and very expensive handmade taiko drums.

taiko drum sticks in all sizes

Did you ever wonder where Japanese parade floats came from? Me, too!

This one sells for just over $24,000

The museum was very small, but very cool for three reasons.

1) they had drums from all over the world on display
2) Even though pictures were not allowed in the museum, the nice curator offered to take a mug shot of us with one of the more impressive displays

The best I could make out, these are Chinese festival drums representing a dragon and the sun.

3) You actually got to PLAY almost all of the drums! They had sticks out and everything. And we're not talking about a few little snare drums. Big, five foot deep taiko drums, water drums from Papau New Guinea, kalimbas from Africa. We were so nervous about it, we only hit them softly. It was so quiet in there, we felt rather odd banging on big drums, but it was VERY cool.

A little ways down the road from the drum museum is a shopping district that specializes in food service. Japan has all sorts of "shopping districts", which are really just clusters of shops specializing in the needs of a certain profession. For example, Tsukiji has the Fish Market and tons of little sushi shops and goods needed to cook and prepare fish. Here in Asakusa, this is where one goes if one owns a restaurant and needs things for it. Shops for signs, display cases, to-go boxes, dishes, foodstuffs (spices, canned and dried goods, etc). Anything you need for a restaurant, you can buy it on these two blocks.

Plates, bowls, serving dishes...

To-go containers and uniforms...

Many stores were simply little warehouses you could browse. I could barely squeeze down some of these aisles.

Lucky Turtle? The mascot for a knife shop...Kacchan.

Who said tacky was out of style?

And, of course, if you are a Japanese restaurant, you need to buy.....plastic food

I always wondered where they came from!

They even have the bizarre pizza with clams on it...

They are called "Sample Shops", and many restaurants in Japan use these plastic foods to show prospective diners what they serve. There were several grades of "samples", including some rather expensive handmade ones that looks very realistic. You normally aren't allowed to take pictures of goods in shops, so I had to be rather sneaky about these. The guy at the expensive shop kept staring at the big Gaijin, so I couldn't get any pics. sorry.

Apparently, you can also outfit your own brewery from this street

or mad scientist lab, I'm not sure...

Now starving after having stared at fake food for the last hour, we headed back towards the temple area, where we wanted to try out Sansada, a tempura restaurant that has been here in Asakusa since the 1850's. It had obviously been remodeled since then, but still had an old fashioned feel to it. The food?

The smile says it all!

Actually, it's funny because the tempura really was good, but there was one piece that all but ruined the meal for us. The mushrooms, spinach and especially onions were very tasty, but there was this flower they put in there, battered and deep fried and larger than the vegetables. I still don't know if I liked it or not, but the flavor was SO strong, that it literally overpowered the meal. If you've ever eaten flowers before (which is not unusual in Asian cuisine), you know that they taste like a smell, if that makes sense. This tasted like distilled essence of a flower. Gum, toothpaste, chocolate and soda could not remove the taste from my mouth even hours later.

One thing we noticed while wandering Asakusa is that the Sky Tree really has started to dominate the skyline. When we were last in Asakusa, it wasn't anywhere near completed, so we never saw it. But now, it's a landmark that can be seen clearly from all around, which is saying something in a city full of tall buildings. With the old Toyko Tower damaged from the tsunami-inducing earthquake back in the spring, the Sky Tree promises to be the new kitschy tourist spot as well as a nice way to figure out which way is east when you are in the city.

Several miles away, it is still impressive

Next up: Meiji Temple and Harajuku!

Bookstores, Namjatown and K-On! in Ikebukuro

Today we ventured into the shopping district of Ikebukuro, where young Toykoites go to shop, play and hang out in the late afternoon and evening. It's an older crowd than Harajuku, mostly high school and college-age and not "hip" like Shinjuku or Shibuya or just plain weird like Akiba. Just a normal place where normal kids hang out...with lots of neon lights.

Our first stop was Junkudo, another one of the largest bookstores in Tokyo. Junkudo dwarfed yesterday's Shosen Book Tower. Junkudo literally has over one million books in stock, and looks more like a library than a bookstore.

