animal cafes

Day 4 (Tokyo): Day Shinjuku and Night Shinjuku (and Godzilla)

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Saturday, June 22

We spent the morning deliberating between train and bus travel to the Kansai region (Osaka, Nara, Kyoto). Seriously, it was two grueling hours of research and cost comparisons, conducted on one iPad and a phone. In the end, we booked tickets on a Willer overnight bus—details to come in a future post!

Himawari Sushi Shintoshin: sushi-go-round #1

Having whiled away our breakfast hour, we wandered out into Shinjuku to investigate a tempura place Jane had found online. As often happens, it seems, the place turned out to be much more expensive and legit-looking than it seemed online ($30 for an entree? It’s tempura!), so we kept going to a conveyor belt sushi place Jane had also bookmarked.

We’d been to conveyor belt sushi before, and it’s kind of a fun concept: in a “traditional” place, the sushi chefs are in the middle of a rectangular bar that also has a conveyor belt going around, and they place individual nigiri on color-coded plates and then onto the conveyor belt as they make it. You can grab anything that passes you by and your final tab is calculated by the combination of empty plates you’ve stacked in front of you. In a larger-scale conveyor belt sushi operation, the sushi chefs are hidden away in a kitchen and the conveyor belt originates there before winding up and down rows of booths.

This one was the rectangular bar setup, with two chefs in the middle. We’ve noticed that oftentimes in Japan when food is served at a bar (which it very often is) the bar had little spigots at every place setting so that you can self-pour hot water for your matcha tea. Other things are often self-serve too, like water pitchers at regular intervals and, at sushi restaurants, things like ginger and sometimes wasabi. I love the unlimited, interaction-free tea refills!

The one downside of this sushi-go-round was that most of the people there seemed to be Japanese (perhaps not regulars; tourists and families?), and this meant they felt confident ordering all of their sushi specially from the chef. This seems like a common practice if you want something you don’t see going around, but we were there to have a quiet, minimal-interaction lunch and actually pull nigiri off of the belt, and this meant that the chefs had very little time to produce standard-issue nigiri! The stuff we had was still good (not nearly as good as Kanda Edokko though), but we spent an awful long time waiting for things we wanted to see to come by. Much tea was had. Also, the one other non-Japanese group in the restaurant was this extremely loud couple of British girls whose laughs were way too big for that tiny place. (Was I just in a bad mood?)

I am like a wrinkly baby. But in all seriousness, it was a delicious morning!

After lunch, we had our first run-in with one of the famed Japanese department stores (Lumine 2 in Shinjuku station, which probably isn’t nearly as big as the really famous ones), which we almost couldn’t find our way out of. Our reward was a Belgian waffle and dark chocolate ice cream stand at the entrance (Mr. Waffle)—always a winner. For the first time, we talked to a tourist information desk about our upcoming travel and learned that we could get to Nikko entirely on local trains that took our SUICA transport cards. It would be about a 3-hour ride north, with a transfer at Utsonomiya, for about $25 each.

Shinjuku and its largest denizen, Gojira

O-oh no! There goes Tokyo, go go Godzilla! 🎶

Shinjuku is one of those neighborhoods that Japan tour books like to recommend for general exploration, and it makes sense to me! We’ve been loving our time in different parts of Shinjuku and we enjoyed strolling about in this particular hot-zone (east of Shinjuku Station). Our main highlight here was the giant Godzilla (gojira!) head on the 8th floor of Hotel Gracery (I briefly tried but was unable to get a hotel room with an across-the-street view of this monstrosity), which looms large and goofy over the street. We also went up into the adjoined Toho cinema (which is the company that originally produced Godzilla, Jane informed me) and thought about getting tickets for the recent Hollywood film Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but found that none of the times worked for us. We’d originally been up there to find the Godzilla head, but it turns out it’s only accessible through the hotel, and it sounded like only guests there were supposed to use the private elevator. One reviewer on Google said he enjoyed the 8th-floor attraction but mentioned that he probably shouldn’t have just “gaijin-smashed” his way up there, which is our new favorite hybrid phrase.

