Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Australia

If I had a thousand yen for every free paper out there, I think I could almost make the taxi fare to Narita airport. These giveaway magazines showcasing restaurants and massage parlours (of the kind ones mother might go to, not the kind you find down Manchester Street or in Shin-Okubo) can be found all over Tokyo in places like railway stations and supermarkets. We got another one in our letterbox yesterday – this one was called Gyutto (Japanese only) and covered our local Azabu / Tamachi area.

While I am not really that interested in getting a sunbed tan, or yet another Asian-fusion-noodle-barbecued-meat-and-sushi restaurant with stylish decour and soft mood lighting, I was interested to read an article about differences in love between guys and gals in Japan. They asked 50 men and women a range of questions about what they looked for in the opposite sex, what sort of language they liked and didn’t like as well as their favourite foods.

They had a listing for the places they dont want to go on a date:

For Japanese Women, the worst places were:

1. Akihabara
2. Shopping
3. Horse Racing
4. Pachinko (Horizontal pinball like gambling)
5. Manga Cafes

with chain pubs, haunted places and forests also listed.

The places Japanese guys most don’t want to go on dates to were:

1. Tokyo Disneyland
2. Shopping
3. Shibuya
4. The womans parents’ house
5. Sanrio Puroland (Kitty Chan theme park)

as well as Matsuya Department Store in Ginza and other places, dessert buffets and mountain climbing.

So there you go – it is perfectly safe to take your date to a strip club. Or even better – train spotting!

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Here are some photos I took whilst out walking one night at the end of last year. The photos were taken around Azabujuban and Roppongi.

Here is a slideshow (pictures change automatically, or you can click to make it hurry up):

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And here is a gallery:

Actually I put these up to test a new gallery plugin for wordpress. Seems to be working fine:)

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Fountains pens are one of those little luxuries which I particularly enjoy. Feeling the smooth flow of ink across the page is a very pleasurable experience, that despite advances in writing technology over the past 100 years, has still not been replaced. I still remember being terribly proud when my teacher at primary school judged my penmanship good enough to graduate from the humble pencil to a fountain pen. I wonder if children in New Zealand still enjoy this? Or do they go straight from pencil to myspace?

Last weekend we were going book shopping in Yaesu, near Tokyo Station when we stumbled upon the Pilot Pen Museum. There are so many little museums scattered around Tokyo that it can be fun to see what finds when out for a wander. The Pilot Pen Station is a Museum and Cafe with a neat display of writing implements – both produced by Pilot as well as outlining the development of writing instruments through out the ages.

There is a cafe on the first floor, non-smoking through-out. It looked pretty standard for a Japanese cafe and we didn’t try what they had on offer. The museum itself is on the second floor – up a staircase which quite ingeniously traces the history of the Pilot Corporation up each of the steps. One of the highlights of the museum was their collection of maki-e fountain pens. I had seen these before in department stores around Tokyo but didn’t know too much about them. They are made using a special lacquer coating process and then have very beautiful individual designs drawn on them. Very Japanese and beautiful to look at.

The museum is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 5pm and Saturdays 11am to 5pm, closed Sunday and National Holidays. Admission is free and they also accept Pilot brand fountain pens and the more exclusive Namiki brand pens for repairs. The museum is easy to get to – one minute from the Ginza Line Kyobashi Station (if coming from Shibuya), 3 minutes from the Takaracho Station on the Asakusa Line (if coming from Ueno / Asakusa) and 8 minutes walk from the Yaesu Exit of JR Tokyo station.

Having visited the Pilot Pen Station museum I had a bit of a poke around on the internet to see what I could find. Pilot themselves don’t have much of an English website. But I found an interesting interview over at the perennial purveyors of pulsating missives – pingmag – with The God of Fountain Pens. As well as that, I found an informative page about the pen museum at Tokyo Fountain Pen Scene (complete with map). The person responsible for that site also sells fountain pens on ebay – here is his page. He seems to have a good selection of pens for sale. (I have no relation with what he is selling btw).