All the floors look like this in all directions

And not just quantity, but quality as well. Along with fiction and pop culture books, there were serious technical books, in Japanese and English, on most every subject imaginable. One floor contained nothing but computer and medical books, but not just things like "C++ For Dummies", but algorithm textbooks and a full shelf of video game design theory books. The medical section was just as deep, with professional texts, journals and any specialty you could imagine. It was quite simply the best bookstore I've ever visited, and that is saying something. In the half floor of travel books was three shelves full of ancient maps. Just amazing.

The title reads "How To Build a CPU" and is literally how to design CPU circuits. Japanese technical books often have cute characters drawn throughout the books, quite possibly to liven up the text.

Quite a view from the top floor. You rarely see this kind of vista in Tokyo. Usually there are too many other tall buildings that hide the mountains in the distance.

After spending way too long and too much money at Junkudo, we wandered over to Sunshine City, a large web of tall buildings that house shopping, entertainment and offices. We had a specific destination in mind, but first we stopped in at the Toyota showroom. This is one of the main showrooms in Tokyo, five floors of the latest cars

Toyota has really gone all out with it's hybrid technology. Over half the vehicles on display were hybird, including a four-seater PHV (plugin hybrid vehicle) that boasted over 75 MPG. Sumi was partial to the new IQ

Toyota's answer to the Smart car, but with far better MPG and a lower sticker price

Me? My favorite is rather obvious

Can I get the Cygnus sport package, please?

One thing I noticed that was quite different here in Japan is that all the car salespeople were women. They were dressed in various uniforms (of course) depending on the floor. This gives us rather incongrueous scenes, such as a woman in what looks like a school uniform, go-go boots and purple jacket on her knees polishing the tires of a display vehicle

After we took the driving simulators for a spin

It takes you around the neighborhood in Ikebukuro and onto the expressway

we headed out in search of our final destination in Sunshine City

Follow the creepy-looking signs on the floor...

Namco NamjaTown in Sunshine City....what's that?

...

What are YOU looking at?

NamjaTown is several things. It's a theme park of sorts, with rides for small children. It's also home to some of the more interesting food shops in Tokyo, including the Gyoza Museum, with all kinds of gyoza (small steamed buns filled everywhere but here in NamjaTown with pork) from all over Japan, a Curry Center, with many different kinds of curry dishes, and Ice Cream City, which has more varieties of ice cream on display that you are likely to see anywhere else. For a small ¥300 entry fee, you get to go in and wander around any of the areas and buy whatever looks good. That was our mission.

Pepper and cheese Gyoza on the right, pork gyoza with pepper and lemon on the left

Crispy Pizza Gyoza. Tastes like Pizza Bites

Beneath all the green onions is chicken gyoza

The name says it all

I'll have number 534 on a waffle cone...

We actually ordered the Wasabi. It tasted, to our disappointment, like vanilla

I thought about ordering Glape...

After eating our fill, we left NamjaTown and promptly got lost in Sunshine City, literally. It's not hard to do, even with all the bilingual signage. While trying to find our way out, we came across a plastic food making demo. A what? Well, most restaurants in Japan use plastic models of their food to advertise what they are selling. Here were some people with tables set up so you could sit down and try your hand at making them yourselves.

Very well made and realistic-looking

After we finally escaped, we did some more window shopping at Animate, one of the large anime stores, and Tokyu Hands, Japan's version of Wal-mart, Target and Marshall Fields all rolled into one, followed by a movie. What movie? Well...

Guilty Pleasure Anime #38

K-On! A TV anime about five girls who are in the Karui Ongakubu, or light music club. Basically they are a bad pop band with songs like "Love Is a Stapler" and "Rice Is a Side Dish" who spend almost no time actually practicing. The writers don't take them seriously, and it's an amusing show, especially if you have ever been in a bad band. The movie was only worth it if you were familiar with the series, so don't bother. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sumi slept.

