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.

There’s a lot that could be said about my month long trip across Japan, but a lot of it is pretty mundane. Dan and I were wandering around the country for a fair bit of time and I don’t think you really want to hear about every “nap in a smokey coffee shop while the waitresses made concerned eyes at us”, funny as they were sometimes.  I’ve decided to pick five of my favorite parts of the trip and give them each a proper post, starting right now with my adventure attending one of Japan’s top 3 biggest/best festivals, the Osaka Tenjin Matsuri. I may fill in some other posts if I have the motivation. Lately, it has been lacking.

A Little Backstory…

Dan and I set out on our grand adventure as per our original plan of having no plans what so ever, and seeing what happens.  Naturally, there were bound to be some mistakes, and some adjusting to this new way of life.  We ended up jumping through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, and Kobe in about 3 days.

Protip: Don’t do this. You will want to die.

It took us a little while to figure out that when you’re moving that fast if you don’t have hotel reservations waiting for you, you can spend a lot of brain power accidentally stressing.  And so over mediocre ramen (but some pretty delicious meat buns) in Kobe’s semi-famous Chinatown, Dan and I made the executive decision to hole up in Kyoto for a longer stretch of time, and maybe get out to the other parts of Kansai (Osaka, Nara) if we had the time or inclination.

We found a reservation at a lovely little hostel called The Sparkling Dolphins Inn (you cannot make these things up), run by a charming younger Japanese couple.

Most of the other people staying in the hostel were Spaniards, Germans or Scandanavians of some kind, although one of our favorite weird travel buddies was an 18 year old French kid traveling alone around Japan named Sebastien. He came to Japan after winning a scholarship/contest, and had managed in very short order to get all of his assets frozen. He was living off of small money orders from his parents. He had not-so-great English, and no Japanese. He also had a profound love for Coke-a-cola tallboys, and Mr. Donuts brand donuts, and was often heard remarking to that effect.

Sebastien: Wanderer, scholar, lover of “the big can coke-a-cola”

What the Hell is a “Tenjin”

After hanging out in Kyoto for a day or two, I remembered that way way back when I was still on Kikai I had read something about some “huge”, “magnificent”, “best in Japan” type festival called the “Tenjin Matsuri” which always happened in Osaka around the end of July.  Our timing just happened to work out that we could go see it first hand, and decide whether it lived up to the hype.

The Tenjin matsuri is held in honor of a scholar who was deified as the patron of learning and art after his death.  “Tenjin” 天神 are the kanji for “sky” and “god” and are either the name or type of the god he became. Someone can probably explain that better than I can,  but since the purpose of the festival in theory: honor Tenjin, and the purpose of the festival in reality: get smashed with your friends, wear traditional clothes, and watch something move or explode or both, are completely separate it’s mostly academic.  The Tenjin matsuri is famous for a huge parade in the afternoon, followed by an equally huge boat precession down at the river in the evening with accompanying fireworks.

The train networks being what they are, it was no real difficulty to day-trip down into Osaka for the festival, then return to the hostel at night.  Sebastien, our young French friend, was also along for the ride.

Pre-Festival-Nanigans

Our adventures began on the express train between Kyoto and Osaka.  Dan, Sebastien and I were standing on the train, making our little gaijin-circle of protection, and a random girl from New Zealand walked up and asked something train related. I can’t remember what, but for the sake of the story lets assume it was important, and Dan and I looked very roguishly handsome and talented in the course of answering it.

She was then so charmed that she stuck around to talk to us, and the conversation eventually swung around to “we’re going to a festival”. Since we were so very handsome and talented, she asked if she could come along, and of course we let her. It would have been an affront to our handsome, talented selves not to.  It was not however in my handsome and talented best interests to remember her name, soooo…

Japanese festivals, at least the summer ones, almost always have the same basic feel to them.  Every street and open area within a certain radius of whatever is being blown up, or paraded, gets lined with tens to hundreds of stalls run by enthusiastic Japanese hawkers selling Japanese festival food, or sometimes small trinkets or tiny live fish (I’m 95% sure they’re not food). The Osaka Tenjin festival was like this, only the stalls stretched for about a mile in every direction, centered around the river that flows through the north of the city.

The walk along the river was an endless mess of fried noodles, candied apples, takoyaki (octopus donuts, as my kids like to call them), and just about everything on a stick you could ever want, from the ubiquitous frankfurter (In Japanese: Huranku farutaa. Sometimes it gets written on the signs in English like that, and we get to have a good laugh), to whole squid and salt grilled mackerel, from pork-belly to cucumbers. While the number of sticked foods might have given the average American festival a run for its money, I would like to point out that they have yet to come up with cheesecake on a stick, and it also begs mentioning that there was no sign of chocolate covered bacon anywhere on the premise. Minnesota – 2.

Squid on a stick, anyone?