Finally Pentrace East has quite an indepth guide to fountain pen culture in Tokyo. I didn’t realise there was so much to do related to fountain pens in Tokyo – that page has recommendations for a couple of days of pen related sightseeing in the capital alone!

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William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer opens with the famous lines ” The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. ” Inspired by a visit to Tokyo it is easy to see how that line could have come about. Tonight certainly the sky is that colour, and none other.

That is the view from our apartment. Very William Gibson. Very Tokyo. The road is the Capital Expressway, and the flow of traffic here never ceases to amaze me.

It has been a busy week. I spent the last couple of days up the coast teaching at a Junior High School, doing a seminar on New Zealand culture. It went well, and was a productive experience. It must be 6 years since I taught kids of that age, so it brought back some pleasant memories of Akita. One of the highlights for me was making poi’s with the kids, and then taking them all outside to poi on the lawn to the succulent sounds of Rhombus.

Rhombus are playing in Roppongi again on the 18th which promises to be a really rocking evening. Choice!

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Out for a walk earlier this evening and I saw this scene in Azabu-Juban. It is a nice place to walk around in the evening with an interesting mix of people – both Japanese and foreign. The photo was taken with my mobile phone, so it isn’t as sharp as it would be with a normal digital camera, but I like the way it balances with a Japanese element on the left, and with the moon taking center stage. There is a delivery vehicle in the foreground. I have always found taking pictures of the moon to be quite a difficult thing to do, so I feel very lucky with this shot.

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Having moved back to Tokyo after a gap of two years, it is an interesting experience to revisit familiar places and to experience new locations. Tokyo provides an interesting mix of the new and the old and here I have written about Tokyo’s electronic town – Akihabara.

Is Japan a manufacturing based economy or a fully-blown (as in blue bottle) consumer society?

One area of Tokyo where the line between the two is sketched thinly is Akihabara (more commonly known as Akiba). Traditionally in Asian cities sellers of similar products grouped together so if you wanted a particular product you would go to that street. You can still find this in places like Hanoi where if you want a blackboard you jump on your Minsk and cruise off to the blackboard street! Compared to the contemporary way of shopping where everything one could want (and a lot of stuff one doesn’t) is all lumped together in a shopping mall, this system means one can compare between sellers and score some great bargains.

Japan is the same and Akihabara was (and still is) the home of electronic components, wires, switches, IC chips, lights and everything a budding Edison could dream of. Under the station you will find rows of little shops selling all sorts of electric goodies – here a shop specialising in lights, a stall with every kind of capacitor under the sun, there a shop selling microphones, surveillance equipment and tiny cameras perfect for spying on staff or worse.

So traditionally this is where the engineers and researchers who powered Japan’s electronic boom came to buy specialised parts, and if there is one thing that such people are also famous for, it is the twisted otaku side of Japanese sub-culture. Hence, shops and restaurants sprang up to cater to there desires for cute anime products and cos-play (costume play) gear. Which lead to cos-play cafes which have since become a global export from Japan – with such cafes springing up in a number of different countries around the globe.

As Akihabara became famous amongst travelers, there was something of a backlash amongst the local powers-that-be, who tried to clean up the areas’ tarnished image. So while the cos-play cafes still curtsy their way into the hearts of many an otaku, today they exist alongside more upmarket and mainstream establishments catering to more mainstream Japanese consumers.

Today the world’s leading “electric town” would have to be Shenzen, across the border from Hong Kong in Mainland China. This city has eclipsed Akihabara and indeed most large cities in China offer wider selections of electronic goods and components than Akihabara does – an indication perhaps of the wider shift in economic power towards Asia’s economic powerhouse.

This mix of electronics, twisted sexual fantasies and the urbane make Akihabara a fascinating place to visit, revealing as it does an intriguing mix of Japan’s past, present and future.

