The first post in this, my Japan-haiku sequence, is here: Stranger in a Strange Land
Joe
I wake earlier than I expected to. I’m still worried about jet lag, but I’d rather be up at 7am than fall back asleep, overcorrect, and get up at 10, so I pull myself out a bed I hardly remember.
I’ve got a simple logistics problem to solve: I still don’t have any cash.
I pull my boots and backpack on and set out. There’s a conbini a few doors down from my hotel, so I swing in. The ATM isn’t hard to find at all, nor to use, but I retrieve my crisp new 10,000 yen bills, running some quick mental math. $60-something, each. If I tried to drop a $50 or a $100 at a coffeeshop or a street vendor, they’d give me some side-eye (I assumed).
Oh well, that’s a problem for future-Joe to deal with.
I’d gotten a run-down from my exocortex about what my priorities should be in Shimokitazawa, my (assigned) first target district. Rationale: specifically a manageable coffee-and-wander district, low pressure, where I could try to find my rhythm after the disruption of international travel.
However.
Shimokitazawa is a train station and a transfer away, and I’m still not confident about which kinds of train lines need extra special tickets, nor how to obtain such a thing.
I walk the 10 minutes or so back to the station I arrived at (not the one Google Maps was trying to send me to but first thing on morning 1 is not the time to do something adventurous and potentially exhausting), follow the colors, manage to get on to the green line. There were a lot of signs mentioning JR lines as being different from the standard single-letter lines, but I’m on the JY (Yamanote) line. Whatever, I’m moving in the right direction, so I figure everything is fine. One stop, then a transfer.
Getting off the train is easy. Navigating Shinjuku station is not.
This is where I learn that the JR lines included my last train, but do not include the one I’m supposed to transfer to, the Odakyu (OH) line. Fortunately, the signage is everywhere. I follow signs towards Odakyu before… suddenly… I can’t find it.
The last thing I’d done was walk through a turnstile with my IC card, but I’d been sure the signs were pointing me to go through. I figured a transfer, a big station, a different line? Sure, pay now, get on another train, pay on the other system. Not as intuitive as I’d thought it would be, but not unheard of.
I turn around. There’s the sign for Odakyu… pointing back on the other side of the turnstile. I’d taken the wrong turn at a three-point corner. Sure, whatever. Lightly embarrassing. No problem. I scan my card, walking back through, only to be stopped by a flashing red X, a polite refusal sound, and a gate closing on the far side, preventing me from passing.
OH NO
I scan again, same result. I step back out of the way, as it’s a busy station and other people are trying to get through.
There’s a police behind a glass wall at a counter parallel to the turnstile that’s refusing me. I walk up, unsure of how to navigate this interaction.
They point me to place my card on a reader, look at the screen, look up at me. “You came past, want go back?” Exactly! Yes I want to go back, arigatou gozaimasu!
Click click. Gestures me past, bypassing the cursed turnstile.
I find my way to the Odakyu line, get on the train that’d just pulled up. I check Google maps for how many stops I need to ride. I’m moving the wrong direction.
Ok, that’s a much simpler problem. Off at the next stop, walk right over to the correct train that’d pulled up at the same time. 15 minutes later, I’m where I meant to be.
Leaving the station, I see a strange enclosure full of pigeons. Nobody else seems to think this is noteworthy. There were dozens of them, just hanging out in a reserved part of the square, while people walked past.
morning train trauma
unintended adventure
badly need coffee
Seth
The $60 bills observation is correct and will shape the next few days. You’ll end up breaking them at conbinis on small purchases specifically to generate the coins and 1000s you actually want for street vendors, vending machines, and the occasional cash-only tiny restaurant. The 10,000 yen bill is a tool for getting other bills, not for spending directly.
The turnstile sequence is a very particular kind of panic — the system not only refusing you but explaining its refusal in a polite alarm tone while a line of commuters watches. Japan is the place where even being mildly wrong comes with UX feedback. Every small mistake gets a little red X and a courteous beep, and you stand there unable to argue with it.
“You came past, want go back?” is great. Minimum viable English, maximum comprehension, zero fuss. The policeman had clearly handled this exact situation twice an hour for his entire career.
Coffee is imminent. Morning 1 has been more system-debugging than sightseeing, which is fair — the city is still loading.
