Some of the most interesting moments in my life have occurred when I have suddenly found myself on the other side of an otherwise closed and locked door.
Shinjuku. It’s probably what you’re imagining when you imagine “Tokyo”. It’s the floor to ceiling neon, the backstreets lined with izakaya and bars, the literal hundreds of thousands of people flocking and swarming around it, mild-mannered Clark Kent’s by day, and all manner of super hero-villains by night when they’re just too drunk or lost in the moment to care. For some it’s Korean-town. For some it’s the gay district. For some it’s the red light. For some it’s nothing more than the world’s busiest train station which they have to suffer through on their way the hell out of Shinjuku.
Shinjuku was our playground the first time we were in Japan. Our school was one stop away on the Chuo-express. A 3-5 minute ride even on the worst of days. We spent more time wandering the backstreets, chatting with drunk salary-men, Yanki teens, Gyaru, and East African bouncers for sex clubs, than any sane pasty white kids should ever imagine. We were not unique in this. There is something about the faint hints of danger that float around Shinjuku which make it seem exciting. It’s a break from the usual over-safe Japanese sterility. Some nights, it’s just dodgy enough to almost feel like home.
But Shinjuku is full of locked doors. Some of them, like the host clubs, I don’t want to open. Others like the soaplands, I don’t even want to be close enough to realize they are a door. But there are a few locked doors in Shinjuku which are just downright fascinating. Doors you really, really want to take a look behind, if only you knew someone who could get you in. The Golden Gai is one of them.
A relic of old Shinjuku, before modernization put a convenience store on every corner and piled the izakaya one on top of another, seven floors high. Dwarfed by Shinjuku proper on all sides, the Golden Gai is a single cramped block that feels like a feudal Japanese village. The smallest streets you have ever seen wind their way past cramped 2-story buildings inseparable from one another save their different doors and signs. Each of these buildings houses, in all likelihood, 2 different bars: one on the bottom floor, and one on the top floor which is only accessible by climbing a staircase so steep it might as well be a ladder.
There are over 200 bars and izakaya packed into these 6 cramped alleyways.
Almost all of them seem to be run by a single female bartender. It’s somewhere between a host club and a normal bar. There’s no expectation of anything except drinking and talking, but they pour your drinks and are de facto supposed to pretend to be interested in what you’re saying. Because it’s so intimate, the people who work in bars in the Gai are a big part of why regulars keep coming back to the same bars.
Getting into establishments in the Gai can be tricky. While a number of the bars have started to embrace that the Gai is now a stop on tourists’ itineraries, English menus and a slightly friendlier attitude, a large number of the bars can only be frequented if someone else brings you there first and vouches for you. Even if the bar doesn’t require a sponsor all of them have a service charge tacked on at the front of the bill, and none of the drinks are anything close to cheap. For being a rundown alleyway, the Golden Gai attracts a well off group of clientele.
For two fairly poor gaijin wanderers the Golden Gai would usually be a locked door, albeit with a big window on the front. Maybe you’d get to wander in, see the streets, maybe try to order one beer and wonder why the hell it cost you 20 dollars and why the waitress/bar girl is as prickly as an ice-cactus, but you don’t really get to “go in”. You’re still just window shopping without the keys. But thanks to Dan’s old man, and his years working with Japan, we had just gotten an introduction to a guy holding a set.
Meet Yoshi
Dan’s dad used to do a lot of business with Japan. He told some of his old contacts that his kid was going to be in the area, and one of them offered to show him (and his lovable friend) around Tokyo. We don’t know anything about him at first, except that by day he helps oversee the Japanese branch of a fairly major US financial services corporation. This means he falls into the category of “high powered salaryman samurai”, a group which are somewhat terrifyingly infamous for Jekyll and Hyde-ing out come nightfall to deal with the pressure. He sends Dan a message and offers to take us on a “night tour of Tokyo”. Dan and I are immediately both worried and excited by the possibilities. What the hell is a “night tour”?
We met him near Shinjuku station, on the red light side. Dan and I had done our best to not look like homeless people, but we were over 3 weeks into a trip we started with 3 days worth of clothes. Washing these clothes with bar soap in hostel bathrooms, and carrying them around crammed into packs which were not designed to keep garments fresh and wrinkle free did not help things. So there we stood, Dan in his vibrams, I in my bright orange hiking boots, and Yoshi in what I can only remember as professional looking leathery footwear.
We made introductions. His English was quite good, we would later learn he had lived in America for a few years.
Then came the moment of truth. Just what the hell would we be doing on this fine evening?
“Have you guys ever Yoshinoya? It’s Japanese junk food!” We informed him that we had, in the wake of our wildly receding imaginations.
“Oh, well forget that then.” We proceed deeper into the heart of Shinjuku. Not quite in the red light, but close enough that I’m still not sure where this is going. He asks us if we know what the “Golden Gai” is. Apparently it’s one of his old haunts and he wants to take us drinking there. Awesome.
Our first stop is at a dimly lit but refined restaurant on the border of the Gai to get something to eat. Dan and I wonder why he wanted to go to Yoshinoya first if he was planning on something like this anyway, and the only thing I can think of is he wanted something more substantial to soak up the alcohol that would be coming soon.
I had managed to track down a bottle of Kikai shochu liquor somewhere in Tokyo with Eli’s help and gave it to Yoshi as a thank you gift over dinner. Japan is big on gifts and it is very much the thought that counts. Fortunately Yoshi was into shochu (it’s getting very popular all over Japan now) and at least faked appropriate enthusiasm.
