ThinkTwisted

I didn’t get to journal yesterday because we didn’t get back to the hotel will late, and I was exhausted from all the exploring we did Saturday and Sunday. Sunday we met in the lobby of the hotel around 915 and took the train from Kawagoe into Ikebukuro in Tokyo. In Ikebukuro, coming out of the train station is quite a site. You are overwhelmed with the busyness of the city. Advertisements, eight lanes of traffic, and thousands of people jump out at you. During the busy times on the weekends, some of the more popular shopping streets are closed to traffic to allow pedestrians to walk about. Even with the streets open to pedestrians, you are still walking shoulder to shoulder with other people 90% of the time. It is without a doubt the busiest place I have ever been.

We walked down the main drag towards Sunshine City, a giant shopping mall that you never have to leave. It reminded me of Vegas, without the seediness. There are department stores, restaurants, hotels, movies, clothing, and electronics; any type of store you could want. The Toyota showroom and museum is also located in Sunshine city. It took us a little over an hour to get to Ikebukuro, so we decided to have an early lunch.

We stopped at Shakey’s, a “western” style pizzeria. They had a lunch buffet, which was good because we tried many different types of pizza. Items of note: Corn pizza; chicken, squid, pepper, pineapple, BBQ pizza (actually my favorite); mayonnaise, bacon, and potato pizza (actually pretty good); and strange salad. Japan seems to have an issue with bacon; it is chronically undercooked. I’m not sure they understand the concept of crispy. They also had fried potato, the equivalent of French fries. They were sliced, seasoned, and fried; I really liked these too, much better than traditional fries.

After Shakey’s, we walked down to Tokyu Hands, an eight story department store at Sunshine City. The first floor was all Christmas stuff, the second all clothing, the third floor is where it got interesting. The third floor was all toys and puzzles, and science learning kits. Japan seems to be obsessed by capsule machines (similar to what we have a grocery store entrances). There is a huge variety, and they are everywhere – in pretty much every single store and even on the streets. Most of them sell key chains or cell phone dangles. One the third floor I found one that sold mushroom key chains with educational sheets about each type of mushroom. Of course, I had to buy one. They also had mushroom growing kits!

They had a floor dedicated to stationary, which is another obsession of Japan. It is a country of illustrators, and you need a very fine point to write small Japanese characters. There are pens and pencils available in all thickness you could want. The typical 0.7 mm and 0.5 mm used to in the US, 0.3 mm, 0.2, 0.18 mm, and probably smaller. There are erasable pens and highlighters. Mechanical pencils that rotate the lead as you write so you never have a dull/flat tip. All sorts of fancy and smooth pens, traditional ink pens, calligraphy pens, paint pens, anything you could want for writing, drawing, or illustration. The floor also had many stamps, paper selections, and other “office” type supplies. They had paperclips in a dozen different animal shapes. My personal favorite is the staple-less stapler. It punches and flap and hole in the sheets of paper and tucks the flap through the hole to secure the pages. I bought one rated for 4 pages.

Next floor up was a drug store, medicines, soaps, personal care, etc. Another strange thing in Japan are ear picks. They are long pieces of bamboo or metal with a slight curve at the end, used for cleaning the wax out of your ears. The other end typically has a fluffy puff at the end, I guess to use like a Q-tip? There were dozens for sale, ranging from 158 yen to 2000 yen. They also had fiber optic cameras you can use to look inside your ears.

The next floor seemed to be a hobby/hardware floor. Huge selection of bar stocks, pipe stock, channel stock, screws, nuts, bolts, electronic component, etc. It was fun to explore this floor, US geeks would love to have in America. Next floor up was outdoor gear: mountain bikes, climbing supplies, camping equipment. Next floor up was travel supplies, mostly luggage of all shapes, sizes, and colors.

The stop floor was for pets. Mostly cats. Lots of cats. They had a room on the eighth floor you could pay admission to enter. It contained 11 cats you can play with; the admission price you paid determined how many cats would be out to play with you at a time. They had a small selection of dog items, a small selection of rodents, and small selection of fish. Most of the floor was cat supplies and toys.

After spending a few hours in Tokyu Hands, I got separated by from our group. We had planned to meet at the aquarium at 1 if we got separated. I ventured into the bowels of Sunshine City to find the Aquarium on the 9th floor. Getting to the aquarium was an adventure, there is no direct route and no signs in English to guide you. You had to go to the basement and ride an elevator up to the 9th floor. The basement was a maze of restaurants and high end clothing stores. I stopped at the elevator I thought I needed to get to the aquarium, and there were elevator assistants. I spoke with one in broken English (she was very embarrassed about her English, but she got the point across well), and told me the direction and elevator I needed. By some miracle I managed to find it. This elevator also had assistants to get you on the elevator and to the floor you needed. It was very posh and the elevator was very quick, about 20 seconds to get to the 9th floor with no stops.

