Sons of Loki

It’s been a busy few weeks.

Before I write about the epic struggle of climbing Mt Fuji, I feel like I need to keep up with the stuff I’ve been doing in the last month. This will mostly be an dispassionate list of events, but the Fuji post will hopefully be a doozy.

So … On Tuesday 29th, back in June, I went to Sweets Paradise – a Japan staple, an all-you-can-eat cake bar. I mean, loads of cake. And ice cream. As if filling up on cake wasn’t bad enough, the following day we – Hime, Katy, Fran, Ella, Miles and I – went to Yokohama to visit Chinatown.

Yokohama is part of the enormous Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama-Kawasaki conurbation, about 30 minutes south of Shinjuku by the Shonan-Shinjuku Line, and it’s quite famous for its Chinatown. It was a pretty surreal experience – it felt like London’s Chinatown, so in the end the overall feeling was something like having left Japan to visit London to visit Soho to visit Chinatown. Except, it was … a more real Chinatown?

We ate Chinese food – of course, there they just call it food – and it was pretty tasty, but … In all honestly, I’m not a huge fan of Chinese Chinese food. The tastes are a little too weird. I much prefer British Chinese food, as MSG- and fat-laden as it is. Still, the spring rolls and chicken soup was delish.

Then we took a walk down to the harbour, which was beautiful.

And then finally, a cup of “Relax Blend” tea in a charming little cafe. One of those tea/coffee houses that Japan does so well.

The day after that, I went on a ROAD TRIP. Rob’s been teaching English to this cool old dude called Abeshima-san, and he took us (Rob, Kanako and me) off to Fuji go-ko (Fuji Five Lakes), a popular tourist area to the north of Fuji, about two hours west of Tokyo. It was, as expected, very pretty, very picturesque.

We ate zaru soba, the dish of cold noodles served on a bamboo tray with a pot of sauce. I’d never eaten it before because it looked a bit … like cold, tasteless noodles, but my word, was it tasty! You pick up the noodles and dip them in the thin sauce, and they go down a treat. Later, we tried grass mochi, which were surprisingly nice.

We went to a few tourist-trappy places, like an expensive art museum (admittedly with some beautiful kimono dyed by a man called Itchiku Kubota) and the museum of – uh – music boxes.

But the coolest bit was the Bat Cave, a small cave in the infamous forest of Aokigahara (reputedly haunted, and sadly a top spot for suicides).

I love caves, but I’ve only been to a handful – the best being the famous Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. I’d really like to get into it properly – there’s something about clambering around in the pristine atmosphere of a rocky hollow somewhere deep underground.

OH SHIT WHAT IS THAT

Finally, we skipped stones down by the smallest of the lakes (the name of which escapes me).

The day after that (told you I was busy!) Rob, Kaz and I went to a little ramen shop called Ramen Jiro in Koganei to try out what I was told was a big, big bowl of ramen. I was pretty hungry, so I thought I’d get 大 (big) size rather than 小 (small), but Kaz warned me that “small” didn’t mean “small” here.

There was a big queue for such a tiny little ramen shop, but then ramen shops are serious business in Japan. After a while, we got seats and I got my bowl of ramen.

It was … Picture a big bowl of ramen. Then add the contents of another two bowls on top, until you have a massive tower of beansprouts, cabbage, and the juiciest, most tender pork you’ve ever tasted, layered on top of noodles and broth and – oh god, it was huge. I ate, and ate, and ate, and after thirty minutes I had a bowl of ramen that was still as big as the biggest portion you’d get anywhere else. So I ate some more. And I finished it – but only just.

After that, we went to the park with some drinks to just chill out. We chatted shit. Some cops stopped us because they thought we two big gaijin were menacing poor Kaz, but then we had a nice chat and everything was alright. (Ahaha, cops are so racist.) Our friend Risako turned out, and we stayed out in the park until dawn, just chatting and drinking. (Try doing that in England without getting stabbed or mugged.)

The day after, I went to Narita to pick up Jade, my old friend from Japanese class in Norwich. It’s her second trip to Japan after a week on an exchange trip to an art university in Asagaya, and she’s hoping to pick up a few contacts here for exhibitions and such. We went for delicious okonomiyaki at this little place near Tobitakyu station (seriously, what is it with Japan and tiny little restaurants that make the best food?). Sunday, we hit up my old hometown, Uguisudani (which hadn’t changed a bit since November) and walked through Ueno and the Ameyoko street market down to Akihabara, the place I will one day die in misery.

Monday we went for all-you-can-eat curry in Shinjuku (Tokyo seems to have as many curry houses as Britain, and the standard is generally pretty high) with Rob and a few friends, then stopped for coffee in Asagaya with Kanako and Risako as the rain battered the windows. Tuesday was my friend Miles’s leaving party – all-you-can-eat pizza (my stomach groans) and then karaoke. Man, I will miss karaoke.

Then Wednesday, Jade and I went with my friend Deky to see the Pokemon Store in Hamamatsucho. It was pretty cool, though largely just a standard merchandise store. No Nurse Joys or omnipresent Chanseys, though they did have the Pokemon Centre music. On. Continuous. Loop.


Then we went to the Miraikan, the MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE! in Odaiba. They had an exhibition of Doraemon and the real-life parallels in modern science. I love that kind of stuff.

One of the coolest exhibits was an actual honest-to-god Invisibility Cloak. It only worked from exactly the right angle (behind the projector that projected an image on to a cloak covered in retro-reflective material) but man, it looked cool.

Then we tackled another marvel of modern science, the Lotteria 10-story Tower Cheese Burger (タワーチーズバーガー). I saw this on a poster and thought it was just a photoshopped joke, but then I saw it on the menu, and knew I would try it one day.

It’s kind of disappointing.

It’s just a big, salty, cheesy burger with ten layers. We split it between us, and it was alright, I guess. Only 990 yen, too.

We saw the amazing razor-sharp edge of enormous ad agency Dentsu’s HQ (a clever optical illusion – the path leading up to it is precisely the angle of the (invisible) wall around the edge) in rainy Minato-ku.

Finally, we went down to Roppongi Hills (like, my fourth time?) to go up to their observation deck. I’ve been up the Tokyo Metropolitan Towers deck so often, it was nice to see a different perspective.


Man, I cannot get over this city.

The day after, we climbed Fuji.