518: Tokyo tips, Japan's social contract, and Para Para dancing
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Ni hao from Taiwan! You know the deal by now - here’s last weeks’ Japan tips.
‘Only in Japan’ highlights from this week for me were undoubtedly: hot tubbing with snow monkeys, going to a para para dance club, the otter cafe, TeamLabs Planets, and a maid cafe experience.
Shinjuku has touristy neon cyberpunkiness, along with the Golden Gai neighborhood of tiny bars (start with Open Door) and the red light district Kabukicho. Pro tip - the touts offering massages are offering more than massages.
Odaiba is an artificial island theme park mall that is worth a visit. Teamlabs is nearby - which puts to shame any other venue using the word ‘immersive’. Go in blind - I had no idea what was behind each next door. But if you can’t make it IRL - it’s all filmed on Youtube, sure. Joypolis was also a highlight there - a huge indoor theme park with video game hybrid rides. We played with capybaras at Animeal, and had fun failing the Ninja Warrior course in the north building.
Akihibara is otaku nerd heaven, with dozens of maid cafes and giant electronics stores. We went with the perky Maidreamin, but there are others themed Victorian, chubby(!), feudal Japan, and even muscle girls. Honestly the experience inside is not as weird as it sounds - think dinner theater.
Harajuku is fashion central, with the Meiji shrine and jam packed Takeshita Street and cool retail Cat Street. Apparently cosplayers don’t hang out in Yoyogi park anymore and instead have moved to Ikebukuro, but you can still see the crazy fashion styles Gwen Stefani sang about in the stores. The Otter Cafe here was our favorite of all the animal cafes - they’re so active!
Shibuya is youth culture incarnate, with the famous Shibuya scramble crosswalks and Vegas style pop music advertisement vans driving by.
Roppongi was foreigner nightlife central in years past, and still worthwhile. We did the incredibly alcoholic even by pub crawl standards Tokyo Bar Crawl here, and my beloved para para event was at Maharaja.
Our daytrip to Jigokudani snow monkey park, where they bask in hot springs, was an excellent use of a winter day and good way to see Japanese mountains.
Kyoto was worth the 3 hour bullet train trip. It’s full of shrines and cherry blossoms. The BB gun range bar ‘shooting bar m4’ was great, as was the micropig cafe.
We did a daytrip from there to Nara to feed the inquisitive bowing deer and scope the largest bronze Buddha in the world.
For more:
The Tokyo Cheapo website was invaluable, as was Reformatt’s guide.
Three very comprehensive guides from friends to go even deeper: one two three.
Technology, Ideologies
I’m gonna stick all my Japan observations here for now, since they reflect technology and ideologies somewhat. Back to normal when I’m online again ofc.
Tokyo makes San Francisco look like a developing country. The cleanliness, density, and sheer efficiency of everything is almost too good to be real.
All powered by the social contract. People queue in subway lines, stay quiet on trains, don’t jaywalk ever, don’t touch the sexy maids at maid cafes, don’t hassle the animals at animal cafes - so much is unlocked by this trust!
It seems the academic term for this is ‘amae’ - ‘a uniquely Japanese need to be in good favor with, and be able to depend on, the people around oneself.’
But there is a dark side to this culture of obedience and repressed urges. Upskirting public photos are so rampant they carry 3 years jail time and Apple Japan iPhones make noises when you take photos no matter what to discourage it. And Japan has a high ride of suicide - apparently that’s what those secondary subway gates exist to prevent.
Free public bathrooms abounded, but trash cans did not! Even street vendors selling food with packaging didn’t have them - the web says due to cleanliness and bomb scares. Meant I travelled with a pocked of trash back home every day.
Vending machines sell everything from drinks to tickets and carnival toys. While omnipresent convenience stores sell everything else.
Every attraction has a mascot, and every mascot has stickers and keychains to buy. Displaying ‘moe’ - attraction to a cute object, which is obviously a capitalists dream. Even my hometown subway BART has mascots now.
I was struck by how little folks spoke English, and yet how friendly they’d still be. We had multiple stilted conversations with strangers who just wanted to talk to us, despite having almost no English.
The little songs the trains sing when they enter each station are different, apparently to wake up sleeping train riders with the sound of their home station!
Memes
I briefly mentioned para para dance and eurobeat last week, but now after having been to an actual parapara club, I cannot recommend it enough. It’s a fast DDR style EDM genre where you dance using synchronized arm movements, which had its day in the 2000s and has faded into obscurity ever since.
Check out those glory days, though!
I feel it redefines the nightlife experience, since you can follow along everyone in the club doing the same moves, mistakes just look like normal flailing, and your endurance is unmatched given you’re not using your feet.
Reformatt filmed himself going to the biggest parapara event of the year which gives you a sense of the wholesome vibe. I used this site to find local para para events.
Meanwhile, Youtuber Dogen makes videos poking fun at a foreigners life in Japan on his channel, which appeared to get to the heart of dynamics visitor me only brushed against.