Karaoke in Tokyo *tick*

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Whenever I visit a big city, I like to find a skyscraper with an observation deck. I find it helpful to get my bearings, and it's nice to get above the claustrophobic street level. In Tokyo, many people go to Tokyo Tower, a steel lattice structure similar to the Eiffel tower. Instead we went to "Tokyo City View", an observation deck in Mori Tower at Roppongi Hills, which is actually at the same height as the observatory at Tokyo Tower (250m). Unfortunately the sky deck and aquarium weren't open, but we did get fantastic 360 degree views of the city.

Next we headed to Ueno Park. At Kiyomizu Kannon-do, a Buddhist temple, I had my fortune told. I handed over 200 yen to the attendant, who passed me a tube with a small hole on one end. After giving it a shake, a stick came out with a number on it. The attendant then gave me a printed fortune that corresponded to the number I drew. Apparently some people go around to different temples collecting fortunes until they get one that they like, which I think kinda defeats the purpose.

At the party on Saturday night, we had briefly discussed religion. The impression I got was that many Japanese are not overly religious, but they are "cultural buddhists", as many New Zealanders are "cultural christians". They visit temples a few times a year and celebrate holidays, but they're not overly pious or preachy. It surprised the guys at the party that I don't believe in any god - they'd never met an athiest. People often have the mistaken idea that atheists *believe* there is no god and will never be convinced otherwise, even if It happened to appear right in front of them. I explained we are open minded but sceptical.

My fortune offered such gems of wisdom as:
Study: Work hard or you'll fail
Missing thing: Try to find it. It's easy to find.
and my favourite
Travel: Any direction will do.
*Amen to that!*

A little later we were met by one of Kim's friends from Osaka. It was a warm day, so we ate delicious soft-serve ice cream while looking for the famous statue of Saigo Takamori. Kim's friend couldn't remember why it was famous, but I later learned he was "the Last Samurai" that the Tom Cruise film was based on.

I wanted to go to the Tokyo National Museum, but unfortunately it was closed on Mondays. We wandered past the other museums in the park, including the National Museum of Western Art. The building was designed by Le Corbusier - TBH it just looked like a fugly concrete building, but I guess it's culturally significant because he was a pioneer of "Modern architecture".

We wandered round Shinobazu Pond. The surface was covered with lotuses and there was a pretty temple at its centre. People were feeding turtles and giant carp from one of the bridges, and there were a few birds around. After walking around so much my shoes were starting to hurt so we took the metro to Akihabara.

Akihabara "Electric Town" is an area of Tokyo filled with electronic, computer, and otaku (geeky fan) stores. Most shops are multi-storied, and the number of them is overwhelming. We browsed for a while, but I wasn't really looking to buy anything.

We came across a multi-storied sex shop and decided to have a peek. Strictly in the interests of cultural education, of course. Ahem... anyway, we wandered through a couple of floors of outfits, toys and videos. Anime (cartoons) and manga (comics and print cartoons) are a huge part of Japanese culture, and pornographic varieties of both seem to be popular. Even in the regular electronics stores they had rude figurines of anime heroines displayed right next to the Hello Kitty's.

We kept an eye out for "Maid Cafés" while we browsed the streets of electronic stores. Just when we'd given up hope we found one. I thought the atmosphere would be a bit seedy but it wasn't. If I had to use one word to sum up the Meido experience it would be *cute*.

The room was set out like a frilly 1950's American diner. Our innocent-looking young waitress was dressed in the cutest french-maid-crossed-with-schoolgirl outfit. She was polite, smiling and even drew a chocolate-syrup heart on my coffee. There was a fee just to sit at a table, but I can understand why geeky guys would pay to have pretty girls smile at them and call them "Master". And they made a fantastic chocolate sundae with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Apparently the maids have individual manga-style collectors cards, and the thing to do is visit all the cafes and collect cards from your waitresses.

We were meeting Masuo and his brother later for karaoke, so after a good western-style Japanese meal, we checked our email at an internet cafe. Overall, I am ashamed to say I probably ate more western-style food than Japanese when I was in Tokyo. Tokyo has some great French-with-a-Japanese-twist bakeries, and they know how to make a good cup of coffee. Japan also has the most divine peaches in the world. In the supermarket I thought it was funny that all the peaches were individually wrapped in styrofoam sleeves, but once I tasted one I could understand why they were packaged so protectively. They are the biggest, juiciest, sweetest, tastiest fruit I have ever eaten. They also make the lushest fruit smoothies. My mouth is watering now just thinking about them.

We met the boys at a nice wine bar. Masuo was kind enough to buy us a bottle of Merlot, which helped me get in the mood for murdering some perfectly good songs. Masuo and his brother are both incredibly intelligent people with a great sense of humour. I taught them how to speak in a Kiwi accent, and they tried to teach me how to tell if someone is from Osaka or Tokyo (apparently there's a big rivalry between the two cities). We conducted an international exchange of silly walks. Masuo would like to be a diplomat, and I can definitely recommend him as the Silly Walks Cultural Attache.

Karaoke in New Zealand often just involves a regular bar hiring a karaoke machine, so you have to sing to a whole bunch of strangers. I usually don't have the nerve to get up and sing. They do have some booth-style places in Auckland, but my friends always do the same songs that they know they're good at (you know who you are!) so it gets kinda boring. Karaoke with Kim, Masuo and his brother was awesome. They sang some Japanese pop songs, and of course we did a Michael Jackson medley. Kim gave "You Could be Mine" by Guns N' Roses a bloody good go. I was having so much fun I threw a tantrum when they said our time was up so we stayed a bit longer. By the time we got home it was well after 1am and I had to get up at 7 to catch my flight but it was so worth it.

Thank you to my fantastic hosts, and especially Kimberly for showing me a fantastic time in Tokyo.

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Photos

Jocelyn & Kim at Tokyo City View
That's Tokyo Tower to our left and a model of the Mori Tower to our right.