Cliff’s 2008 Japan Trip - Day 2

Ginza

Ginza from my room in the daytime

Ginza is probably what Ayala will look like when it finally grows up and gets over itself, 30 years in the future or so. The sidewalks are so clean you could eat mochi off of it, which is probably an incredible breach of etiquette. I gathered this because when my fiancee’s mother decided to eat one mochi while standing on the sidewalk (not off of it though), an older gentleman in a scorching-hot gray custom roadster kept giving her scathingly disapproving looks.

Mitsukoshi is what Rustan’s wants to be when it grows up, too. And Mitsuya is what Greenbelt 5 wants to be. It has half a floor dedicated to objects that share nothing in common except for the fact that they have excellent design, like clocks, notebooks, aroma dispersers, chairs, and toys. It has an entire section dedicated to fine paintings and calligraphy. And footwear. Lots of footwear.

It is at this point that I begin to get bored. If I wanted to shop for Western designer apparel I would have stayed in Makati. Fortunately, the ratio of attractive women is very high in Ginza so I wasn’t too bored. I found myself developing a crush for 1 in every 10 women that walked by. My fiancee and I discussed this and we decided that this was my dormant genetic memory being reawakened, since I’m part-Japanese. My chromosomes were getting all tingly.

I treated everyone to lunch at the basement cafeteria-type place. I had cold soba, everyone else had sushi or ramen of various kinds. It cost me 10000 yen, or roughly 5000 pesos. Clearly I had underestimated cafeteria prices in Ginza. Actually, they overcharged me slightly and after consulting with our waitress, they realized they charged me for ‘ni’ tenzaru soba instead of ‘ichi’. I looked at the cashier in the waitress outfit with apron and said, “Ichi.” She giggled. She was cute.  Curse my genes.

By the end of the day I was beginning to get cabin fever. In a mall. I was in Japan, for God’s sake. The rest of the city was calling out to me — Shibuya, Shinjuku, Harajuku, and Akihabara. But I was stuck in Ginza.

Not so, proclaimed my fiancee’s mom. We were going to Roppongi Hills that evening. Finally, out of Ginza!

The taxi ride to Roppongi was pretty fun. I sat in the passenger seat, which is of course, where the driver’s seat would be back home, so I pretended I was driving. Traffic wasn’t bad at all, I guess mass transit was so efficient that only people with private cars took to the roads. Plus the taxi ride was getting expensive. What would have been a 160 yen train ride was now costing us 2000 yen. Oh well, not my money.

Roppongi Hills

A wall display in Roppongi Hills

Okay, Roppongi Hills is beautiful. THIS is what Greenbelt wants to be when it grows up. Unfortunately I didn’t come to Japan to go to Greenbelt-Plus so I stood around carrying shopping bags while shopping for French purses was going on.

We entered a chic shop that I can only describe as a Japanese Ikea. High tech furniture, neat gadgets, Roppongi prices. I got myself a notebook clip/pen holder for 800 yen and left it at that — after all, I was still smarting from my lunch fiasco.

We had dinner at an izakaya on one of the higher floors. This was very stressful because our very patient waitress could speak very little English, and my future mother-in-law compensated by repeating the same English sentences over and over again, only louder and more slowly, attracting the attention of the other patrons. ”FISH! WHAT - KIND - OF - FISH - DO - YOU - SERVE - HERE?” “Gomen nasai, wakarimasen…” “FISH! WHAT - KIND - OF - FISH –”

Eventually, using the little Japanese I knew, I finally managed to order dinner for everyone and a bottle of sake for myself. Hey, it was an izakaya, I was expected to drink. The food was excellent  (in our case consisting of assorted fish, meats, and vegetables on sticks and some chu-toro sashimi, in my fiancee’s mom’s case a whole grilled fish of some sort that she had picked out of a basket the waitress brought to the table) and the alcohol brightened my mood considerably.

Foo:D Magazine in Roppongi

We walked down the street to a large two-floor konbini store called Foo:D Magazine (oh those literal Engrish names) where we bought our breakfasts for the rest of the stay. Peyangu sauce yakisoba, instant curry ramen, bread and butter, some cheeses, and a lot of bottled water, even though the tap water at the hotel was potable. Can’t be too safe I guess.

The famous all-female Takarazuka Revue

Ginza at Night

When we got back to the hotel, Maoi and I decided to explore Ginza a little bit more. We discovered a side exit from the guest tower (to avoid the rest of the maze) and found ourselves outside the all-female answer to Kabuki, the Takarazuka Theater. We decided to stick around because a large but very well-behaved crowd composed mostly of women had formed outside the theater, waiting for the star to exit.

This was a very surreal twenty minutes, because everyone was so very quiet. Every time the door would open, the crowd would stand up expectantly, like a wave of hushed fandom. And then they would sit back down again, all of one mind, when the people who would come out turned out not to be the star. This repeated itself over a dozen times until finally the star, a very tall and handsome looking woman,  finally made her appearance to very muted applause. No cheers or whistles, just quiet clapping, like golf claps only even quieter, and the flash of cameras going off.

Ginza street-level at night

Along the main streets of Ginza the neon signs flashed, and drunken salarymen and OLs made their way to the train station. We passed one guy puking his guts out into the gutter, while his friends patted him on the back consolingly. After checking out the local arcade (which had 3 floors, modest by Japanese standards), we made our way back to the hotel.

I turned in, wanting to get up early, since tomorrow was the day I was finally going to Shibuya.