Gaijin Tonic

The opulent Prince Hotel in Shinagawa offers an epic three-hour all-you-can-drink deal in their swish 39th floor bar, so me and my similarly opportunistic companions regularly leap at the chance to eviscerate our livers in the lap of luxury. Fun fun fun!
We head up to the snazzy establishment and knock back expertly-made cocktails while seated in a cosy semicircular sofa facing the window, gazing out at a magnificent panoramic view of the city as the sun sets and gives way to a million twinkling lights, our view of the skyline slowly blurring as we get progressively more smashed.

Ordinarily you’d have to sell a kidney to afford a single beer in a classy place like this, but the Prince charges a hilariously small fee for the mammoth drinking session (2300 Yen). I think the plan had been that customers would order heaps of food while imbibing, and the expensive grub would bump up their checks dramatically. Evidently the management hadn’t bargained on penny-pinchers popping into the nearby McDonalds before hitting the bar. The Prince Hotel waiters can get a little snooty when you ask for a seventeenth round of cocktails without having ordered so much to eat as as a bowl of peanuts.

Despite our obvious lack of class, my aspirational pal Jonny fancies himself as something of a high-flying international playboy, and loves to bask in the swanky ambience. Despite being perpetually broke, he masquerades as a wealthy visiting jet-setter, sipping Martini and smoking cigars.
According to Jonny, the Shinagawa hotel bar is the perfect place for romance – you can bring a date and dazzle her with the glamorous setting and breathtaking view, and the fast-flowing booze will double your chances of getting your leg over. If you can’t find a date to bring, never mind - the place is full of ladies on vacations or business trips, hoping to make use of their king-sized beds. Despite his lofty pretensions, Jonny never has two coins to scrape together, so for a bargain-basement lothario such as he, the cheapness of the drinks is the icing on the cake.

One night, however, proved less than economical for Jonny.
That evening, as we drank like lords, he exchanged lusty glances with an attractive girl at the next table. Eventually he made his way over to her, and after a few hours of canoodling and innumerable cocktails she suggested booking a room in the hotel. Blind drunk and hornier than a sex-starved bonobo, Jonny thought this was an excellent idea. ‘Since we’re already in a hotel it seems silly not to take advantage of the rooms,’ he reasoned to himself, grinning in anticipation as they made their way to the front desk.

After a night of intense pleasure, the next day he was woken abruptly by a ringing telephone. Blearily surveying his surroundings, he was surprised to find himself in a large, luxurious suite. Since he was alone in the massive bed, it would seem the girl had sneaked off in the early hours. It immediately struck him that this night of fun was was going to cost him a small fortune. He answered the phone with trepidation and was informed by a member of the hotel staff that, since the check-out time had long since passed, he’d have to pay for two nights. Gulp. The resulting check was similar in price to a second-hand car. So this is how the Prince Hotel makes all it’s money. Genius.

Info:
Shinagawa Prince Hotel, 10-30 Takanawa 4-Chome, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 108-8611
Tel: 03-3440-1111

Here’s an amusing liquor-related invention from Japan - a USB key for computers, in the shape of a sake bottle. Guaranteed to distract alcoholic salarymen from their work, and constantly keep the destructive thought of booze alive in their minds. Smart thinking!

This was made by SolidAlliance, a mental company who also brought us such genius contraptions the “Kobe Beef business-card holder” and the rice “omelette mouse cover.”
You can read more about them at Akihabara News

If a cave-based shrine to Frankenstein is your kind of place, you’ll like “3 Bozu Paradise”, a Frankenstein-themed joint hidden in the shadows down a dark side-street near Yokohama station. It’s an eerie eaterie that should please anyone who prefers Hellraiser to Hello-Kitty.

The whole place is abundant with imagery of Frankenstein’s monster. Everywhere you turn are pictures and statues of the famous flat-headed freak of nature and his big-haired bride. It’s very narrow and poky inside, with low, cave-like ceilings, so you might feel self-consciously similar to Frankestein’s hulking monster, as you try to navigate your way to a table without breaking anything. The most scary thing about the place is the threat of bashing your head on the low ceilings.

The murky interior is decked out like a medieval dungeon, with rock-like walls, and bars on the windows. It’s pretty realistic, although I don’t think classy food was served up to prisoners in real medieval dungeons- if history books are anything to go by, jailers preferred whips and chains to hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. If you want to get picky, I can’t imagine Frankenstein’s monster eating salad with chopsticks, either.

Still all this is quickly forgotten once you order a drink and start soaking up the spooky atmos. Cocktails with names like “Dracula’s Tears” are served up way past the witching hour, in test tubes, mad scientist-style.
And so, you can kick back and have fun, under the leering gaze of a green reanimated corpse statue.

Info:
3 Bozu Paradise

Taiyou Building 1F, Minami Saiwai 2-20-12, Nishi-Ku, Yokohama City.
Open from 5pm to 4am
Tel: (04) 5320 3066

One of the first and most fantastic words any foreigner in Japan learns is “nomihodai” which means “all-you-can-drink”. Loads of restaurants and bars offer this deal, usually two or three hours of imbibement for a couple of thousand yen. I often find myself goggling in incomprehension at signs promising a night of drunken debauchery for the price of a couple of cans of supermarket-brand lager. “Drink as much as you like” quickly translates as “drink as much as is humanly possible, as quickly as possible, until you start seeing lizards, soil yourself and forget how to use your legs.”

