Day 2 (Part II) - Tokyo

Day 2 (Part II) - Tokyo

Shinjuku

After visiting Electrictown we got cleaned up and headed out for the night to an another neighborhood/ward in Tokyo called Shinjuku. Before headingout to dinner we met up with Chris Jones at the Shinjuku station, which is the busiest subway station in the world. I can believe that assertion, as we walked around aimlessly in the station for about 45 minutes before we found the correct exit (we were too stupid to realize that we had to go directly towards and through the West exit to get to the East exit, which apparently makes sense to people in Tokyo).

Shinjuku is a major commercial and administrative center of Tokyo. It is home to the largest non-native Japanese population in all of Japan. It also has a very busy nightlife.

Izikaya/Saya's Birthday Part I

We met Chris Brennan and a group of girls out for dinner for one of the girls' birthday party. The girl whose birthday we were celebrating is named Saya and her friend's name is Minami. I'm not sure if they were friends with Chris Jones, Chris's fiancee (Miwa), Chris Brennan, or all three.

I also didn't catch the name of the restaurant, but it was an Izikaya. Izikaya's traditionally were places that Japanese businessmen would go after work to have a few drinks and a few small dishes of food before going home for dinner. It is widely known that the landscape of the Japanese business world historically has been noticeably different than that of the United States. From a young age Japanese students would work incredibly hard throughout their childhood and teenage years to get into a good college/graduate school, oftentimes attending school all day, coming home and studying for a few hours, and then attending another school at night, all to get ahead or simply to stay on track. The ultimate hope was to get into a good school to be hired into a reputable company after graduation. This used to be incredibly important because once a person was hired into these companies they were typically employed for life with that same company. This obviously is quite different than the American job market where people change jobs frequently.

Many of these Japanese businessmen would be paid a set salary and thus the name "Salaryman" came into existence to refer to these white collared Japanese businessmen. It is a term that you hear rather frequently in Japan. Salarymen are known to work long hours, but they also are known to party pretty hard after work as well, much as young professionals do in New York, Chicago, and other major US cities.

One thing that I found interesting about Salarymen and their social life is that it is tradition that when a group of Salarymen are out on the town a younger salaryman should not go home before his superior, so oftentimes they end up staying out later and drinking more than they would like. If you're lucky you may see one passed out in public after a long night on the town.

Japan also traditionally is/was a male dominated society, with women being thought of as subservient. This landscape is slowly changing and you will see a number of women "salarymen" (or "salarywomen"?) around Tokyo, although the market is still heavily dominated by men.

Back to dinner, as more Japanese women entered the workforce the menus of these Izikaya restaurants expanded and now it is common to find groups of people having drinks and sharing small dishes.

To me it seemed like some sort of Japanese Tapas restaurant. Our Tokyo friends referred to the place we went as the Japanese T.G.I.Friday's.

Either way I thought it was great. You can simply order what you want on a portable menu screen and they continually bring you food and drinks. It was a really fun way to get the evening started.

Private Room Kareoke

After dinner we decided to go out and party like Salarymen. One thing that we all knew was that Japanese people love their kareoke. Perhaps the only thing they love more than kareoke is private room kareoke.

Those who saw the movie Lost in Translation caught a glimpse of Bill Murray participating in this popular Japanese tradition, and those who were in Shinjuku on September 12 were (un?) lucky enough to see Mike Schreiner participate as well.

For those who have never had a chance to partake in private room kareoke, it is simply renting out a room that has a kareoke machine in it, multiple microphones, and some tambourines. Even in Japan they have plenty of English and American songs, so "Don't Stop Believin", "I want it that way", "Like a Prayer" and "Every Rose Has its Thorn" are played ad nauseum, as people try their best to display their singing voices.

The best part about private room kareoke is that you are in a room filled with people you know and not a room full of strangers, which you might be in a typical kareoke setting, so it is a lot easier to cut loose and have fun.

The complete lack of any singing talent whatsoever in most participants is masked by the fact that 99% of the people who participate in private room kareoke are extremely intoxicated, which allows people to (a) actually think that they sound good and (b) actually think other people sound "good" or "not that bad",

when neither of which is actually true.

One thing that I found interesting about this particular private room kareoke was the mixture of music tastes. The girls were all Japanese and sang a lot of songs that we obviously have never heard of, some of the guys were a little older and Australian so they sang some pretty weird stuff as well, and I was surprised to see that my rendition of "Don't Stop Believin" by Journey, which is known to many (read - myself) as the ultimate kareoke song of all time, completely crashed and burned.
Whatever the case may be, we had an absolute blast. I would highly recommend this experience to anyone visiting Japan.

Late Night - Shinjuku

After Kareoke Chris Brennan took us to a few random late night bars.

As you can see from the pictures I think we probably could have done without these places :)

Tokyo is absolutely nuts. I'll save my parting thoughts on Tokyo for a later entry as we returned to Tokyo after visiting a few more places.