We ended the day with a walk through the ancient Sensoji temple near our hotel, but it was too dark for pictures. I'll be taking some tomorrow, so I'll post them afterwards. For now, I'll leave you with a few store names in Sunshine City to ponder:

Important Information About Your Credit Card

I'm so jet lagged, I totally forgot to mention something that took almost two hours of our day today. We had been window shopping all over Akiba, comparing prices and availability of the PS Vita and some games for it. We had purchased several books at Shosen using our credit card, since we didn't bring all that much cash with us this time. We settled on a great little store called Lamutara (no idea what it means) to buy our stuff, as they were the cheapest and had the games we wanted.

Well, it turns out there's been an awful lot of credit card fraud since Christmas, and so Visa has been extra vigilant. What that means is that they flag accounts for all sorts of things, such as making purchases in Japan after using that very card to GET TWO PLANE TICKETS TO JAPAN AND BOOK A HOTEL IN JAPAN. Very suspicious, I'm sure you'll agree. Well, needless to say (yet I'm still saying it), when we went to pay for our shiny new, expensive toys, our card was denied. See, flagging your card for fraud means they just cut you off and make you call them in order to use your card again.

Now, in the States, that's not a big deal. You step out of line, whip out your cell phone, call the 800 number on the back of your card, answer a few security questions and five minutes later your card is fine and you are walking out of the store. What happens, however, when you are in a foreign country is as follows:

1) You ask the clerk where the nearest pay phone is, since an international plan on AT&T is $99 a month extra, and as such you do not HAVE said international plan. The clerk, being a Japanese man in his early thirties, has never in his life used a pay phone and barely knows what one looks like. He says he has no idea where one is. You tell him you are going to look for one and step outside....and literally almost run into the pay phones directly in front of the store.

2) You spend almost ten minutes trying to figure out how to use a pay phone in Japan to call the number on the denied receipt (the clerk doesn't even know what one looks like, so he's probably no help at all), only to finally succeed....and find out this number only handles JAPANESE Visa cards.

3) You spend almost TWENTY minutes trying to figure out how to make an international collect call from a pay phone in Japan to the US, only to finally give up, turn on international calling on your wife's cell phone and pay Lord knows how much (we'll find out with out next bill. I don't even want to look) to call NOT an 800 number (can't call an 800 number internationally) to contact Visa to have them remove the fraud flag. You breath a sigh of relief and head back into the store.

4) The clerk tries again to run your card and it is denied again. Now, slightly irritated, you call Visa again with your international roaming charges, only to be PUT ON HOLD while this guy gets his supervisor.

5) The supervisor is very helpful, especially when she realizes you are actually in Japan (that detail managed to not get transmitted to her) and explains that the hold on your card is not removed immediately, as the first woman told you, but after 24 hours. She then overrides the hold so you can use your card. She stays on the line with you while the clerk tries two more times and gets denied two more times. She then says it's not her fault, and it's all their fault, but nicely, and suggests we have the clerk clear the cache from his machine or call his vendor and can't get off the phone fast enough.

6) Pondering exactly how to explain in Japanese to the clerk that he should try clearing the cache on his cash register or work this out with his vendor, you communicate to him that your credit card company says everything is fine and there is a problem here in Japan. He understands that, and thankfully offers to call his company.

7) After about ten minutes on the phone with HIS credit card company, you see him taking his cash register apart and, apparently, resetting the system. He then runs the card through successfully, and we are on our way, only 90 minutes later with our shiny new toys, a working credit card and a ridiculous cell phone bill.

Moral of the story: If you ever travel overseas, call your credit card company. Tell them where you are going, when you are going, how long you are going for and what you plan on using your card for when you are there.