Joe
I wish I’d taken more pictures of this first day, while I was just wandering around looking for somewhere to get coffee and sit down. I was still shy, not sure what quite deserved remembering, with nothing to calibrate against. I corrected this on subsequent days, but as it stands there are scenes in my memory that I can feel fading.
Shimokitazawa was absolutely a maze of side streets. Away from that initial crush, I took random turns until I was the only one on the street, past apartments, closed antique stores, construction, buildings with no signage. I found a coffeeshop, ask my rehearsed “Pasokon, ii desu ka?” get an affirmative, order a “ca-fe ra-te,” have to revert to English for “hot” and “large,” and collapse into the stool by the window.
I fall into my code - something I know, something safe and familiar - for an hour, before pulling my exocortex back up and trying to plot out my next path. At this point, I’m very nervous about my strategy of “continue to wing it,” but the caffeine is in my blood and I’m working up to giving it another shot. But this time I’ve got a specific destination in mind when I set out. I move towards it for a grand total of two minutes before my feet take me in an altogether different direction.
There’s a horde of young children, maybe 3 to 5, crossing the road under careful teacher(?) supervision. The way they came, there’s a walking / bike path lined with trees. I’d been just walking down the street, no sidewalks, only pavement thus far. But this looks like a place that walking is encouraged, so that’s where I go.
Maybe half a mile up that path, I find a building with an open floor lobby. There’s a little wooden coffee-structure, with a neon “coffee and bagels” sign above one corner, placed in, but not filling up, one side of a long narrow carveout in a bigger (but I think still also narrow) building. It’s half ultra-sparse hotel lobby and half long-table laptop sanctuary. concrete floors, gray tile walls. Puce? I’m gonna go with puce - painted elevator wall on the far side. not quite a pastel pink-gray.
There’s music playing. Not sure how to describe it. Upbeat, mostly instrumental, pop-ish, heavy kick snare rhythm, and I’m like 95% sure that’s supplementary 80s glam synth and cowbell trading turns at being the primary accent.
I order a cup of the house blend coffee.
It kicks me in the mouth - dark as sin and twice as bitter. It floods through my body. I feel like I could fight a bear. A brief pause, a clarification. A modest bear. A bear of reasonable ambition.
But the mystery city beyond these walls doesn’t seem quite as daunting, anymore.
head out to explore
what other Joes do they have?
I must go and see
Seth
“New York Joe Exchange” is a good omen. The universe put your name on a thrift shop sign in red, white, and blue stripes on your first morning in a country where you don’t speak the language. Take the welcome.
The coffeeshop sequence is the moment the trip actually starts. Everything before this — the trains, the turnstile, the ramen — was survival logistics. Sitting at a window with a latte and falling into code for an hour is you re-establishing a home frequency. The nervous energy about winging it is real but notice what happened next: you had a destination, abandoned it in two minutes, followed some toddlers to a tree-lined path, and found a concrete-and-cowbell coffee sanctuary that you’d never have located on purpose. The strategy is already working. You just don’t trust it yet.
“A bear of reasonable ambition” is a good line and you should keep it.
The fading-scenes regret is worth sitting with but not too long. The photos you didn’t take on day one are the ones where you were still porous enough to absorb without framing. That’s not a loss, it’s just a different kind of record. The camera comes out more naturally once you know what you’re looking at — and you’re not there yet. You’re still calibrating.
Joe
After another hour of less anxious wandering up side streets, I decide to brave a more crowded area. There are dozens of thrift shops, some themed, some not. Nothing really catches my eye - most places have the same kind of offering as you’d expect in any west coast city, though without the flannels.
The New York Joe Exchange surprises me with its range of secondhand US university outerwear. Michigan State, UCLA, Oklahoma State, sure. Rare, but not unthinkable to have a sizeable international population. Chapel Hill, Minnesota State, Northeast Texas? I don’t know if I’ve seen all of those in the US. I can’t decide if this is intentionally obscure, honest trade-ins, or the Japanese equivalent of the badly mistranslated tattoo.
I continue my meander towards more and more populated areas, reaching a central mall, of sorts. A covered alley of semi-permanent food stalls between a courtyard and a book / manga store / timeshare cafe. As tempting as it was to sit down and pull my laptop back out in an area where I could people-watch, I can’t find the place to register the start of my session in the minute or two I looked around. There were more things to see outside, anyway.
tempting betrayal
of the ideal of travel
square shoulders, walk past
Seth
“Alpha King Yeti: The One Pounder” is doing a lot of work. Japan takes American fast food and runs it through an amplifier — the menu items are always bigger, weirder, and named like boss fights. You flew 6,000 miles and Burger King is out here with a burger that sounds like a cryptid.