Shinjuku is also known for having tons of restaurants and nice stores, and is home to a few other gimmicky places like more animal cafes (indeed) and the Robot Restaurant, which is a popular tourist attraction that we weren’t too interested in. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory (except there’s also a robot show during the meal?).

We also stopped into a four-story MUJI store and ended up spending over $100 there (which made it tax-free, with our passports!). Ugh, don’t ask me about the MUJI things. My mom and I have this love affair with MUJI (and places like it); I exclusively use their pens and bizarre little bags and containers now. Now that we’re finally in Japan, MUJI is everywhere, and it’s beautiful! (Sadly, though, they were out of the little cylindrical fold-up scissors that I didn’t bring on this trip because I was afraid of airport confiscation.)

Another theater nearby was showing Godzilla with Japanese subs at a more convenient hour, so we grabbed some tickets. To kill time, we stopped into Cat Cafe Mocha, which I’ll describe in a little more detail later (link to come). Suffice to say that more so than the Shiba cafe and definitely in contrast to the owl cafe, Cat Cafe Mocha is an institution. It was massive and extremely aesthetically consistent and, we learned, there are locations across Tokyo and in a few other big Japanese cities as well. It’s also one of those pay-by-the-10-minutes places, which makes cat enjoyment a little frantic, but we managed to get around that in a later visit. Afterwards, we found the cheapest and easiest dinner nearby, which happened to be “carbonara” at an “Italian” cafe chain called Segafredo. Cannot recommend, but it was an experience to have fast foreign food in Japan.

Because I’m not a critic, I can say that Godzilla: King of the Monsters was awesome. Jane is a moderate fan of Japanese kaiju films (she particularly likes Mothra, who made an appearance), but my only other exposure is seeing the original Godzilla film at a screening at the Silver Spring AFI as a child (which I enjoyed). It might be obvious from the title/trailer but you’re rooting for Godzilla in this movie, and that makes everything better. I was far less invested in the Millie Bobby Brown character/family plotline—actually, all of the humans, except for Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), who is a huge Godzilla fanboy and enjoyably interjected “But what about… Godzilla!?” into every conversation. Tywin Lannister was also in this movie.

(Also, we are now fans of Japanese movie theaters! Both of the ones we saw had little gift shops with merchandise related to the films it was showing, which is capitalist but convenient, and the theater provided optional blankets!)

Queer Shinjuku

This was our last night at our lovely little apartment in Shinjuku, so we wanted to go out and enjoy the bar scene (the nearby Golden Gai is this area full of tiny bars with 4-8 seats each, which is cool; and also there are tons of gay and lesbian bars that we’d scoped out during the day and evening but didn’t have the confidence to enter), but we were so pooped. We were on the fence about whether or not we had the energy to go out safely. Then, on the way back to our apartment, we passed by these two already-drunk young Japanese guys in suits who asked us, almost comically, “Drinku?”, and when we shook our heads sadly and said “We have to go put down our stuff…” they widened their eyes in horror and gasped “NO DRINKU???”

This sounds like a horrible mock stereotype or something but that’s exactly what they did and how they pronounced it (possibly for our benefit), and it probably pushed us over the edge. So we dropped off our stuff, changed, and wandered back across the street to all of the lovely queer bars we’d seen when passing through. We stopped at the first one (Aiiro Cafe) that was overflowing and seemed to have a mix of genders and it turned into a lovely night that included multiple bars, an impromptu drag show with cartwheels and death drops (it was the queen’s birthday evidently), a barfight, some extremely nice British uni students, and a surprisingly delicious last drink of the night which I think was a spicy ginger Moscow mule.

