Sons of Loki

On Christmas Day I unwrapped my presents – ah, precious books! in English! – and caught a train to Shibuya for a bit of a wander and a hunt for lunch. A good roast was out of the question, so I decided to settle for a big old katsu kare – only to find that there were no kare joints to be found. Eventually I settled for katsu rice with a big old bowl of noodles, which is hardly traditional Christmas fare, but filled me up good.
I kept seeing other gaijin in the streets: wondering why they were alone in Tokyo today, wondering if they were thinking the same about me. (Ah, the loneliness of the long distance Tokyo ex-pat.)
Luckily I curtailed this aimless wo/andering with a trip to Akiba to meet up with my dear buddy James, up from Kobe Konan for a few days. We hit one of the multi-floor games stores, where I debated for a looong time whether to buy a “junk” second-hand PS2 for ¥2000 (£13) before ultimately deciding I should save my money, because it probably wouldn’t work.
Having shown James what the inside of a games store looks like, he asked me if there wasn’t anywhere more interesting to go in Tokyo, and so I finally settled on Odaiba for want of anything else.
Oh, crazy Odaiba. We went to Venus Fort, which is a recently-refurbished shopping mall and destination for a squillion couples who were enjoying a Christmas Day date (the traditional yuletide activity in Japan). Oh, and me and James. We’re totally not a couple. Ahahaha.


After a wander about and gunning down a few zombies on the Silent Hill arcade shooter (is it zombies in Silent Hill? I confess to never playing the games) we headed along to the excitingly named TOKYO TELEPORT, which in my mind very strongly reminds me of some Halo level. It looks like arcs of blue plasma should be pulsing from the top, don’t you think?


We got the train from TOKYO TELEPORT! back to the Shinj, where we met Satomi and went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Building’s free observatory deck (the perfect place for skint people like myself to bring visitors!). And so Christmas Day wound up in an izakaya with Jay and Si (my Leeds coursemates, also at Kobe), a plate of chips and some dirt-cheap gintoniks. Heavenly.

Yesterday James, Miles and I made a long overdue visit to an Akihabara maid cafe.
Okay. Maid cafes. You go there, pay a 500 yen cover charge. The staff are all cute young girls dressed as maids. They speak to you in squeaky voices and very polite Japanese and call you “master” and bring you drinks and stir your coffee (“stir your coffee” – I believe this calls for a Pythonesque nudge nudge) and make pretty ketchup designs on your omerice. You can have your picture taken with them.
All this will ring alarm bells for most people – Westerners at least – and I have to say I was really put off by what I thought was the sleaziness of these places. Until, that is, I read up a little more on them, and finally felt slightly more comfortable about visiting one. You know what? They aren’t really that sleazy at all.
Yes, a lot of the customers are otaku, but there were more than a few girls there. One guy had brought his girlfriend (or had she brought him?). The overriding aesthetic (at least at the place we went to) is cute, not sexy. Everything is so sugary sweet that the impressions of some kind of weird hostess bar couldn’t be further from your mind. It is moe, more a pure appreciation of cute kawaii femininity than a leery, pervy lust. At least that’s how I saw it.
I got a cake with a bunny rabbit drawn in chocolate and strawberry sauce. When we ordered pizza, we had to do this ancient Japanese purification ritual (possibly) of making the heart shape with our hands and waving them about while chanting in Japanese. Someone ordered a cocktail, and the poor guy got dragged up on stage while the maid sang a mixing song, waving a cocktail shaker around.
(I had this awesome idea for this Densha Otoko-style romance called Daidokoro Onna – Kitchen Girl about a plain-looking girl who works in the kitchen of a maid cafe and falls in love in one of the patrons, an unusually hunky otaku, but because she’s too ugly to work as a maid she never gets to talk to him until Episode 6 when she has a makeover and in ancient anime tradition merely has to take off her glasses and immediately becomes gorgeous and the rest of the series is about them falling in love and then there’d be a second series but it would be crap.)

With our wallets considerably lightened we met back up with the guys and girls and headed back to Odaiba along the lovely Rainbow Bridge.


We ate at a weird restaurant in Venus Fort, apparently themed in a vague 1930s Hong Kong style with crumbling brickwork and flyers pasted over the walls outside and a kind of Orientalist red-and-black interior. Food was alright, though my portion of chicken and cashew nuts was tiny. Later, ice cream, and then Miles and I said our farewells and got the train back to Shinjuku. I can’t wait to head to Kobe to see those guys in their native environment.