I spent some time yesterday in Shinjuku. Also known as “the place that has that street from Lost in Translation.” Neon, neon, neon. The station is also stunning, not architecturally, but because two million people pass through it every day, apparently, and I think they do it all at once, all the time. On the neon streets, I found Mitsukoshi department store. Specifically, the craft and hobbies department of Mitsukoshi department store, which has thoroughly cured my shopping indifference. I cannot reveal anything about the purchases, as they will become presents, but I took out my wallet so often, I got Repetitive Shopping Injury. I finally felt normal, if normal is feeling like an ungroomed elephant in the midst of petite expensively dressed people, but an elephant who is spending money.
In the bowels - ie. ground floor - of Shinjuku station, I had more noodles after more stilted conversation which usually goes like this:
Konichwa
[Something unknown but not Konichwa but which means good morning or hello or something]
Do you speak English?
No/A little
Oh.
[Pause]
[Point]
Can I have ramen with only vegetables?
Pork?
No, only vegetables.
?
No pork.
Ramen?
Yes. No pork. [mimes removing pork from picture of ramen with pork]
Hai!
And so on.
It is pathetic that I haven't learned more Japanese phrases yet. And miraculous that I have so far only had ramen with vegetables, as sort of requested, and no unexpected live lobsters or fishy surprises. I attribute this to the good faith and patience of the noodle shop employees and to the pleasing fact that the word “vegetarian” - “begeterien” - has entered Japanese, more or less.
After fast noodle food, I went to Mejiro to meet P. and Sekino-san, a Japanese man who I have seen at both toilet conferences but who doesn't speak anything but Japanese so I've never understood what he can get out of them. Also, he has a rockabilly haircut, wears a cowboy necktie and is 72. His business card says “household paper historian.” Of course I was curious. By the end of Sekino-san going through his exhaustive collection of toilet and toilet paper memorabilia (documents half a foot high; 500 pictures), both P. and I were exhausted. But I am pleased to report that Sekino-san is as eccentric as he seems. And the world is a better place for it, even if he did refuse to let us go to his house “because there's nowhere to sit.”
In the evening, I met Shumon's friend Y., one of the few Japanese women in Tokyo with short-ish hair, who studied for years in London and speaks excellent English. She took me first to a festival at a shrine in Shinjuku, which consists of many food stalls, some frying baby octopuses, a crowd so dense it moves millimetre by millimetre, and many merchants spending hundreds and thousands of pounds on strange decorated ornamental rake objects, which they buy after a stick-clacking ceremony and some shouting - which brings good luck - and which they then shuffle through the crowd with, holding their rakes aloft. The rakes are supposed to rake in money. It was a lot of cocks strutting, only with rakes. Which is appropriate, as the festival is only held on the days of the Rooster.
I asked Y. what the stall-owners do on the 362 days a year that there is no festival selling their rake products. “This is the great mystery,” she said. But the food-stalls, she believes, are run by “irregular people.” Yakuza.
Behind the shrine are the tiny alleyways and unbelievably tiny bars of Golden Gai. I would never have gone into one on my own, and neither would Y. So we went together, ending up going up some tiny narrow steep stairs to a bar with five stools and lots of huge bottles of plum sake, run by a hefty and hearty girl from Hiroshima. I started with beer, but soon switched to sour plum sake, which is far too delicious. Luckily, behind the tiny bar, the hearty Hiroshima girl has a tiny kitchen - a gas ring, some foil covering and one wok - on which she can make fried noodles and vegetables, completed by with an omelette draped over the top. After several sour plum sakes, this tasted damn good.
Introductions were made after a sleazy man had appeared and been told to leave. The sleazy man was a starer. He was staring at me and the back of Y's head, and when I tried to get out of his line of sight by leaning away from him, he would follow by leaning. Hiroshima girl finally told him to leave then said, “If I see him again, I”ll beat him up.” This is feasible., having seen him and having seen her. After that, Y. introduced me as a writer writing about toilets and the Blue Dragon tiny bar became a tiny toilet symposium. Information was offered from all quarters, about tri-ply toilet paper, and the benefits of Inax in-toilet drying equipment over Toto's, and how everything's about the angle.
“They are very interested,” said Y, who also thinks the toilet topic is fascinating. “They are trying to help you by telling you everything they know.”
They were wonderful. In the guidebooks, it is written that foreigners are not welcome in some Golden Gai bars. Except Quentin Tarantino, who is “always here,” says Hiroshima girl. “He loves manga!” Hiroshima girl also said she doesn't mind foreign travellers - ” we had a German in yesterday” - but the foreigners teaching English are stingy and refuse to pay the 500¥ cover fee. Even with the 500¥ cover fee, I can't imagine how the bars make a living. But they do, gas ring, fire hazard and all.