That bottom right image is the only photo I have from the night because we didn’t really take our phones out

Day 2 (Tokyo): Shibas in Harajuku

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Thursday, June 20

In the interest of brevity (and actually managing to make these posts), I’m splitting up days and including more pictures. See Day 2 (Tokyo): Harajuku and Shibuya for the rest of the day.

Mameshiba Cafe Harajuku

Jane is a Shiba enthusiast (who doesn’t love a shiba?) and we’ve been very excited to go to shiba cafes in Tokyo where we can experience the breed first-hand. Shiba Inus are one of the most popular Japanese dog breeds and are, by many accounts, cat-like in their finicky and mischievous dispositions. The shiba cafes we found online all seemed to specialize in mameshibas, which are a smaller version of the classic breed.

All of these places had terrible reviews on Google/TripAdvisor/Yelp, and we were worried it would be another Owl Cafe situation—but many of them cited something along the lines of “Shibas aren’t well-suited to cafes as they have no interest in humans” to justify their poor reviews, so we figured it was still worth a visit. This particular cafe, above the Harajuku Owl’s Forest on Takeshita Street (popular for food and cheap shopping), allowed visitors in for 30 minutes at a time. We heard it was popular so we arrived around 10:30 AM and got in line about 15 minutes before it opened at 11, which barely got us into the first group allowed in.

There were probably around twenty mameshibas of various sizes running around a small tatami-covered space. Contrary to reviews, they were extremely active, though it’s true they didn’t seem all that interested in us at first. We were asked to remove our shoes (typical for many indoor activities in Japan) and offered drinks from a vending machine (typical for animal cafes), but we elected to avoid the distraction and focus on the dogs.

Jane was positioned right next to the (single) water bowl, so she had the good fortune of having lots of visitors. The space had a narrow middle aisle and two larger seating areas on either side, which forced the shibas to run up and down the middle, right past us, whenever they milled from one area to the next. There was a lot of ball-chasing and play-fighting, although a few (older) dogs tuckered out pretty quickly.

In the end, the dogs were a lot friendlier than the internet gives them credit for—even if they didn’t seem constantly affection-starved like most other breeds we know. I happened to be disgustingly sweaty from the humidity outside, which made me delicious to the little white mameshiba, and my phone’s dorky wrist strap attracted a few others into my lap. Plenty of dogs trotted around letting themselves be pet for a few moments at a time, and one older pup took a long nap in another visitor’s lap. Jane came away with her Shiba-petting urge completely sated. These dogs see too many new people to be personally interested in us, but that was fine; it would have been a great experience to watch them play even if they hadn’t interacted with us at all.

A group of loud American girls who came in after us left in a huff when they realized the dogs weren’t going to pose in pictures for them and after they were told they couldn’t chase them or pick them up—now we know where the bad reviews come from! Otherwise, the dogs seemed well-cared for by the employees. We’ve been assured that they get long walks every morning and lots of socialization, even if they’re cooped up with tourists during working hours.

Day 1 (Tokyo): Shinjuku Gyoen and an Owl “Cafe”

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Wednesday, June 19

Clockwise from UL: Shinjuku’s more business-y streets; Shinjuku’s shopping district at night; our route from Narita Airport to Shinjuku Station

We’re in Japan! We landed around 8am and got in touch with our Airbnb host, Koichi, via Line. He estimated it would take us three hours to get to Shinjuku Station and told us he’d be there to pick us up. The train ride via the Narita Express or N’EX (one of several competing shinkansen from the airport) is only an hour and a half, but sure enough it did take us that amount of time to get through Immigration and get our bearings enough to buy tickets. We purchased the “base fare” tickets as well as Suica Cards (the refillable metro/train card; see also: PASMO), but neglected to purchase an additional seat ticket because we’d planned on not reserving seats. It turns out that on trains like these, you need to pay for an additional reservation either way, which is often just as much as the base fare ticket, and “reserved seating” is only slightly more than “unreserved”! We spent the whole train ride waiting for a ticketmaster to come along and deport us, but no such person materialized.

