No Maps for These Territories

YEAY!  Life sized beer cans!  Complete with fake foam!

Welcome…  to the cavern of the BEER GODS.

They had paintings illustrating that women have been getting men drunk on beer and taking advantage of them for at least 100 years in Japan.

The essential ingredients of beer, being held in some sort of bizarre kryptonite-based prison.

Back when Egyptians discovered beer, they would get shitfaced and have to carry each other home.  Apparently.  I can’t read kanji.

Here’s my favorite part!  The tasting room!

Of course, since it’s Japan, that means that tastings are done by getting a ticket out of a machine.  We decided to go for the sampler.

Who knew that Sapporo made red ale and a wheet beer?

Yes, that’s beer-based jello.

Lots of it.

Next, we headed off to Harajuku to check out the shopping areas, and because we wanted to see the legendary 4-story tall 100-yen Daiso.

Seriously, what is this product?  A fake swan head that you can attach to your daughter’s elegant ballerina outfit..  while a perverted child molester behind her pretends that the swan head is his phallus.  I’m so confused.  At least it’s only 100 yen.

What a tasty looking almond and dried fish snack mix!

Want to go green?  Stop using power, and shred those papers by HAND, Nancy!

Sadly, trucker hats have made their way from the douchebags of the US to the douchebags of Japan.  Everywhere you look, there’s huge trucker hats with complete nonsense on them in english.  Like this one, stating “You are the one.  All I need is you.  It goes to meet.  SO GREAT.”

Please do not fornicate on the ashtray.

Or on the package of band-aids?

Pink Latte is a store in Harajuku that is ALL PINK.  With the body of a pink airplane inside the store.  Full of pink goods.

Later that night,  I headed to Shibuya Kaikan, which is a legendary 50-yen arcade.  And MAN was it awesome.  It ended up being six stories of gaming goodness, every floor having a different game theme.

The outside of Shibuya Kaikan.

Lots and lots of Gundam fighting games.

I believe these were for playing majjong, but I mostly wanted to show how comfortable they looked.  Big fat ass leather chairs, and an ashtray.  What more do you need?

The rhythm section was nearly empty, much to my delight.  I ran around and tried nearly every one of these games, some of them were brand new and not in the US yet.

Like this one, where you need to touch the colored squares as soon as they light up, to music.  It’s pretty neat.

Pop’n.  This shows the audience perfectly, solitary otaku, and schoolgirls.

Halflife 2, the arcade game?  Whaaa?

Here’s the retro room.  Look at those awesome old games!  Mario in a cabinet!!

See you guys later, I gotta go play some Bubble Bobble, baby.

Today we head out to check out Yoyogi park, right next to Harajuku, which is infamous for having greasers dancing, and people dressing up and having a blast, every Sunday.   People come out and picnic, dance around, get drunk, and people watch.  I’ve seen videos of the guys dressing as 50′s greasers for years, and I always wanted to see it in person.  I wasn’t disappointed!

We accidentally headed into the shrine section of the park first, which was a lucky accident.  There’s all sorts of gorgeous stuff in there, including a massive wall of sake casks.

We should have known we were in the wrong place, this park was far too quiet!

Ah, now there’s the crazy stuff.  Under a bridge, a whole bunch of guys were playing music and doing choreographed drum playing.

Also, it just happened to be Earth Day.  Whoops.  We looked at the fairgrounds, but decided we could get enough of that back in San Francisco, and headed back in search of greasers.

Found them!

These guys were heroes, it was a hot day, and half of them were wearing leather pants.  If you want to see some videos of them in action, we did a Noobtoob video about it.

I think this guy was the king of the greasers, he had by far the largest hair.

These guys had a different take on the 1950′s, they had poodle skirts and colored jackets, and they were doing the Hop, and lots of other group dances.  This circle was really fun to watch.

We started calling this look “host hair”.  It’s like emo on crack.  All the guys who work at host bars, which means that they entertain women and con them into buying overpriced drinks in exchange for company, have this hair.  It’s surprisingly popular, despite its silliness.

Some of the people dressed up on the bridge in Harajuku went all out.

Including this guy.  I have NO idea what he was supposed to be, but he still haunts my dreams.

Next, off to Ikebukero for italian food.  We were a bit skeptical, but Toshi promised us that it would be delicious.  And it was really quite awesome.