Credit card companies are battling a lot of fraud, and really don't care how much of an inconvenience arbitrarily blocking your account will have. I don't blame them much, honestly, though I do wish that an iota of common sense and/or actual human intelligence would be used when determining if fraud flags are false positives BEFORE blocking a card. This is the third time in the last eight months this has happened to me. Twice now I've been in LA for gigs, bought the plane tickets, reserved a car, actually rented the car, drove around all weekend, used the same card for gas and food all over Southern CA, then on Sunday morning when putting gas in the rental car right before returning it, my card gets flagged and I need to call in. I understand they have to protect their money and sympathize to a large degree, but the lack of communication and shifting the burden of proof to the customer at an arbitrary time and place which will ALWAYS be inconvenient to the customer is just poor service.

AKB48! Or is it SDN48? Or SKE48?

OK, the title is kind of an inside joke for Japanese music fans. There's this ultra-popular, ultra-bad group of "singing" and "dancing" and "acting" pop idols called AKB48, which is short for "Akihabara (Akiba) 48" which, I suppose, should imply there are 48 of them. They were started by some music promo guy with the idea that if you have a bunch of cute girls wearing skimpy outfits bouncing around on stage and pretending to sing utterly vacuous, drab, sugary pop songs, it would sell records. Well, it works. Very well. And by having over 70 of them (including "trainees"), they can flood the airwaves with "different" (so they say) songs by various AKB girls and their spinoff groups, so you can have all sorts of records in the charts at the same time, which makes them look even bigger, thus selling even more....you get the idea.

They used to perform daily on the 6th floor of one of the buildings in Akihabara, but have just recently finished construction on a brand new AKB48 Cafe and Shop (oh, boy), so now they can sell themselves alongside overpriced, bland sandwiches to match their "hits"

Exploitation at it's finest

This, of course, takes away from some of the more traditional Akiba sights that have the kind of flavor one is looking for when visiting the Kingdom of Otaku (for the non-Japanese geeks, Otaku is usually a derogatory term for people, usually young men, obsessed with all things anime), like, for example:

The Gundam Cafe, where the overpriced food is shaped like aliens from the series, and artwork, statues and figurines adorn the walls. The sign this guy is carrying says "Please Do Not Touch the Gundam"

People have been complaining that Akiba has been losing its old fashioned geek culture for a while now and it is true, to a point. There used to be street performers dressed up in random cosplay, some singing, some acting, some just enjoying being stared at, and the shops had some unique stuff that wasn't always based on images of young girls with big eyes and even bigger breasts. It's still there, but it's harder to find, and you need to wade through the muck to find it. The street is filled with nothing in early January, but even in the summer, it is now girls dressed up as maids trying to get you into their cafe and theaters full of AKB girls all trying to take the otaku's money, rather than celebrating their own special brand of weirdness. It's too bad, but that is the trend, whenever there is a good or unique thing, business comes in to capitalize on it and, in the process, makes it less unique and almost always less good.

For us, Akiba is still a great place for windows shopping (they don't allow pictures in any of the stores, sorry) or to find stuff we can't get in the US, like Japanese books from one of the biggest bookstores in Tokyo, Shosen Book Tower

The largest selection of Japanese CPU books in the world

8 floors and over 500,000 books.

or new games and game consoles that haven't been (or won't be) released in the US:

We luv our toys!

We're not into buying DVD's or Blu-rays of anime here, since they are just outrageously priced (¥11250, or $130, for a single Blu-ray with two twenty-three minute episodes) and full seasons on DVD come to the US in a year or two for less than $40. Sooner or later, even the very loyal otaku dollar is just not going to keep supporting the industry's greed. I'm not looking forward to that day, since it will mean even less quality anime and more "commercial" output that can sell tie-in goods by the boatload (think Pokemon, Dragonball Z, or anything with the word "harem" in the description).


Food is, as usual, good and an adventure at the same time. The more we're here, the more comfortable we are trying places, which is usually pretty rewarding. This morning, however, since we were up looking for breakfast at the ungodly hour of.... 7:00? we had very few choices, all of them western. Japanese people rarely go out for breakfast, and if they do it is usually grabbing something fast on their way to work, like McDonald's or a doughnut, and so even those places (McDonald's excluded) don't open until at least 7:30 and usually 8 or 8:30. So here we are, having walked to Ueno Station (about 25 minutes from our hotel) to find only one place open that was not McDonald's:

Nothing says Japan like the Hard Rock Cafe

and only in Japan is a hot dog considered a normal breakfast item. We tried the other two meals, which were surprisingly good.

