Tokyo: Ikebukuro + Roppongi

First, a little about #LOHOjapan…

This Autumn, my boyfriend and I traveled to Japan for 2.5 weeks uhh… 3 weeks (more to come on why our trip was extended in a later post). This Japan trip is organized by the hashtag/name #LOHOjapan. Click here to see my Instagram photos of my trip so far.

It’s my first time in Japan so this trip includes a lot of touristy places and activities. I will be writing a series of posts on what we did each day of our trip. As usual, these travel posts will be recapped with a final post showcasing my travel montage video.

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Arrival to Shinjuku

Our flight arrives at Narita Airport, where we take an express train to metro Tokyo area. This express ticket costs us $40 USD per person and takes us around 45 minutes to get to Shinjuku, where we are staying for a week.

Note: my costs will be estimated in USD instead of CAD because it’s a more approximate/easier conversion.

To take public transit in Japan, you will require a Suica card, which is equivalent to Vancouver’s compass card. You simply reload the balance when it is low and beep the card when you enter a train station.

We decide not to purchase a JR pass for our trip as our timing doesn’t work out based on our itinerary to make it cost-effective. If you have an itinerary that requires a lot of travel via the JR line, the pass can save you money. You can learn more about the JR pass here.

We arrive in Shinjuku and check in to our Airbnb, which is an apartment. The apartment is nice and sufficient, but it is very small if you compare it to average apartments in Vancouver. In total, this apartment is 237 ft² with a double bed. Yes, this is the size of the entire apartment.

Dinner: Random yakitori restaurant

We eat dinner in a random restaurant near our Airbnb (don’t have the name because it’s all in kanji letters). It is a yakitori restaurant – chicken skewers and the atmosphere is bumpin’ with Japanese salary men clapping and drinking beer. We ask for an English menu, which many restaurants actually can provide.

We order 8-kinds of chicken skewers. This includes “young” (I, too wonder what this means. Baby chicken?), fried chicken, fried chicken skin, gizzards, hearts, livers, cartilage and normal chicken.

My favourite is fried chicken and skin (lol so basic). Because this assortment has so many different parts of a chicken, we feel as if we ate a whole chicken.

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We also try some of their specials of the day: deep fried baby scallops and a beef yakisoba (pan fried noodles). These are delicious!

This is also my first time taking a glimpse of the alcohol menu in Japan (because I’m an alcoholic… ha ha… ha…). Aside from sake, which I find tastes like horse urine on fire (yes, that is exactly what I just wrote), it seems like Japan likes highballs and a type of beer called Shochu. We try their ginger and yuzu (lemon) high ball, which is whiskey mixed with soda. This is the beginning of my highball addiction.

We head back to our Airbnb to rest after our 9 hour flight.

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Ikebukuro

Ikebukuro is a student hot spot. This means cheaper shopping and more diverse things to do. Everything from giant malls to animal cafes and anime goods.

Breakfast: 711

If you are not familiar with Japan, let me be the first to educate you on how amazing convenience stores are in Japan. There are 3 major convenience stores in Japan: 711, Family Mart and Lawsons. They are all awesome.

If you’re from Vancouver, you may be only thinking of cold taquitos and slushies when I mention 711. But from now on, if someone mentions Japan 711 you must think of fresh sandwiches, delicious pork buns and fried chicken, THE BEST pudding ever and microwave meals that taste better than what your average 25-year-old can cook.

In case you cannot already tell, eating at 711 is something I am very looking forward to. The first on my list is the egg salad sandwich ($2.20) that youtubers rave about. The bread is soft and the egg salad mixture is packed with flavour.

We also try their chicken cutlet sandwich ($2.90). Again, the bread is so soft but everything stays together. The chicken cutlet is quite big and it even has some sort of a teriyaki sauce and a little bit of coleslaw.

We also purchase an onigiri (rice ball). We choose the ikura (fish roe) onigiri ($1.65). Please follow the instructions on the packaging on how to open it because they are brilliant. The rice ball is salty from the fish roe and balances well with the rice and seaweed. I can suddenly see myself living on 711 food and only earning $50 a day.

711 has a section for hot foods. We purchase a pork bun ($1.50). It is filled with warm pork inside and tastes just like the ones my mom buys from Costco and steams in our bamboo case.

Things to do: Japanese UFO games

Japanese UFOs are not unidentified flying objects. They are actually claw games and they are in arcades everywhere. You can win stuffed animals, snacks and anime figurines. Each try will cost you $1.

Things to do: Otome Road

Otome means “maiden”. This road is filled with anime goods that are targeted towards females. I am talking lots of shoujo (female romance genre) characters and J-pop celebrity merchandise. I am also talking about the yaoi (boy love) genre. We go inside a giant Animate building, which is 10 floors of anime stuff.

They sell mangas, art pieces, keychains and pencil bags and giant posters and even costumes. I buy nothing lol.

Lunch: Kura Sushi

We wait 1 hour to eat at Kura Sushi, a popular conveyor belt sushi restaurant. Every booth has access to a conveyor belt where plates of sushi will pass by. If you see one you like, you simply open the lid and take the plate. Each plate costs $1 with some “special” dishes costing $2+.

