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Published: November 30th 2007
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"these boots were made for walking"
this robot suit is at the top of my Christmas list Tokyo is a shopping Mecca. If it exists, you can buy it here. If it doesn't exist, you can probably order it anyway! There is an impressive district called "Electric Town" which is packed with seven-floor superstores containing every electrical item known to man. This is the place you look if you want to see what we'll be buying in England in a years time. There is a department store called Takshimay which sells a French loaf for £25 ($50). It is baked in Paris on a Thursday and flown to Japan for the weekend. There is a fascinating chain store called "ranKing ranQueen". The Japanese love to compile top ten lists, which they called "rankings". This store, ranKing ranQueen, sells the Top Ten of everything! Top ten CDs, top ten perfumes, etc. Once something drops outside the top ten, they stop selling it and start selling the newly popular item. There is also some very bizarre shopping you can do here. I found a shopping mall with a large shop dedicated to selling only yo-yos! Nearby was a shop that only sold gay comics, and a shop that sold things left on the tube. I also visited a bathroom showroom,
total toilet control
You can crap with confidence with this new technological toilet panel. Whatever next? A toilet you can drive around the house? which was showcasing the very latest in toilet technology. One toilet had a control panel which raise and lowered the seat/lid, selected the temperature of the seat and the water, and had a bidet spray which you control the water pressure and direction. They had one of these in the actual lavatory of the showroom, so I had a play around. I've never played with a toilet before. The only thing I couldn't figure out was how to flush the damn thing! Seriously. I didn't want to press too many buttons in case I set off some panic alarm or ejector seat or something. Also in the showroom was a toilet which chemically analyses your wastes, and alerts you in anything is wrong, and a bath which can be programmed to fill itself from the internet or your mobile phone!
Many countries have "Love Hotels", which rent rooms by the hour. They are either used by prostitutes and clients, or by frisky couples who fancy an afternoon quickie. Tokyo takes the concept of the Love Hotel to the next level. Many of them just have a small slot where you exchange money and keys with a hidden desk, thus
Concept Car
groovy little love machine avoiding any embarassing eye contact. Others simply work on a vending machine principle, removing the need for human contact altogether. You can order a simple room, you could rent a luxuty velvet-lined room with sunken jacuzzi in the middle, or full-on bondage suite with swings, harnesses and such.
To the south of Tokyo is the modern district of Odaiba. This consists of a series of entertainment complexes, high-tech showcases by various companies, and ultra-modern shopping malls (including Venus Fort, a shopping centre entirely devoted to women). It's also the home of the impressive Fuji headquarters with it's distinctive observation globe. I was particularly impressed by the Toyota showcase, with it's concept cars and robotic people-carrier , which consisted of a one-person cradle on huge hydraulic robot legs. In the Joypolis entertainment complex there were three floors of virtual reality rides and the latest arcade games. There was a six-person running game, with people on treadmills racing against each other while watching digitised versions of themselves on a digitised running track. And a horse racing manager game with eight complex consoles in front of the biggest arcade screen I have ever seen. This one was obviously a game for playing
Fuji headquarters
made entirely from Mechano sets in a long sitting, because the chairs were reclining leather loungers with headrests. One game made me laugh. Have you seen an arcade shooting game called "House of the Dead", where you shoot a gun at an incoming wave of zombies and other beasts? They had a similar one called "Typing of the Dead" with two keyboards instead of guns. The graphics are the same, but each monster has a word against it, and you have to quickly type the word to kill it. The "Institute of Emerging Technology and Innovation" was also interesting, with working displays of robotics, explanations of nanotechnology, and assorted interactive displays on genetics and space travel. Also of note was the Sony "ExploraCentre", brimming with interactive displays of technology. Such as the console which samples your voice and then plays it back in a tone of your choice. It plays with the wave forms of your voice, changing the pitch, amplitude and duration. So, using one sampled sentence, you can hear yourself angry, tired, drunk, excited and tired! Very cool. And the Shadow Animals console, where you made shadows with your hands of spiders, birds and other creatures, and they come to animated life and
you can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish
the fishmongers make short work of these massive fish fly/walk/crawl around the screen.
No visit to Tokyo is complete without visiting the Tsukiji Fish Market. This is the world's largest and busiest fish market, and certainly is a sight! There are over 900 wholesale retailers, selling over 400 types of seafood to the thousands of restaurants and smaller fishmongers of Tokyo. The action begins early at 3am when the market opens and the first catches are brought in. The most desirable fish is the tuna, and there is a famous "tuna auction" which begins sometime before 4am and 5am. I was gutted because I didn't reach the market until 6am and missed it. But there was still plenty of action to behold. The place was a hive of activity, with trucks loading and unloading, crates being shifted, and assorted electric carts and lifters zooming around. You had to be on your guard to avoid being hit by all the small electric vehicles which were weaving in and out of each other. I was astounded by the diversity of seafood here. There was stuff I didn't even recognise, although they do say that if it swims, the Japanese will eat it. There were fish packed in ice, fresh fish
I'm a sucker for a bit of seafood
the biggest octopus I have ever seen in tanks, live octopus reaching out of water with their arms, and frozen tuna the size of ME being sliced up with circular sawblades. The strange thing was, there wasn't a smell of fish. Everything was so damn fresh.
I had a fantastic time in Tokyo, but I do have a few culinary regrets. I never got to try Fugu, which is pufferfish. The taste and texture are meant to be exquisite. However the pufferfish contains a powerful and deadly neurotoxin called tetradotoxin which , in no uncertain terms, will kill you. Chefs train for a minimum of four years in how to neutralise this poison so that pufferfish can be eaten. The real art is to leave just enough poison so that when you eat it, your lips go numb. Should the chef get this wrong, you could die. Although there has only been one puffer-death in the last 20 years. My other regret is not trying Kobe beef. This is meant to be the finest steak EVER, although it is very expensive. The Kobe cattle are treated like Kings, having massage and acupuncture throughout their lives, and drinking small amounts of sake (rice wine) each day. I
what are these?
they have shells like an oyster, but bodies like a sea snake also never got to try the Ninja restaurant, where all the staff dress like ninjas. And there is rumoured to be a sashimi bar where you eat the food off the thighs of virgins. Crazy Tokyo! Some day I'll be back
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