Tokyo: Akihabara

This is the third recap for LOHOjapan, my 3 week trip to Japan with my boyfriend. After visiting the trendy Shibuya spots on the weekend, we try to tone it down with a chill day in Akihabara.

Lunch: Ichiran

We choose to sleep right through breakfast and have an early lunch at Ichiran instead. Ichiran is a big ramen chain – you can find a location almost anywhere. We go to one near Shinjuku, where we are staying. They are famous for their vending machine ordering process and eating-alone stalls.

To order, you select what you want from a vending machine. They will give you a ticket and you head inside the restaurant where you will be seated in a little booth. The booth is facing some window blinds that only open when a server is going to give you food. There is a piece of paper where you circle your noodle and soup preferences, and then you wait. If you are not eating alone, you can remove the barrier between seats, but essentially both of you will be facing the same direction.

We order 2 signature ramens ($8 USD each) with our own preferences for noodle and soup – things like thin vs. thick noodles, amount of garlic you want, etc. We both add a ramen egg (around $1.30 each) and we add a smoke flavoured stewed pork ($5).

The ramen is very good – basically on par or better than any ramen place in Vancouver. For $8 a bowl, I suddenly feel outraged that they are around $10-15 back home.

The stewed pork is also very tender. If you have room in your belly – add it! Good to share with 2 people.

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Akihabara

Akihabara is a buzzing shopping hub famed for its electronic retailers and anime merchandise. It is the district of otakus and weebs.

Things to do: Anime shopping

There are so many buildings selling electronics and anime merchandise. We spend a long time looking at figurines and trying to win some at more Japanese UFO claw games. There are also a lot of pachinko games.

You will also find lots of doll goods. This includes dolls themselves, or clothing and accessories for dolls. To be honest, it is kind of creepy for me.

Things to do: Maid cafe

I am told that maid cafes are more of a tourist thing and that locals do not go. I drag my boyfriend to a maid cafe called Maid Dreamin. All along the streets of Akihabara, there are girls in different maid costumes with flyers, enticing you to go inside. You’ll find more on the outer streets farther away from the station. Maid Dreamin is the closest one.

We go up an elevator – the cafe is 2 floors but we choose the floor that is more pink. Inside, it feels like a 6-year-old girl’s dream restaurant. Pink and red sofa seats and little tables fill up the room. It is not empty (thank god) but it is mostly foreigners.

We are showed to our table by a maid/server. In general, their English is not too bad but they have very strong accents. Their voices are also very high/squeaky – not sure if this is their natural voices.

These maids upsell you hard. We are given a “special” menu with all sorts of special combos/deals. There is a regular menu provided but they never explain or show it to you. They always push for the special combos.

How expensive is a maid cafe?

We order the dessert special combo for $29. It comes with one parfait, drink, a gift and a picture with a maid. Note that you are not allowed to take pictures or film the maid unless you pay for it. They will ask you to delete if they see you doing so. They have mirrors set up at the top of the walls, angled to see what is on your screen.

We are told there is a minimum order per person, so we are not allowed to share the dessert combo. My boyfriend orders a caesar ($8). There is also a $5 per person cover charge to stay for 1 hour. If you stay for longer than that, you need to pay cover again for each additional hour.

The maids make us say things. For example, if we want to order or get their attention, we have to say, “meow meow”. We do this and feel slightly embarrassed.

The food is not good…

Our dessert and drinks arrive. Please do not come here for lunch. I cannot stress this enough. The food is terrible. Even the caesar my boyfriend ordered tastes like watered down tomato juice. The parfait is an average pass. It’s cute – but you can get cuter parfaits in other cafes.

Of course, they make us say a magical spell that will make our food taste more delicious. It goes like this: delicious! delicious! love-u love-u love-u! -make hearts with your hands and shoot it at your food side to side-

Finally, at the end we take a picture with one of the maids. You can take 1 photo with your phone or you can use their Polaroid camera and keep one picture.

We leave without a gift because it’s a useless folder. Some of their other gifts that they ran out of are animal ears or a keychain.

Dinner: Shinjuku Tatsukichi

We go for dinner back in Shinjuku because I am tired of walking around Akihabara. If you’re not into anime, you will find stores get very repetitive after awhile.

We try to find a restaurant for kushiage. Kushiage is deep-fried meat and vegetable skewers. We get lost for 40 minutes trying to find this restaurant. It is actually on the 10th floor of a restaurant building. They only have their logo in kanji on the wall so we missed it multiple times and wasn’t sure.

We finally get to Shinjuku Tatsukichi and it’s very nice and classy inside. The host seats us at a table in front of the chef. It is an omakase style table setting. Omakase means “leave it up to the chef”. Each chef is stationed at a working station with 8-10 seats around him.

We sit down and order water. We notice there is no food menu given to us so we get nervous. The chef is deep-frying skewers and handing them out to the people sitting at our station one by one. He also gives one each to us and tells us which sauce is best to pair it with. We eat it, but are secretly wondering: how much is this? What is this?

We look up reviews online and realize that this restaurant has no menu. The chef will decide what to give you and basically when you are full, you get up and leave and will be given the bill.

We let ourselves go and enjoy the experience of not knowing what we will get next. It’s actually very fun! Everything is delicious of course, and well thought out. Since everything is deep-fried, every 5-8 skewers, the chef will prepare something to offset that.

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I’m here to let you know how expensive it is. On average, each skewer costs around $1.80-3. In total, we eat approximately 12-15 skewers (we were waiting for the crab claw!) and the final bill comes to $60 for 2 people.

And now… a story you didn’t ask for…

Japanese toilets

It is here I will tell you all the story of my first time using a bidet/Japanese toilet. Feel free to skip if you are not interested.

If you’ve been to Europe, you may know what a bidet is. What is a bidet? Basically, it’s an enhancement to the toilet where it washes your bum and genitals for you after you do your business.

Japanese toilets take this up a few notches. First of all, Japanese toilets are everywhere – in apartments, malls, restaurants, etc. Not only is there a function to wash yourself, you can also control the temperature of your toilet seat (omg the best thing in the winter) and you can even “play sounds” to help you pee or to hide the sound of your poop splashing into the toilet water. Sorry, you can still skip this section.

So I’ve been in Japan for a few days now and even our airbnb toilet has all these buttons and functions, but I’ve been too damn scared to try it. Yes, it’s a scary thing! Like some tube just comes out and squirts water at me? Is it clean? Does it hurt? I don’t know!

So I decide to be brave and try using a bidet when I am at this kushiage restaurant because it’s a really nice restaurant and their washroom is very clean and private.

So I sit my ass down and press on the button and brace myself…

Everybody… Japanese toilets are wonderful. The water does not hurt. It is not cold. You can control how long the water squirts out for and there is a button for it to self-clean itself. I have never felt so clean and wonderful coming out of a washroom in my life.

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Final thoughts on day three

Today was supposed to be a chill day, but getting lost in Shinjuku exhausted my feet. We were using a portable wifi supplied by our Airbnb. In general, it works fine but there are times when Google maps is completely inaccurate in pinning down where our current location is. If you can read hiragana, it helps a lot because sometimes stores and restaurants only have a sign with their name on it. Conversely, the Google translate app is very helpful.

As for my thoughts on Akihabara, I kind of got tired of looking at anime figurines and merchandise. For context, I do read a lot of manga and watch a lot of anime, so I don’t think it’s because I don’t like anime or manga. I think it’s because after awhile, every place was selling the same thing so it got boring for me.

Stay tuned for my next post and follow along with the other recaps!
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

Sincerely, Loewe