You can also order what you want from a tablet if you don’t see what you like on the conveyor belt. They also have non-sushi items you can order.

There is minimum service as everything is self-served. You can make tea by adding some green tea powder into your cup and pressing it against the hot water tap at your table.

The slot at the end of the table is where you slide in your empty dishes. For every 5 plates you slide in, you get a chance to play a game to win a little toy (fun for kids). This slide goes straight to their dishwashing process (I assume) and they also use this for billing purposes (to know how much you ate).

We ate around 20 dishes and it only costs us around $25!

Things to do: Sunshine City

Sunshine City is a giant mall. Not only is there shopping, there is also an aquarium and a planetarium.

One of my favourite stores is Tokyo Hands – they seem to sell everything from kitchen supplies to accessories and hardware, but I love their stationary floor.

We also visit the Pokemon Centre, which I originally thought would be some sort of interactive place where I can finally start my Pokemon career. Alas, it is just a retail store but with some cool Pokemon merchandise.

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We buy tickets to see the planetarium. It costs us $35 per person for a 1-hour show. The show is in Japanese but they offer English audio guides. The audio guides are not very helpful as they are slow to translate and also get in the way of you trying to listen to the music.

I actually find the show we watch boring. It is about the milky way and constellations, but there isn’t a lot of action. Things are very slow and music is very sentimental. We end up falling asleep from how tired we are LOL.

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Roppongi

Roppongi is a night life district with many bars and clubs. In the daytime, they are more of an expensive district with higher-end boutiques and shopping.

Dinner: random izakaya

Izakaya is a Japanese pub. We eat at a random izakaya because we are unable to find the izakaya we want to eat at. It is also a Saturday night, so many izakayas are already full.

We order a yakisoba, chicken karaage (deep fried) and an interesting menu item that only says “sexy fried rice” ($15).

Well the sexy fried rice is a big mistake because the protion size is huge. Also it is a little… unappetizing.

Things to do: Clubbing

Ok so first of all, I don’t know how the hell we mustered up enough energy to go clubbing because we were already tired from exploring Ikebukuro all day – the amount of walking in Japan is crazy. I think it’s because there are only so many weekends during our trip and if we didn’t go clubbing today, we would have to wait until next weekend, but we will be in Kyoto.

Esprit

So we look up some clubs to go to on Google and decide to go to Esprit, which is reviewed and listed as an EDM club in Roppongi. We get there at 11:30 pm and have to pay for cover. It costs $10 for females and $20-30 for men but they all come with 3 drink coupons.

I was told that dancing in a club was illegal in Japan 3 years ago – something that is ridiculous to try to comprehend as a foreigner. Even though dancing is now legal, I wasn’t sure what kind of dancing is legal. Like is tango legal but grinding is illegal? WHO KNOWS? So I wait and see what locals dance to know what is appropriate but nobody dances.

It’s almost midnight but the club is pretty empty. There are maybe 20 people in the club but they are scattered, smoking and talking. Nobody is dancing.

We befriend a couple from Ireland. They are in Japan for the World Rugby Cup, a sports event that has brought many Europeans. We drink with them for a bit but even they find the club too dead so they leave and we leave shortly after them.

Mezzo

We try going to the bar next door called Mezzo. It is jam packed with Europeans to the point where there is no room for dancing. Again, we pay cover ($50 for both of us) and are given 9 drink coupons.

As there are more foreigners, it is easier to make new friends. We befriend a group of girls who are all studying in Japan but come from Denmark and New Zealand. There’s a bunch of guys from England. We also befriend 2 Japanese locals and communicate with them through our broken Japanese phrases and Google translate.

It is now 2 am and time to go home. Local trains have stopped operating so we need to take a taxi back to Shinjuku area. The taxi driver didn’t seem to rip us off when we told him what station to drop us off at (perhaps because we said it in Japanese?). The total fare ended up being around $50.

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Final thoughts on day one

It was a very jam-packed Saturday. Right off the bat, I was surprised by a few things. First, there are always people everywhere. For example, a restaurant chain might have 2 locations within 20 seconds walking distance of one another, but both locations have customers inside eating at 3 pm, which is not even a normal dining time.

Second, the food in Japan is decent anywhere. Based on the 2 random restaurants we went to, I have never went to a “bad” restaurant. Bad as in not a single thing tasted average.

Third, there is so much walking. I know I already mentioned this earlier in the post, but it is actually insane. My feet were sore by 6 pm and I had already hit 12,000 steps on my fitbit by 3 pm. For a benchmark, my daily goal in Vancouver is 8,000 steps and my average steps on weekdays are only around 4,000 steps.

Lastly, you will never have trouble finding a vending machine but it’s a serious endeavor to find a garbage can. The streets and all the failities are clean, but there is rarely a trash can nearby. I have no idea where Japanese people put their garbage.

Stay tuned for my next post and follow along with the other recaps! They will be linked as they are posted.
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Sincerely, Loewe