If I Opened a Restaurant

With it's 30+ million people, the Keihin area (Tokyo and its neighbors) is booming with businesses that have to somehow distinguish themselves from others. You see this most often when it comes to the food industry. There's no limit to the originality and innovation of the restaurants you'll find in Tokyo. Just take a look at the Themed Restaurant tag on my blog and you'll get a good idea of what I mean. And I haven't yet even scratched the surface of the matter at hand.
 The thing is, what keeps these businesses running is not only the owners striving to differentiate themselves, but also the great number of people aching for something new. And with a metropolitan area with this many people, one needs only to pick people's curiosity to have a steady flow of customers.
 Which gets me thinking that, if I had the capital to start up, I could open something really fucked up that would have curious customers rallying to my shop's door. Here's a few ideas!

1. Merry Go Around
A restaurant where all tables are round. Customers order as usual, and, when the food arrives, their chairs start revolving around the table, moving along a track! What a great way to share food when eating with a group of several people, all the while making sure one asshole doesn't hog all the good stuff.

2. Firing Squad
Customers grab an apron and place their order then line up against the wall with their mouths open. The food is then thrown at their face by something similar to a baseball pitching machine.

3. Hunger Games
Everyone pays the same price to enter the restaurant, and receives chopsticks, a fork or a spoon (chosen at the entrance.) They then stand in a room with a timer above head, and, when the timer hits zero, a door opens and they must all rush into the next room (a 50 meter dash or so) which has a great amount of food at its center. First arrived gets first pick. Everyone has 2 minutes to eat as much as they can before they are urged by the staff to go back into the previous room and wait for the timer again.

4. Gravity
By most means a regular restaurant, except customers are strapped to a chair suspended from the ceiling. Pregnant women aren't allowed entry.

5. Limelight
Ten juries (paying customers, maybe 2000¥ each) are placed at a table with lots of food, but are not allowed to touch it at all (or else they get kicked out and replaced by another paying customer.) Then, a "performer" (another paying customer, 2000¥) must dance or sing to impress the juries (less than 2 minutes per performance please.) Depending on how impressed they were, the juries give you food accordingly. Every 3 performances the juries are swapped out by the next batch of paying customers. Performers get to take their food to the next room.

THESE IDEAS ARE MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY NOW. DON'T STEAL MY IDEAS.

A Warrior Returning Alive

Myself, Dario and Lo in Golden Gai.

I was meeting up with Aala when a different yet familiar face appeared within sight. Imagine my surprise to see my good friend Lo back in Japan, no warning given.
 "The hell you doing in Japan?" I asked.
 "Not much."
 "How long you here for?"
 "A while."
 Well, no questions asked. Lo's back for quite a bit, albeit his reasons are mysterious. No complaints here. Ghost towns and road trips await!

End of the Second Summer

Summer has officially ended, and I'm somewhat proud to have survived the unbearable wet heat of the wrathful season. Between Mount Fuji and Oshima island, I'm pretty happy with what I've undertaken, but here are some of the little things that have been going on here and there and in-between.

Decorations made by the local kids.

There've been quite a few little festivals at the local park. The kids do this every year.

Sophie was briefly in Japan! Only got to meet up with her once, but she and Ken and I had dinner. Consisting of cake.

There was a Summer camp at my workplace! There are loads of cute pictures on the facebook page.

 Check out my aerial! Millo and I have been practicing tricking at least once a week.

We still have lots of fun bringing new people to Kagaya, but I no longer teach his children.

In one more month it'll already have been two years since I first landed in this country. And yet there's still so much to see and do. I'm looking forward to another haikyo in two weeks' time!

Flying Sushi

Japan's well known for having turning sushi tables (Kaitenzushi) but the modern version is a whole step above. The Uobei sushi chain features "flying sushi" or "sushi trains" where the food is delivered to you on a small platform that speeds along a rail track. You order from a touch panel over head and it comes to you three to five minutes later.
 It's actually a really affordable place to pig out on sushi. Uobei's probably the place I've eaten sushi the most often.
Check out the video!

You Don't Know Ice Cream

The Tokyo Summer is waning and there's a typhoon expected to hit tomorrow. I hate rain. Planning anything outdoors is kind of a game of Russian roulette, and so it's time to look indoors a bit.
I had heard from Aala a while back that Nanja Town, an indoor theme park owned by Namco, the video game producing company, was the place to go for exotic ice cream flavors, and it's been on my to-do list for quite a bit, so I went to check it out for myself. I'm sure I would've loved Namja Town if I were a kid and I spoke Japanese, but unfortunately for my sorry ass, neither of those conditions were fulfilled at the time of my visit. But I can still eat ice cream.
 And boy do they have ice cream. What do you know about ice cream?
Do you like ice cream? What about Indian curry? Oh well fancy that, they have Indian curry flavored ice cream. It might just be your day.
 Let's see. What else do they have...
 Garlic. Sea urchin. Rose. Basil. Wasabi. Shark-fin ramen. Eel. Shrimp. Cow tongue. Shellfish. 12 year old single malt. Cassis orange. Crab. Avocado milk. Cheese. Mascarpone. Golden tomato. Coal. Roasted eggplant. 
 Those were some of the flavors of the day. I tried Indian curry and it actually wasn't terrible, but I could've sworn it was actually...spicy, and yet not hot. Bizarre.
But wait, to top the list, and unfortunately unavailable the day of my visit is...viper. As in the venomous pit snake. Who the fuck ever ate a viper? At least the rest of those things I have a vague idea of the taste. Viper must be pretty tasty if it merits its own ice cream flavor. Shit.