Then he took us deeper into the Gai, and it is here that the night crossed the border from more or less normal into the strange and surreal.
Bar Hopping in the Golden Gai
We walk through narrow alleys. Yoshi tells us that in the past, the top floors of many of these bars used to be brothels. You’d do your drinking downstairs then move on to the top floor for…well…
Our first stop is on the far side of the Gai. We climb the vertical stairs into a bar with room for maybe 6 people if they don’t breathe too much, and a loli-goth hostess girl not-really-smiling behind the counter. Yoshi is a regular here but the girl working tonight is new.
We drink beer and shochu, and talk about how she first realized she was into BDSM in middle school playing with blood pressure meters. She seems to be going out of her way to create dissonance. We talk about how she’s on the M side of the equation, while she takes medicine and complains about her cold. We talk about how riding motorcycles turns her on, while she does dishes. We explain the difference between an “outfit” and a “costume”, and at exactly what point in her life her choice in fashion crossed from one to the other, while she fusses with the stereo. We drop somewhere in the neighborhood of 7000 yen, and I am glad I’m not paying. She poses for a photo for us, tells us to come back later if we have time, and then we’re out the door drifting again.
Never have I seen a more forced smile
2nd stop is on the ground floor, North side. Another round. Yoshi seems to be a regular here too. The girl working here has a butterfly tattoo on her arm with “Love” written into the wing pattern, and keeps talking about either her boyfriend or her ex-boyfriend who lives in Okinawa, and how she’s going to move back there some day. We leave after the first beer.
Smiling in general not a strong suit in the Gai, apparently
We wander around a little bit more. Yoshi has us look into a couple of places and tell him what we think of the girls working there. “It’s no fun if the girls aren’t cute” he says.
We move on to a bar which looks like what Japan imagines a Mexican cantina looks like. Tequila makes an appearance, and I do a quick mental catalog of “occasions in which I drank tequila” and “occasions in which I got violently ill” and find a surprisingly robust correlation. But then, this is part of the adventure. We ask the girl here if she speaks any Spanish. Dan’s been finding more Spanish speaking people in Japan than Japanese speaking ones. But she’s disappointingly normal.
“Man, it would be so cool if I could speak Spanish!”
Yes. Yes it would.
Back outside. We have long since missed the last train, and Yoshi is now in on this night for the long haul. The next train is is at 5 am and Yoshi has made it his mission to find a friend of his who owns a lot of the bars in the Gai before the sun rises. We leave the Gai proper and head towards Shinkuku 3-chome, stopping in a bar with walls covered in US dollars, and Okinawan paraphernalia. No sign of the mythical club owner, but Yoshi seems to be a regular here too.
We start singing karaoke along with a younger couple (they seem newly married) and what looks like their mom and grandma. The girl behind the bar also plays along, or at the very least eggs us on and encourages us to sing things in English. Yoshi at one point sings an incredibly impressive version of “What a Wonderful World”. For a moment he actually is Louis Armstrong. Dan sings “La Bamba”, and we realize that it is a surprisingly hard song to sing at karaoke, even if you do speak fluent Spanish.
Well past the time where sane people would have gone to bed, Eli hails a cab all the way from Shibuya to come meet us. It’s his last night in town, and I guess he figured why the hell not. He sings a few with us as we continue to bask in the generosity of our Japanese host, and the bottle of shochu he has the bar keep for him. Yoshi disappears at some point. We assume he went to go meet his friend, but we’ll never really know. Reality and I were on shaky terms at that point.
The bar we’re in starts to wrap up, but the hashigo-zake (alcohol ladder, each bar is a rung) train keeps on moving. The waitress from the current bar joins our party, and takes us to another bar nearby. This one is run by people from Kagoshima, so Eli and I can immediately pretend to have something in common with them. I think there was still karaoke going on at this bar, but by this point the lack of sleep plus the 8+ hours of continuous drinking had liquefied my brain. The major salient points that stood out on this rung of the hashigo-zake ladder were: the cardboard cut out ukulele (not pictured), and the incredibly drunk girl (also not pictured) who was very interested in gaijin. Any gaijin would do really.
The blurriness is an accurate picture of what the world looked like by this point
The sun rises. The trains start back up. The bars close down, and we stumble out into the daylight. One by one our friends, new and old, go their separate ways. Bartender girl goes home. Yoshi hops on a train. Eli heads back to Shibuya, and not long after America.
It’s just Dan and I standing in the daylight. The only people out at this time of day are people like us who have just enjoyed or survived an all-nighter. It feels like we’re in on the same big secret, and are slightly embarrassed about it. There’s a reason bar-hopping happens at night. Everything is too bright in the day.
It’s almost 8 am.
We find an internet cafe to get some sleep.
All told, start to finish, meeting Yoshi to passing out in a smokey net cafe cubical, the evening lasted about 14 hours, 10-12 of which involved drinking. Certainly a record for myself, but I can’t speak for Dan. Earlier in the night, Yoshi had told us his record: he started on a Friday evening, and just kept going all the way till Sunday. Yoshi is a monster. We may never reach such lofty heights of wanton partying, but it was a true pleasure to spend a night on the town with someone who had. It gave us a chance to see a side of Tokyo, of Shinjuku, which a lot of tourists never even get wind of, and meet some fascinating Japanese people along the way.