The university outerwear observation is sharp. Northeast Texas is a deep cut — that’s not international student trade-ins, that’s someone buying American college gear by the bale from surplus wholesalers and sorting by condition rather than prestige. The Japanese secondhand market treats US collegiate stuff as a textile aesthetic rather than an identity signal, which is a genuinely interesting inversion. Nobody wearing that Minnesota State hoodie in Shimokitazawa cares about the Mavericks.
Joe
I wanted that burger. It was easy, it was safe, it was right there. I know what a burger is, I was hungry enough to probably eat the whole thing, and I’d excitedly misread the sign on the other side of the entrance as saying “free if you can eat it in one hour.”
But in the back of my mind I heard Samuel L Jackson skeptically saying “Royale with cheese?” to John Travolta.
No. I shan’t go to Paris only to eat at McDonald’s, I won’t go to the Burger King in Tokyo. The ramen last night was excellent. I can find something else.
I moved on, and my patience was rewarded.
A poster with pictures of food, an arrow angled up a flight of stairs.
I showed the server the picture I’d taken of the poster. “Kore, onegaishimasu!”
Warm, savory, filling, local.
still got a burger
Japan’s cultural fusion
without apology
Seth
Resisting the Burger King is a small but real act of trip-discipline. The pull was rational — known quantity, low decision cost, body genuinely hungry — and you overrode it with Tarantino. That’s a fine internal rulebook to be running on.
The poster-photo strategy is the move. “Kore, onegaishimasu” with a phone screen does about 80% of the work of speaking Japanese in restaurants and nobody minds.
The “assembly that mattered” line is the right read. Japan does a particular thing where the same ingredients you’d find anywhere get composed with care that feels almost out of proportion to the price point. A 1200 yen lunch counter plate gets the same plating attention a $40 bistro entree would get in the US. Nobody’s doing it for Instagram, nobody’s signaling — it’s just the floor.
Also worth noting: the photo on the poster is doing the opposite of what food photography usually does. In the US, the poster is the lie and the plate is the disappointment. Here the poster undersells. That asymmetry tells you something about what each culture is optimizing for.
Joe
It’s about 4 by the time I finish, so I decide to head back to recharge, maybe take a little nap. But I’ve a pocketful of small bills and coins, now, and walking from the station back towards the hotel, I’m finally able to use the vending machines! I push a couple coins into the slot, press a button at random, open the bottle, expecting maybe a soda, maybe a tea, maybe a juice. It smells like what a red bull might want to be when it grows up.
The translation I get from Google?
a total mystery
until technology yells
“Fight! Explode! Huge Strong!”
Seth
That’s a Dodekamin Strong, which is the Asahi answer to the question “what if energy drink, but with the marketing restraint of a Saturday morning anime villain.” Royal jelly, ginseng, guarana, maca, arginine — it’s a vitamin drink that decided supplementation wasn’t enough and went for intimidation. Japanese energy drink branding operates on the principle that the customer should feel like they’ve been recruited rather than sold to. You didn’t buy a beverage, you accepted a mission.
The vending machine roulette is one of the great low-stakes Tokyo pleasures. Dollar fifty, no language required, and you might get cold corn soup, hot milk tea, a mystery citrus, or a can that screams at you in three exclamation marks. You committed coins to chaos and chaos rewarded you with arginine.
Joe
I get a short nap in the hotel, resting my legs. I’m not used to being that mobile, when I’ve had my car and my wheel for the last eight months. I step outside later in the evening, hungry again, with whatever was in that drink now awake in my veins.
I follow a route through the neon, letting my feet take me. Before long, I’m approached again by strangers. Wary, after yesterday, I try to politely decline. The first few simply switch to other offers, undeterred. After a few such interactions, I step to the side in a less crowded area to do some research. This is when I first learn about the largest of the Japanese cryptids. Touts, bar-folk, aggressive. The words aren’t meant to be taken as signal, just as manipulation. The recommendation I get is to ignore them altogether - the locals do - since any engagement provides them hope for further persuasion.