At the aquarium I was about five minutes late. I was the first to arrive. It took my companions 30 and 45 minutes respectively to find their way to aquarium, and I thought I had an adventure. The aquarium was 1800 yen (about 22 USD). It was much smaller than I anticipated. It was also depressing. I felt bad for many of the fish, particularly the very large ones that were on display. Their tanks were much too small for their size. Many of the fish seemed in poor health, inactive or with fungus growing on them. We saw one cuddle fish that was missing a huge chunk of his hind end. The one thing that was very cool was the Japanese Spider Crab. It has to be the world’s largest crab. The body was bigger than my head, and leg span had to be about 10 feet.

After the aquarium, we went back to the Ikebukuro station and to the Yamanote line to Akihabara (Electric Town) district of Tokyo. Electric Town is the classic area frequently seen in movies of Japan, the buildings are covered in billboards and flashing lights. Japanese pop music blasts from store fronts. Japanese people seem to be drawn to blaring pop music and flashing lights like the proverbial moth to the flame. Anytime a storefront had these two things, there were crowds in front. Stores without both were less visited.

We saw the Sega store, if I were still a child I would have been overwhelmed to see. There was an “adult amusement park,” which based on some of the items we saw in one of the other “normal” gaming/video stores we decided to avoid. Our first stop was at an video game/anime/video store. It was 8 floors tall, and incredibly crowded. The first two floors were dedicated to video games (PS Vita, PS3, Xbox 360, WiiU, etc). The third floor was dedicated to robot models and games. The fourth floor was dedicated to anime video and figurines. Nearly all of the figurines were of anime girls, many of them were in provocative positions. There is a photo of the mildest of these in the gallery with this post.

The higher in the shop you went, the more adult themed it became. The fifth floor was racy (i.e. erotic) anime. We found it very unusual, but funny. The sixth floor was sexually explicit anime; incredibly weird and bizarre. The seventh floor was all real pornography. There was a porn star there posing for pictures with fans. The eighth floor…well we never found out exactly what it was. There was a closed door at the top of the stairs, the first person in line peeked in and was promptly ushered out. He said he saw a room full of men and a woman on stage. We later learned it was the “event floor,” whatever that means.

The most unusual thing about this is that it was treated completely normal by everyone. On each floor the workers asked if you needed assistance or could help you, no one gave you dirty looks, men (and a few women) were openly browsing and reading descriptions. I can’t imagine a store like this in the US where people wouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed to enter and buy items.

After our strange adventure through anime sex, we went back out to the main drag. We stopped in many electronic stores, some selling very high end machines and parts to build your own machine, some selling second hand equipment, many selling Chinese cables and knock offs. We found one little market area that is an electrical engineer’s dream. Any sort of connector, component, project box, or tube you could possibly want. If only there was such a place in Ohio.

One the way back to the train station, one of my companions got a six pack of octopus balls. They weren’t balls in the testicular sense, but dough balls, similar to a dough nut, with octopi tentacles inside, fried and drizzled with chocolate syrup and fish flakes. We all tried one. They actually were good, except for the chewiness of the octopus.
We then took the Yamanote line back to Ikebukuro. We decided to take a different train back to Kawagoe than the one we rode in on because it was an express with fewer stops. We wanted the Saikyo line, but based on the map it looked like we wanted to the Shonan-Shinjuku line. The signs in the train station were not clear, and some of them were not in English, so they weren’t much help. We checked to train platform and looked at the LED signs for the stops we wanted to find the correct train. We got back to Kawagoe in about 50 minutes on Saikyo line.

Nothing too exciting today, we ended up getting to the cafeteria late for lunch, and the only meal option left was the “western.” It was fried chicken chunks (kind of like nuggets) of dark meat with shredded cabbage salad. Sides were rice (like always), some sort of mushroom with sprouts in a sweet soy sauce (meh), and a paste with potatoes, some kind of green, mixed with mayo and mustard (okay, guess it was suppose to be potato salad?).

I needed to do some laundry (out of clean socks!), so I brought all my dirty laundry with me to work. One of the guys that was here last week said there was a Laundromat just down the road from the plant and pointed out the direction to me. He left last week. I went in the direction he pointed, and found nothing but a dry cleaner. Another guy in our group said there was a Laundromat on the other side of the train station close to a McDonald’s. I found another dry cleaner there. I pulled out my translation app and put in the Laundromat. I asked several people where it was. They all told me the other side of the tracks. I wandered around a bit to make sure I wasn’t missing it anywhere and then headed to the other side of the tracks. I walked around the area for a while, then decided to ask a few people. Different people pointed me in several different directions. One guy walked me about half way then pointed down the street and said to keep going. I kept going, and going, and eventually ended up in a residential area and turned back. All in and all I wanted nearly all the streets surrounding the train station for about a hour. I can say with a high level of confidence there is not Laundromat in that area. Guess I’ll be washing my socks in the sink tonight.