Tokyo 2020

My Facebook feed caught fire the other day when it was announced that Tokyo won the bid for the 2020 Olympic Games host city. Damn, I thought, I'll be 30 by then. But apparently people here are pretty serious about it and have been cheering up and down across the country.

 I've been having some fun with it at work, making babies do gymnastics and telling them it's to prepare for the Olympics.
 "Wow, nice forward roll! I'll see you in the 2020 Olympics!"
To which the mother says; "He'll only be 8 years old..."
And to which I reply, "I have such high hopes for your son."

Has anyone seen the Presentation Showreel yet? It's enough to even get me hyped for it. And I don't even follow the Olympics that much at all. Loving the thump-thump heartbeat thing. Congrats, Tokyo. Here it is for those who haven't.

The Weather's Getting Crazy

Littered streets of Akiba after a hurricane in '12.

Apparently news made it out to the rest of the world that there was a tornado in Tokyo. I actually hadn't heard about it until after I got a concerned mail from my mother. The tornado apparently hit Koshigaya, injuring 60-some people. It's a little out of the city borders actually, but that's where Kazue used to live! Shit, weather be getting crazy down here.
 Though the month of June kind of gets rep for being the rainy season, this is my second September in Tokyo and it's kind of proving to be the worst of the two evils here. Freak thunderstorms have been hitting the area, shutting down trains and the like. From what I hear, it's actually not so uncommon that the trains themselves get hit by bolts of lightning, though passengers never really feel or see the effects other than the agonizing slowness of their commute.
20$ says there'll be one or two more typhoons this month.

Izu Oshima

After a 6 hour overnight boat ride aboard the SS Salvia, I landed upon the largest of the Izu islands, Oshima. Being that the ferry landed at 5 in the morning, and the seats didn't allow for the best comfort, I found myself a little dazed, stumbling out of the ship with a hundred or so other passengers in a zombie-like fashion. 

There were rumors a typhoon was going to hit this side of the country, and looking at the horizon it appeared I'd be in for a bit of that. I took a bus to the main settlement in the northern part of the island, dumped my bag at the hotel, and, unable to actually check-in into my room, strolled into a town which had to wake up itself. Palm trees line the streets of an aging town with few of the conveniences of the city, and I was actually impressed there were no McDonalds' in sight.

 And man, I thought, Oshima is pretty damn awesome already.

The island itself has little in terms of local population. Most of the people walking around are tourists from Tokyo or Kanagawa. I guess the large cat population (and the incredibly large spider population) kind of make up for that. It's a hell of an escape, and despite there being quite a few tourists, I was a little amazed that there weren't more. Oshima also happens to be the closest island to the main landmass. Fun fact: all the Izu islands have a volcano in their middle! That's how they came to exist.
As it turned out, that typhoon didn't come after all. I was treated to a great big sun that was overly enthusiastic about scorching the shit out of my skin (which it did.) There's actually quite a bit to be seen in Oshima, and had I had the time, I'd have been glad to spend an extra day on the island.

That was fun, if quite dangerous!

 It's easy to find a whole damn beach to yourself and just jump into the ocean without having to share a single grain of sand - a pleasure you won't find in Tokyo. The one I stumbled upon actually had enormous waves the likes of which I hadn't seen, which kind of goes on par with the island's popularity with surfers.

Quite happy no one came behind me and ran over my tripod.

 Actually, the waves were so viciously strong that they literally sucked me in and flipped me over, and I kind of gave up on going deeper than my waist for fear I'd get smashed on a rock. Adventure ahoy!

 If I have to recommend one thing to anyone interested in traveling to Oshima, it's renting a bicycle. Pay that 20$ and get one for the day. It's definitely worth it even if only for the Sunset Palm Tree Line, which takes you around the northern shoreline and offers a wonderful view over the course of a few kilometers. If it hadn't occurred to you before then that you were on a tropical island in the middle of the ocean, it will once you do. You'll end up in the port town once you're done and you can treat yourself to a slushie in that one shop. You'll know which one. There's only one.

They don't do it like this in the city!

On the note of food, don't expect to find anything other than more or less traditional Japanese meals here. Actually, during lunch and dinner each restaurant I stumbled into was about to close or stop offering meals, but opted to give me the choice of a limited menu instead. Island restaurant tactics? Maybe. I was told for lunch there was only ramen available, and wasn't expecting much, but this awesome seafood feast came up and took me aback.


Had I had the extra day, I would've probably tried to visit the south side of the island, which is apparently quite scenic, as well as the volcano itself, which is rumored to have a really cool crater on top, but there's only so much your own body will let you do after you've been thrown out of a ship at 5 in the morning. As an afterthought, there's lots to see in the other Izu islands as well, and Oshima was just such an amazing opener to a side of Japan I had yet to experience.