Seasons Dont Fear The Ninja.

August, 18 2007


Today I ventured into Akihabara for the first time. Akihabara is the place I keep mentioning as the anime and electronics district of Japan...and...the world. I went in the morning, so the place wasn't buzzing nearly as much as usual. I wandered from shop to shop, basically just overwhelmed by the amount of STUFF. Shelves and shelves of manga books, tools, electronics, wires and cables, games, dvd's...it was like someone took a 100 comic book shops, 100 radio shacks, 100 best buys, threw them into a pile, placed a bomb in the center and just blew their contents everywhere.

Yet somehow I wasn't able to find a simple ethernet cable.

It was getting hot pretty quick and the cosplay and school girls don't go to Akihabara until nighttime, so I decided to go home and...do something. I don't quite remember what.

Tim (my roommate) got home in the evening and we wandered to Kinshicho to find some food. Along the way, passing by a park I walk by every day, I heard a lot of
'whap!'
'smack!'
"HUYYYY!!!"
"HAAAAAA!"
'thwap!'
'snap!'
Tim noticed me looking around trying to find the noise and pointed at a dojo built on the edge of the park. The darkness outside made it easy to see in, revealing one of the most bad-ass things I've ever seen in my life.
I'm hesitant to blog about this without picture, but it's riling me up again so I might as well just talk about it. So basically it was a room very similar to the one in the Matrix when Morpheus challenges Neo to a dual in the cyber-dojo. The only difference being that this dojo didn't have big wooden columns along the edge of the room.
Inside there were about 15 hooded figures wielding Kendo swords, dawning black-as-night robes. Imagine the grim reaper holding a bamboo sword. Yeah. It was that fucking bad-ass looking. They were all broken into pairs, circling each other calculating when to make the perfect strike. The words they were yelling out a combination of a verbal cue as to where they were intending to attack on the opponents body (to show self control), as well as a a release of built up energy.
Believe me, it was fucking bad-ass.

After sitting on a bench and watching that for a few minutes we made our way towards the busier part of Kinshicho. We picked a random elevator to take to a restaurant, but they had an hour wait. Wandered around a little more, and eventually was approached by an intimidating black man. Haha...the situation has just become kind of funny because you know that you can expect them to speak perfectly good English, and that they are going to ask you if you want booze or girls. It's hard to explain how much I welcome this. I mean, it's a)someone that can speak English, which is extremely helpful and b)someone that can provide alcohol and women. Could you really ask for a better combination?
So of course after denying his offer for sinful goods, we simply asked him if he could recommend a decent izakaya. "Oh yeah, sure, the one right there is great!"
"Haha, thanks man!"

We walked over to where the man had pointed too, tapped the handle and the door slide to the side. Man! I FUCKING love it when the doors do that!
We helped ourselves to a booth, but there were many sections of the room where people were sitting on pillows on the ground at those very low asian tables. Easily one of the most comfortable/casual places I've ever eaten at.
We glanced over the menu settling on a list of what appeared to be meat on sticks. We ordered the straight up yakitori (chicken) and tongushi (pork), along with some menu roulette with negi and asparabacon. Hell, how bad could something with the word "bacon" in it be!? Of course we also ordered "big beeru!"

While we waited for our food Tim was telling me how expensive liquors, such as fine scotch or vodka, is dirt cheap in Japan. Something I'll have to put to the test later.

When our food came it was deliciousness on sticks. The negi turned out to be a sort of chive, which was great. The asparabacon was sticks of asparagus wrapped with...you guessed it! BACON!!!
So we ate our food while drinking bottles of Asahi (the Japanese equivalent of Labatt Blue, or Miller High Life) and smoked a few cigarettes (smoking in public places in Japan is still acceptable, with the non-smoking sections just further away in the room- the same as how NY and CA were before they passed the no smoking laws) (hell, Japan has cigarette vending machines everywhere, obviously they aren't too concerned with smoking!).

After that we went home and I slept all full of meat and alcohol. It was a good night.

I hoped to dream of bad-ass grim reaper ninjas.