Lost in Shinjuku

What a wild four days. Tokyo rocks. On the Thursday afternoon that I arrived, I headed off to checkout Shinjuku as soon as I could. The Akihabara district of Tokyo (also known as Electric Town), is famous for its electronic stores, and I intended to go there, but Tracey Northcott gave me the heads up and suggested that Shinjuku's stores, products, and prices were just as good. And that was handy because when I did visit Akihabara the next day, I was disappointed with the stores, products, and prices.

As well as being a major commercial centre (and home to Skyscraper City - their term, not mine) Shinjuku is one of Tokyo's many retail and entertainment focal points. I likened it to Times Square, but my Tokyo friends tell me that there are a half dozen other places that might easily also claim the title, Shibuya among them. But Shinjuku does have a lot of flashing lights and neon signs, enough to make Jim Soorley have a fit. Coming from Brisbane, it is all terribly exciting. And in retrospect (having visited Shibuya the next day) Shinjuku is my favourite.

Anyhow, on Thursday afternoon I headed to Yodobashi Camera, an electronics chain and easily my favourite store in Japan. The Shinjuku location is their head store, occupying eight floors in a sizable building (even though their "normal" stores are huge by Australian standards). I spent more than hour just gawking at electronics and camera stuff, as every major product allows a hands-on. Overcome with the urge to shop, I ended up buying a few things that I probably didn't need, but seemed essential at the time. Japanese prices vary to Australian prices only according to the product. So some things are cheaper, but a lot is pretty much the same price. Some things are more expensive but they will tend to be stuff we just can't get (or even be able to ship and use) back in Australia like huge NTSC projectors and plasma screens. I picked up a CompactFlash LAN card for my PDA for about AUD $45, and an unbelievably small flash memory dongle (512MB) for an amazing AUD $75. My hotel had free ethernet internet access, so the LAN card was kinda essential... but the dongle is probably just for coolness. And it is cool.

After shopping I headed back to the hotel to change and get ready for dinner. I love being in a new city and staying at a nice hotel. It all seems so glamorous. I met Tracey at 9pm for drinks and dinner, and she offered me a wonderful perspective of the area. We met under the huge Studio Alta television (a local meeting point) and wound our way through the busier avenues and little side streets of Shinjuku. Even at 9pm there were masses of people everywhere. Tracey showed me the little spot, just near some cinemas, where the local drag queens congregate. Really strange. They look like cross-dressing street cleaners performing some street mime, standing in the middle of the street with brooms, almost frozen like a statue. Weird.

We then went to the Golden Gai area which has about 400 bars in the space of around 1 square mile. The area is so small it's grid doesn't even show up on my map. Many of these bars (like many throughout Tokyo) only have a handful of seats, and customers have to be known to the owners in order to enter and be served. The little place we went to was called Krishna, and it was really cool. The food and decor was a fusion between foreign and Japanese sensibilities... a bit like the clientele. We then headed to Shinjuku-2-chome (which I later visited every night while in Tokyo). This is Tokyo's designated gay district, but just like Osaka it's a pretty disappointing setup for such a densely populated metropolis.

Knowing I'd be in town, Paul Jones came down to Tokyo for the weekend. Knowing that our nights would be busy, I planned most of my sightseeing for Friday and Saturday. First thing Friday morning I went to the Tsukiji Fish Markets. As I was hungover I arrived too late to see the tuna being cut up, but it was still pretty cool to wander around the little maze of restaurants which serve the fresh produce.

I then headed to Ginza, which might be world-renowned for high-end shopping but just looked to me like I wandered into Surfer's Paradise. I did visit the Sony Building in Ginza, which has a 5-story of past and present Sony products. Some of the stuff on show was very cool, especially the high-definition video cameras and projectors. One of the cooler displays had an original WalkMan, CD WalkMan, and MP3 player side-by-side. I also got to play with an Aibo robotic dog. They're pretty neat.

Next stop was Tokyo Tower, which shows up in many tourist photos. Even though I'd seen it countless times before I never new until recently that it is a replica of the Eiffel Tower. It's obvious now when I look at it, but I think I was thrown off by the Tokyo Tower being painted red and white. Why these ugly colours? Apparently all transmission towers in Japan must be painted these colours to aid aerial navigation (ie not crash into the towers). Unlike its French sibling there are no grand, wide boulevards leading up to the Tokyo Tower. Instead you catch glimpses of its uppermost tip between the skyscrapers. As you approach it you realise it's actually in the middle of a commercial district, on a hill no less, and completely built-in by the surrounding buildings. There are two observation decks, the highest of which can offer a pretty spectacular view of the city and even allowing glimpses of Mt Fuji on a clear day. But on the day I visited there was a brown haze obscuring even the closest landmarks. The thing I love about observation decks is how they can provide a spatial map to the city. Having already wandered around Shinjuku it was astounding to view it from a distance and see how big just that one district is, and how far it is from all the other centres.

I caught up with Tracey, Paul, and Nobby on Friday night for drinks, which turned into more drinks, at a place that I can only describe as Tokyo's answer to the Cockatoo Club... just not as fancy. It knocked, but it was the fun group that made the night.