The 4 of us walked around the riverbank, soaking up the pre-festival atmosphere, getting to know our new Kiwi friend and listening to Sebastien recount The Tale of Sebastien’s Money (which he was getting much better at telling), while watching the stalls set up. In Dan’s case he was also trying to see if he could leverage his functional Japanese vocabulary of about 50 words to talk his way onto one of the boats which was going to be in the parade later that night.  He did not succeed, but it was an admirable effort.

I for my part enjoyed chatting with random toothless-to-varying-degrees stall owners, and ambushing them with my Osaka accent.  Most of my major Japanese parent-figures have spoken with some degree of the Osaka accent, and it crept in at some point.  Under normal circumstances I can confuse people a great deal by using it. It would be like a Japanese guy who spoke with traces of a southern drawl, or maybe a Bronx or Bostonian accent would be a better analog.  Just take a moment and picture it.

Apparently though, using this accent while actually in Osaka just completely melts faces.  I was particularly pleased when I responded to one of them and his 9/10 year old kid, with this just priceless confused look on his face, screams out ” HE’S JAPANESE!!!!” and his dad proceeds to slap him on the back of his head and tell him “Don’t be an asshole”.

In Which Dan Is Shameless to Great Effect

After a good bit of wandering and eating things on sticks, we settled down near the river under some trees to wait for the boat parade and the fireworks to begin. It was still pretty early so we managed to get close to the front, with only one large group of picnicking 20 somethings between us and the water. It was a pretty sweet spot.

We sat around chatting as it grew steadily darker, admiring how well prepared (and cute) the group in front of us was.  Tragically, as we were waiting it got dark enough that the food stall near us decided to turn on their portable generator to power their 2 sad, bare little light bulbs.  All generators come with some amount of noise, but this generator was apparently up for generator of the month or something, and was particularly enthusiastic.

At some point I wandered off to go to the bathroom and take photos of strangers (2 separate activities) and by the time I returned Dan had managed to:

1. Approach the group of Japanese kids in front of us, completely cold, and with no real Japanese to speak of, and challenge one of them to rock-paper-scissors.
2. Ride this introduction into being invited to sit with their group, and drink their beer.

After I returned Dan then managed to:

1. Further expand on this invitation to merge our two groups.
2. Ascertain that every girl in the group was either married or had a boyfriend.

Proving once and for all that being utterly shameless in the face of potential embarrassment will get you much much further than fluency.  Knew there was a reason I traveled with that guy.

In Which Boats Are Paraded, and Fireworks Fired

Right around sunset the boats started moving. We’d been seeing them moored along the riverbank for hours now, and during some brief moment when we weren’t looking they snuck down and filled them with people and entertainers.  They started gliding by, beginning a wide circuit which would take them up one bank and down the other over the next two to three hours.  Then all at once they started shooting off the fireworks, and at this point it gets hard to do the moment justice in words.

The water reflected every pinprick of light, from the fireworks over head, to the torches, paper lanterns and giant glowing advertisements for beer to insurance to colleges riding on some of the boats.  The floor to ceiling plate glass windows on the skyscrapers all around us also caught all that light and reflected it back, filling the otherwise darkness with hundreds of thousands of glowing tracers. The crowd behind us had filled in so thickly that there was almost no hope of escape (without the clever use of a gaijin-smash or two), everyone wearing flowery summer yukata, and sporting elaborately styled hair (the men, often more so than the women).

Each of the boats was packed with customers seated at tables and as they’d drift by the MCs on the boats would call out for everyone on shore to wave to them and cheer.  Sometimes they got so close we could reach out and shake their hands, and at least once the four of us got called out by an announcer asking us how we liked Japan, or cheering that we could make it down to enjoy the festival with them.

All the while somewhere in the middle of the river a large traditional looking barge had some sort of very long, elaborate, religious ceremony going on as far as we could tell completely independent of the rest of the festival. I guess that was the “honoring Tenjin” part of the festivities.

The boats and fireworks went on like this, with no noticeable drop in momentum, for no less than 3 hours.

It went on for so long in fact that we started taking it in turns to go watch, a group up at the fence near the water, and a group continuing the serious business of drinking all that beer and having conversations in broken English and Japanese.

At some point during one of my beer rotations later in the evening, two of the guys from the group walked up to me and took positions on either side of me. With very solemn expressions painted on their faces, one of them looked me in the eye and then slowly gestured towards his crotch:

“In English…penis?”

A discussion of synonyms and the nuances of English vocabulary followed. There are now two 20-something Japanese guys running around in Osaka armed with a cold war era nuclear arsenal of English vulgarities, and names for their junk.  Apparently they had asked Dan this same question earlier in the night, but either found his answer unsatisfactory, or wanted a confirmation.

Alas, eventually the festivities had to start wrapping up. The crowds began slowly shuffling off towards the subway entrances, the vendors hocking the last of their food at cut-rate prices (which we took advantage of to get chocolate covered bananas on sticks), and the boats returned to the riverbanks from which they came.

We said goodbye to our Japanese hosts, and the four of us joined the crowd to slowly work our way back to the trains to catch a ride back to Kyoto.