Asakusa Nights

Still overdue for pictures, but that will have to wait. At least now I can start talking about the only city anyone in America knows about in Japan: Tokyo.

*For this post and some future ones I'll be using anonymous abbreviations for some people's names. This is to protect them from some of the hilarious things they've said while drinking.

Getting out of Sapporo sucks. If you know me, you know I'm great at almost-missing flights. I'm great at almost-missing everything, so it's a good thing my head is 100% attached. I actually did follow instructions properly, leaving before 4 (more than 2 hours before my flight), getting on the closest stop down the line to the airport train, etc etc, and then, bam, I took a local train instead of the airport express without checking the signs. Oops. I just barely managed to make two proper transfers that took me to the right place. One messup at all, and I would have been going in the wrong direction. And I'm not joking when I say that boarding started like 2 minutes after I cleared security check. And Japanese planes don't board 30 minutes in advance. They board more like 5 minutes in advance, and get the hell out. So yes, near miss entirely. Scary shit.

When I arrived, K was there to pick me up. K is everything but Japanese. First of all, she picked me up in a car. No one drives in Japan, much less in Tokyo of all places. She's actually been to New Orleans several times, which has forever corrupted her from acting like a normal Japanese person. As a result, she teases me, chastises me openly for not following Japanese etiquette to a t, and talks extremely loudly in public. Fortunately she knows good Japanese hospitality. On the first night she took me out to an izekaya (traditional-style sit-in restaurant and pub) in Saitama. She mocked me for ordering fried chicken regardless of what else I ate, and then she mocked me for ordering chick drinks. Whenever I do something American, she kills herself laughing. But if I do something very Japanese, she also laughs her ass off. She's basically insane, and she thinks I'm quite the character. Then again, I am quite the character, so I guess it's fortunate for her that she met the one New Orleanian passing through her city. I don't know how to put up with such a person, but she is hilarious and extremely cute. Of course the obvious stupid question people ask me here is "why didn't you get on it" etc etc. The answer is ridiculous.

She's in love with a jazz musician in New Orleans who's more than twice her age and married with children. I could not make this shit up if I tried.

You see, K is also quite the drinker, as in she can meet me almost drink for drink, and I'm no lightweight. She very much enjoys the Japanese art of nommunication (Jp: nomi, drinking + communication), a style of being very honest excused by the magic of alcohol. At this same time I also found out that she's friends with a bro of mine back at home. Small world indeed, what of these 7000 miles separating us. After we drank, I realized that we had driven there, and then she introduced me to the magic of call-in driving escorts. I was enchanted.

The hostel I stayed at the first night is extremely cheap, like 15 a night cheap, but it's horribly off the beaten path in Saitama, maybe 30+ minutes away from most wards by train. And aside from the narrow walkways everywhere, and having to leave the place and go to another part of the complex through another door, the actual bedrooms are set up like capsule hotels, complete with coffins. I'm a traveler, so this doesn't bother me all that much, but comfort is at a premium here.

My second day I woke up late, shrugged off the hangover, and went exploring in Ginza. Before I had only really seen parts of Shibuya, Shinjuku, Harajuku, and Akihabara, all very common and well known parts of the prefecture. This time I wanted to see a little bit different stuff. Ginza is cool, and it's covered in towering buildings, but all of the shops are impossibly expensive. It's actually an established upscale fashion district, location of the first Japanese McDonald's. There's a real logic to this, by the way.

I met up with K in Asakusa, where she lives. She treated me to shabu-shabu, which she is fortunate enough to actually eat pretty frequently. It's my favorite Japanese food, a kind of thin cut meat you quickly dip into boiling water and then mix with sauces. We paid for a 90 minute buffet of the stuff, and threw in a drinking buffet for good measure. My ordering of a mango sour cracked her up. So sue me, I love mango. She also watched in wander as I put down half a kilo of meat easy. I had to explain to her my athletic background. It actually stuck, but then she called me "kawaii." She calls me that a lot. Most people know it to just mean "cute" but it also has kind of a sarcastic meaning of "precious" mixed with "funny," making it kinda like the description of most children. She told me I'd have to make it up to her, all the shit she's treated me to, by treating her when she got to New Orleans. No problem there, I said, I can afford to cook and all. It's not like I'd have to pay a hundred bucks a night to take care of her.

Afterward she dragged me down a few blocks to some undefined place. She told me to trust her. She could have been bringing me to the gates of hell, but even hell is a new place to discover, so I went with my gut. She brought me to her grandma's restaurant, where I was immediately made to feel at home. You see, her grandma has been to New Orleans 20 or so times, has invited a collective of them to come to Tokyo every year, and is a self-proclaimed "honorary citizen" of the Crescent. Oh, and she told me to call her Big Mama.

When K told her I was staying in Saitama, she said that was no good and insisted that I be moved to a hostel in Asakusa. She gave me about 150 bucks to do so. I literally could not refuse, between my sense of etiquette and my poor Japanese. When Big Mama offers you a favor, you don't say no. She also pulled out pear and plum flavored sake and told me I could have as much as I wanted any time I visited. She also gave me a bunch of soup packets to eat when I move into Kansai Gaidai. There is some power to being a New Orleanian, some bond that sticks to you no matter where in the world you travel and brings like-minded souls close. I was speechless. Of course, I told her I'd take great care of her granddaughter the next time she came to visit.

The next place we went was a neighborhood dive bar. It was exceptionally tacky and thus reminded me completely of Snake and Jake's. The bartender was dressed as a musician. K ordered a hot wine (Fab, that one's for you) and then we dove into bottles of sake, the Japanese peace pipe. The guys at the table next to us wanted to meet us, so they introduced themselves and treated us to a couple bottles as well. I don't remember their names completely, but I believe one was named Yousuke and the other Toshi. Toshi was actually only 19 years old, despite looking several years older than myself. That didn't stop him from drinking freely, because that's how we roll out East. Neither of the two could speak beyond broken words of English, but I did my damndest to try to communicate with them, cell phone dictionary in hand. K's friend also stopped by, and she was with a traveler from France. I shot the shit with him, and of course he had been to New Orleans and all. He gave me India as a travel recommendation. I'll take it to note.

Afterwards we checked me into the hostel, and K asked if I wanted to keep drinking. That was a terrible question for her to ask, as far as her wallet is concerned. We went to a dart bar where we broke into two teams and K and Toshi proceeded to humiliate us. We also played drunken Jenga. I'm a master of physics. So is K apparently. They also introduced me to some kind of stacking puzzle where you place these little naked dolls with an eyeball for heads in suggestive positions. I demanded an explanation, but Japanese don't play that. Toshi and Yousuke discovered that the rare moment I can form a grammatically perfect sentence, it's pretty hilarious. They got on their bicycles after we had left and accompanied me home, and K went ahead and jumped on the back of one of them. I shouted after them "oi, kanojo wa omoi, jan" (hey, isn't she heavy?). Toshi laughed his ass off and said "goodu taimingu!"

To say the least, Asakusa is becoming one of my new favorite cities. Most people just know it as that one ward of Tokyo with nothing but shrines everywhere. In actuality, it's got a bit of the spice of home. I'll be glad to stay here.