Most of Saturday was a write-off, but Paul and Nobby took the train to Shibuya which is regarded to be the young people's area. Not sure what we were doing there. Scarlett Johansson's character visits Shibuya in Lost in Translation. She's seen watching a dinosaur move across a huge television screen affixed to the side of a building. We didn't spend much time here, and it just seemed like a blur of retail stores to me without anything particularly special that caught my eye. Out of the two, Shinjuku definitely has my heart.

I hunted for a gym on Saturday afternoon, eventually finding myself at the Tipness chain's Shinjuku location. Tipness is the largest fitness chain in Japan, and I'd be surprised if many other locations are larger than Shinjuku. Set over two or three floors, there must have been at least three or four hundred people there at the time. There was an aerobics class in full swing that must have had at least two hundred people, all jumping in unison, like a military parade on speed. If you've been reading the blog you'll know about the crazy Japanese rules about wearing gym shoes to the gym, ie I am supposed to have a pair of shoes that only ever see the inside of a gym. Tipness had this huge board near the entrance listing all of its rules. Near the top was "No tattoos". If you have a tattoo, no matter what it is, you cannot attend the gym. How crazy is that?

Nobby arranged a dinner on Saturday night with friends at a restaurant called Christon Cafe. It's in Shinjuku, in what looks from the outside to be a commercial office building. When the elevator doors open on the 8th floor, it's like stepping into the Bat Cave. Who would have thought there would be a two-storey themed restaurant on the top floor of an office building. Unusually for such a large space in Japan, there are no windows to the outside. Instead all the fittings look like they have been ripped from a cathedral in Europe. Rather than trying to explain this, perhaps it's better if you check out their site.

After dinner we headed to Ageha, Tokyo's superclub. If there is any one thing that I did in Tokyo that gave me a feeling of how big the city is, then it was going to this nightclub. It's on the "outskirts" of town, but still accessible by a 30-minute-plus subway ride from Shinjuku. It seemed to take ages to get there. On this particular night the club hosted a Paradise Ball party. I'd love to say it was uniquely fabulous and unlike nothing I had ever seen before, but I'd been lying. It was fabulous, but EXACTLY the same as gay dance party in Sydney at a place like Home. What people wear, do, dance, drink, smoke etc etc, and how it is all done, is all exactly the same as Australia. The only difference being that all night I had the feeling that I'd wandered into the middle of a gang of Asian youth at Mardi Gras.

Sunday was almost a total write-off. I was very tired from the night before, and thankfully the Shinjuku Washington hotel provided me with a cool, dark space to hibernate in for many hours of catch-up sleep. I did manage to head out into Shinjuku and Shibuya to snap some night-time photos which you'll find on Flickr.

First thing Monday morning I had breakfast with Nobby and Paul at their hotel buffet. I felt really sad saying goodbye to them both as I had spent a lot of time with them over the preceeding weeks. They're so cute together.

I thought of Ben as I navigated through Shinjuku station to find the Narita airport express train. I think Ben once got lost in the station, and it is so easy to see why. It's also the busiest station in the world, with more than 3 million people passing through every day. Do you remember the John Eales Visa card where he is trying to push his way on to a Japanese train. It was shot at Shinjuku station.

I had wanted to visit Japan since studying Japanese at school. Still I think if that Paul Jones wasn't living there I may not have made the trip so soon. And I can't help but think that Lost in Translation was also a motivating factor in reigniting my interest. I expected Japan to be different, but it was still so different to what I expected. In many ways it is a country of contrast and contradiction. 130 million people crammed into an area smaller than New South Wales, and while it's unbelievably busy I rarely felt claustrophobic. Everything runs smoothly and on time, but from a distance it looks like total chaos. It's a place where the drinking age is measured by whether someone is tall enough to pop coins into a vending machine (thank you Tracey for that chestnut), and you can go on a 3-day non-stop karaoke binge, yet gambling is still offically outlawed. Foreign men may be in great demand with Japanese women, yet the Japanese men are scared senseless by foreign women. It's an Asian country that is more Western than many Western countries, idolises Western celebrities who sell Japanese products, yet you can still encounter bars in Tokyo with signs on the door saying "No Foreigners". Where's Quentin Bryce when you need her?

On leaving Japan, the overwhelming feeling of my experience was how much I value diversity, be it in people or places, and how I have always taken this for granted in Australia. Foreigners stick out like sore thumbs in Japan. And while the Japanese people are nothing less than first-class in almost every way, I always felt like a guest in their country, and might never be more than that. Whether in Hiroshima or Tokyo or elsewhere, I often felt the hint of nationalism. Or maybe it's just foreigner culture shock. There is something to be said for how foreigners greet one another as they pass. This didn't always happen mind you, but quite often I would pass another foreigner and we would acknowledge each other with a nod of the head or a friendly hello... even though I had never seen them before, and would never see them again.

The Lost in Translation film is wonderful as entertainment, but it is much more than that. Sofia Coppola really nails the mixed sense of wonderment and isolation that accompanies life for a foreigner in Japan.