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I put up some Japan News feeds using the wordpress plugin I mentioned in the last post. Trying to make this site a little more useful for myself! I used to use an RSS feeder within the Firefox webbrowser but they updated it…

I want to add some feeds for events in Tokyo – TokyoArtBeat has some good listings, but I would like to set it up on a daily basis, with things like movies and poetry readings, concerts and bands, dj’s as well.

Anyone know any good RSS feeds they can recommend for what is on in Tokyo?

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Well we have been back in Tokyo for just over a week now – all the chaos of moving and reorganizing is over, and we are settling back into life where left off when we left Tokyo a bit over two years ago.

For those of you who couldn’t read the Tokyoだ post as it was in Japanese – we have moved back to Minato Ward in Tokyo. We found an apartment in Azabu, just down the road from where we were living when we were last in Tokyo. Not a house this time and we did go and see our old landlord but that area is being redeveloped. If I understood correctly because of the rick of earthquakes in Tokyo they want to get rid of all the old houses in this part of town. It is kind of sad to think that Tokyo will go the way of places like Shanghai with little of its’ traditional architekture preserved, but such is the nature of ‘progress’ in Asia.

We are on the top floor and for the first time in quite a few years in Japan we have a view again. Those of you who visited our place in Mita will remember it was a little on the dark side, so having a well lit place is a welcome change. And the view from the roof is superb – it is going to be a great place for barbecues once summer roles around again.

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東京に引っ越しました！やや東京だ。懐かしいこといっぱい思い出します。

これは屋上から見る景色です。都会だね！いばらぎ県から引っ越すと百姓という気持ちになるぺ。昔はそういう気持ちはなかった。

二つ目の写真も俺が住んでいるビルの屋上から撮った写真です。すごいね！Mainlandとはニュージーランドの南島の事です。なんで港区にあるかどうか分からんけどいい事だぜ！

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Tokyo has an image of being one of the most expensive cities in the world, a city where spending ten thousand dollars on an evening entertaining clients, where everyone sports their Louis Vuitton status symbols as if they are truly unique. But of course being a city of 24 million people things are a little more diverse than that reputation would have you believe.

Of course such frivolous nights are possible, even though they are less common than they were during the effervescent bubble of 20 years ago and the yen, being as weak as an American democrat, makes Tokyo an even more affordable place to visit than one might imagine. Even more affordable though, if you are struggling on an unpaid Nova teachers salary, are the free activities and attractions on offer in present day Tokyo.

Tokyo for Free, written by Susan Pompian is a great resource if you are looking for free adventures in Tokyo, or just something interesting to do on the weekend.

With over 300 free attractions there is something for everyone in this book – from watching Japan’s famed sumo wrestlers practicing, through to visiting the home of the Imperial Family in Tokyo, as well as a range of the truly bizarre such as the worlds only Parasitological Museum in Meguro. Whilst being a few years old now – published in 1998 – most of the attractions mentioned are still open and still free.

Tokyo for Free has sections on Parks, Museums, Martial Arts and Sports, Gardens and Festivals, Libraries and Galleries, the Performing Arts and museum-like Antique stores, Super showrooms, free views and temples and shrines. So there is a huge range of things to do for just about anyone.

We have been to a few of the places mentioned in the book, including the wonderful view from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government buildings in Shinjuku, the aforementioned Parasite Museum as well the Fire Museum in Yotsuya and the Bank of Japan’s Currency Museum in Nihonbashi.

One negative for this book is a lack of a geographically based index – which would make finding nearby places much easier. But like the Exploring Kanto book I reviewed earlier, Tokyo for Free is a wonderfully useful resource to liven up ones life in the land of the rising sun.

# Title: Tokyo for Free
# Author: Susan Pompian
# Paperback: 464 pages
# Publisher: Kodansha International (March 23, 1998)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 4770020538
# ISBN-13: 978-4770020536

You can pick up a copy from amazon.com: Tokyo for Free.

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