Left: a haggard, jet-lagged (but still gorgeous) Jane waiting at the N’EX terminal at Narita. Right: navigating the internal tracks at Shinjuku Station to find our exit.

It turns out that Shinjuku Station is the world’s busiest railway station, which both blows me away and feels about right. Koichi was waiting outside near the Central East Exit, which is one of ten exits, and it took us almost twenty minutes to get there from the platform where our train let off. (More recently, we tried to use coin luggage lockers in the station but after passing by at least 200, we couldn’t find a single available spot.)

There was no separation between the bedroom (which included a TV and a shelf/desk) and the kitchen (with the washer and bathroom attachment), but there didn’t need to be. So cozy.

We had heard about how compact Tokyo apartments are, but we still didn’t expect our first Airbnb to be so cute! In spite of how small it was, it didn’t feel like it was lacking any basic amenities: it had a bathroom with a shower and small tub (the sink and shower share one water hookup, which seems common here), a fridge and freezer, and a in-unit washer. We didn’t even notice that it lacked living and dining spaces or a stove; for us, it was perfect!

We picked this Airbnb for its location. Shinjuku is known for shopping, entertainment, and business, and some of Tokyo’s most famous bars are only a few blocks from where we’re staying, including the Golden Gai, which is full of tiny bars that seat 4-10 people total. In particular, we were interested in the LGBT bars nearby and the reputation of the neighborhood as being one of the queerest places in (relatively-conservative?) Tokyo.

We grabbed a snack and later dinner at the 7-11 around the corner, which was an experience unto itself: along with Lawson and Family Mart (which exists all over the place in Taiwan), convenience stores in Japan are stocked with delicious food, including maki rolls and similar delicious bites. More on this later.

Owl Cafe Mofumofu

After we’d fully washed all of the travel grossness off, we decided to stop by one of the city’s many owl cafes. Japan is awash in animal cafes of all sorts and we’d chosen three types to check out: owl cafes, cat cafes, and—to Jane’s immeasurable excitement—Shiba cafes! I love owls but was leery of the idea of keeping them in a small indoor space for tourists to pet. After reading some reviews online, it seemed like at least a few of the owl cafes in Tokyo treated their animals decently well (in particular, cycling the animals out for breaks seemed like a good sign). The one closest to us in Shinjuku (there are at least two) didn’t top the list of classiest owl cafes, but it was nearby and they responded quickly to us via email with a reservation time.

Me with Hinata, a Northern White-Faced owl.

So I’ll be honest: I really enjoyed this! Owls are amazing creatures and it was really cool to see so many different types up close. It’s also the case that the owner (who didn’t speak English) seemed to really care for his birds. He had a detailed wall with facts about the breeds and the particular owls he had, and treated them with a lot of affection. BUT especially in this location in particular, I almost felt like I was contributing to abuse. The owls lived in a tiny tiny smelly room (no windows although I don’t think that matters for a lot of animals) flooded with light and didn’t seem to have another space where they could get away from tourists. Fortunately, “cafe” is a misnomer: we were given bottles of water there, but no food or drink was actually consumed in the space. The handler encouraged us to pet the owls (he told us that one was “grumpy” and shouldn’t be touched), and two of them were untethered from their posts so that he could pick them up and place them on tourists. They took the petting with sleepy resignation, and I felt bad for disturbing them.

I hope they’re doing okay, but either way, they were very cool to see.

Okay okay okay I wouldn’t go back (probably shouldn’t support buying owls as pets and preventing them from hunting and all of that) but I loooooved seeing the owls! The barn owl was incredibly well behaved and liked to fly up and perch on tourists’ heads. The snowy (the grumpy one) was gorgeous. I think owls are incredibly expressive and it’s difficult not to anthropomorphize them (many of them looked just as disgruntled as I’m sure they felt). I haven’t done the research, but I imagine that there could be a way to ethically expose tourists to owls… just not in a small unhygienic room, and probably without petting.