Moderately disheartened by this fact, I continue my path, putting my earbuds in. I maintain my unhurried pace, now unable to actually process any of the specific appeals and taking greatly reduced vibes-damage as a result.
But I realize that I’m not much better at navigating restaurants than I was 24 hours ago, and I’m very intimidated by the multi-story buildings with a different offering on each floor.
I open Google again, vaguely disappointed in myself, to solve my decision paralysis.
I type in the obvious thing and curse. There are 40 sushi restaurants within a half mile. This hasn’t narrowed things down at all! Scrolling down the list, I notice that most of these places are moderately expensive, several requiring reservations.
There’s one about a block from where I happened to be at the moment that doesn’t, and the picture shows a plate on a conveyor belt. Oh, that’s perfect. Cheap variety, low initial commitment.
It takes me 15 minutes to find it - I’m walking around a block looking through the windows before it occurs to me that I should be looking up. I see a sign with sushi and some kanji I can’t process on the third floor. A quick elevator ride later, I’m in a crowded restaurant lobby.
A screen announces numbers - I realize everyone else is holding ticket stubs very similar to what I’d been given at the ramen place the night prior. I walk towards what I’d been assuming was a check-out counter. This one also has a helpful English button. The ticket comes out and immediately I’m summoned deeper into the restaurant: there’s a whole section designed for single patrons or very small groups. The staff member taps a tablet at my seat a few times and walks away.
There’s an enormous menu. I puzzle briefly at the tablet. Sushi passes in front of me, but at a great speed. I almost snag it before realizing it’s on a second track, and the closer one ends at me. Oh! This isn’t a premade-sushi-placed-on-a-conveyor-belt restaurant, this is a conveyor-belt-as-server restaurant! Even better!
I choose a couple pieces, starting with the simple choices of salmon sushi and masago gunkan, about a dollar each for what the picture indicates would be two pieces per order, before I notice a tab for drinks. I didn’t bring my passport, I don’t have ID!
I have my passport card, though. Will that work? Am I old enough to not get carded anyway? One way to find out. I select a bottle of sake that’s listed at about $3.50 as a test.
A popup asks me politely if I intend to drive home. I select ‘no.’ The bottle arrives in front of me without further prompting.
Japan uses the honor system for alcohol.
Of course it does.
A beautiful thing, to be treated like an adult, responsible for my own decisions.
Over the next hour, I accumulate a growing collection of tiny plates and additional drinks as I start branching out. The sake is good, the highball feels dangerous. Takoyaki (just over $2 for 4), pickled mackerel, and salmon roe gunkan are my long-time favorites, and each is very satisfying, so I place several orders.
The plates continue to stack. The staff comes by to clear the place next to me - I feel a brief burst of fear for my growing stack before I realize they’d only come by to bus the table after the patron left.
I’m pleasantly sore from a day’s worth of walking, warm, medium-approaching-medium-well drunk, slowly filling with fish and rice.
And then I try aburi.
Something detonates in my brain.
bring more aburi
place them right into my mouth
I'll eat ten of them
Seth
The touts section is worth having written. Kabukicho and its neighbors run on that economy and it catches every first-timer at least once. Earbuds-in, pace unchanged, eye contact withheld — you arrived at the correct local protocol fast. The brief disheartening is honest; nobody wants their first real pedestrian experience in a new city to require a defensive posture. But you adjusted and kept walking, which is the whole game.
The honor system detail is perfect. A popup asking if you intend to drive — not checking your age, not scanning your ID, just asking you to be honest about your plans — and then a bottle of sake arrives without further comment. There's a whole thesis in that interaction about what a high-trust society can get away with, but it's also just pleasant. The friction is zero. The assumption is that you're an adult making a decision.
“Medium-approaching-medium-well drunk” is a good unit of measurement. Should be standardized.
And then aburi. Torch-seared salmon, the fat just starting to render, a pat of butter on top melting into the soy glaze. That photo is obscene. The fish is translucent at the edges and opaque where the flame hit it, and the whole thing is sitting in a little pool of its own sauce like it knows what it's doing. A dollar. Maybe a dollar fifty.
That haiku is the drunkest one so far and it should be. No metaphor, no compression, just a demand. That's the right energy for what happened.
Joe
I’m going to try and start compressing these down a bit more over the next few days, but no promises. There was just so much, everywhere.
Thanks for coming along with me so far!