This is seriously a special dish here. What looks like a normal pub burger costs...¥1780? $20 for a burger and fries.

This afternoon, however, we got to eat like the natives! There are all sorts of tiny shops that specialize in one kind of food and are very fast and very good at making that one thing and usually very cheap

The sign reads "Soba ¥260 Udon". That's a cheap lunch. (about $3)

Some places use vending machines to sell meal tickets that you bring to the counter when you order, speeding things up even more for the salaryman in a hurry to eat and get back to the office.

Some choices even have helpful pictures.

The menu is also hanging above the counter. Don't let it fool you. Those are all just different ways of serving soba and udon noodles. You bring your ticket up to them and tell them which noodle you want.

Sumi's "Curry Set": Beef Curry and soba noodles in chicken broth

My all-time favorite: Curry Udon! Complete with "traditional" wooden spoon.

The appropriate way to eat noodles in Japan involves a LOT of slurping.

There is a saying in Japan that the more noise you make when slurping your udon, the better it tastes. If that is true, then the guys eating here must have been absolutely LOVING their noodles. The sounds inside this place were almost comical. No music, no TV, no talking except the employees yelling "Irrashaimase!" to the arriving customers and lots and lots of loud slurping from a bunch of grown men in business suits. Excellent, satisfying food for less than a McDonald's value meal.


No firm plans yet for tomorrow, other than to try and sleep past 4:30am (yay jetlag).


I'll leave you with some AKB48 "Classics":
Everyday Kachuusha (exploitation by swimsuit)
Seishun Girls (exploitation by school uniform)
Baby! Baby! Baby! (you can't make stuff this good up)

Back In Japan Again

Well, it was a long travel day, but we made it safe and sound at the Blue Wave Asakusa Hotel. For the most part, international flights are like domestic flights, just longer and with better food. Flying JAL (Japan Air Lines), we also had better movies (I recommend "Hayabusa", an amusing movie about Japan's unmanned probe sent to a meteor to gather samples and return, making it the first time since the moon missions anything has been brought back from another "planet") and friendlier flight attendants.

For our second meal, they had some shrimp pasta dish for us lower class citizens in economy class. I told the flight attendant that I couldn't eat seafood, and she came back with a choice of beef curry or chicken and noodles. I chose beef curry. She came back a few minutes later, looking uncomfortable. You see, the meals she was offering me were the first class sections meals. Curry has a delicious, but rather strong odor. If she made the curry for me, everyone in the cabin would be smelling curry, and would probably be asking them why THEY couldn't have curry instead of their rather unappetizing-looking shrimp pasta salad. So she was explaining this to me and apologizing, and in her anxiety was doing it all in Japanese, which I found rather amusing, both because we always tend to revert to our native language when trying to convey strong emotions like regret (you really don't want to say it wrong and not sound as sorry as you really are) and because I really didn't care, as long as it wasn't seafood. An American flight attendant, if they even looked to see if they had an alternate meal, certainly wouldn't have gone through as much trouble as she did for me, nor would they have been as concerned about my happiness in the same way. Yup, we're on our way to Japan, all right!

Anyway, the flights were blissfully free of small children, obese people and delays. The best air travel experience I've had in over a year. We arrived at Narita at about 5, were through immigration, baggage claim and money changing in under 45 minutes, and in our hotel room by 7, including a 50 minute train ride into the city. Our hotel room is about the size of our bedroom closet, but is clean, comfortable, has a high tech TV as well as toilet and is on the top floor of the hotel, providing us a great view of the other tall building right next to us. All in all, an auspicious start to our vacation. No pictures today (sorry), since the inside of airports, airplanes and trains are pretty non-photogenic and uninteresting at best. Tomorrow, we brave the mean streets of Akihabara, guarded by Gundam figurines and Maid Cafes, in search of the elusive PlayStation Vita!