Here’s an example of how a typical evening at one of these places unfolds.
As a rosy-cheeked nomihodai virgin I myself got extremely carried away when me and a mate happened upon the deal in a quaint little izakaya (traditional drinking-hole) near my flat. After obligingly leaving our shoes at the door and parking our bums on the wooden floor, we begun the difficult task of trying to decipher the menu. Somehow we managed to discover the all-you-can-drink deal among the squiggles, and our jaws dropped. We couldn’t believe our luck and eagerly signed up for a ninety minute session, ordering and quickly polishing off a pitcher of beer and then ordering another.

Deciding this was way too amazing to keep to the two of us, we quickly called up our recently acquired friends on our mobile phones to come and join in the frolics.
Within the hour, much to the chagrin of the staff, there was a group of at least twenty of us squeezed around the one small table, gleefully draining drinks like thirsty camels after a trek through the Sahara. Glasses went up and down like yo-yos and the room was filled with loud voices and sweaty, inebriated faces.

The staff looked perturbed to see all these gaijin taking over their establishment, like a plague of alcoholic locusts, not ordering any food, eating only into the owner’s profits with their prodigious liquor-intake. When the owner had introduced this nomihodai offer, he hadn’t reckoned on the likes of huge, bloated Jimmy swiftly necking an entire pitcher of screwdriver in one enormous gulp.

We soon began making new friends on the other tables. Japanese people, often reserved by daylight, quickly lose their inhibitions after a few beverages and become red-faced and cheery. They happily invited us to join their bizarre drinking games. After a few hours of this, come closing time, it was anarchy. The Izakaya was still teeming with wasted wastrels singing and dancing on tables, a karaoke machine has materialized from somewhere and someone was butchering Aha’s “Take on me”. There were several untouched glasses and pitchers of booze on the table and the incensed manager was pulling his hair out in frustration- Izakaya staff are always annoyed to see full glasses left on the table. Invariably customers have eyes bigger than their bellies and order way too much. I, too, hate to see anything go to waste, so, struggling against the tide of vomit rising up my throat, I heroically necked an entire pitcher of Moscow Mule in one go (which later, on my knees in front of the toilet bowl, I regretted.)
I also smuggled another pitcher, full of beer, out of the bar, under my jacket. It’s no mean feat to tie your shoelaces while balancing a pitcher of booze under your arm, I can tell you, especially while smashed. We then staggered to the nearest Karaoke bar to continue the shenanigans.

Now, reading through this, you might be cringing and thinking, “hey, scumbag! That kind of behaviour is just not on- while overseas you should be acting as an ambassador for you country, not like a delinquent dipsomaniac!” True, true.
Newcomers to Japan often exhibit this outrageous lack of decorum, naively assuming everyone in Japan is getting up to exactly the same hi-jinks as them. Some ex-pats complain that these kind of obnoxious escapades makes all foreigners look bad, but I’d like to think that Japanese people don’t tar all overseas visitors with the same brush just because they saw me staggering, drunk, with my trousers around my ankles, shouting incoherently.

Anyway, few days later, after I’d recovered from the apocalyptic hangover from hell, I decided to go back to the Izakaya hoping for more fun. But to my disappointment I discovered that they had stopped offering the nomihodai deal. I wonder why.

You can still buy beer in vending machines on the street in some places in Japan, but miraculously the kids don’t take advantage. Imagine if such an easy, no-ID-required method of obtaining beer were available in the West- there would be belligerent, shitfaced youths slumped in every street corner, in pools of puke and piss, shouting inanities, rising occasionally to kick in the machines for another beer-buzz. When I asked some Japanese teens why they don’t do this they replied “Oh, that’s because we can’t. It’s against the rules.” Simple as that.
Japanese teens, god bless them, don’t get up to anything worse than giggling in public, (and that’s only the real hardcore rebels.)

Elderly Japanese folks are often whingeing about the state of young people these days, cataloguing gripes about their appalling conduct. Chief among the adolescents’ heinous offences seem to be “sitting on the ground in train stations” (gasp!), “speaking loudly on the telephone,” or…wait for it… “applying their make-up on the train”. Heaven forbid!
Well, if that`s the worst of it, the old wrinklies should count themselves lucky. Compared to the sociopathic, pizza-faced delinquents we have to endure in the rest of the world, Japanese teenagers are sweethearts.

Hip-hop, especially of the domestic variety, is huge in Yokohama. In fact, it’s pretty difficult to avoid, blaring from the windows of newly pimped-out cars, or from the beatboxes of teenagers in over-sized sportswear break-dancing with their reflections in shop windows. J-Hop (or Nip-Hop) is the most happening scene right now. The most popular venue is the evergreen “Yokohama Bay Hall”, the place to be for fans of the amusingly-named local scenesters such as Butcher, Rude Bwoy Face, H-Man, and Moomin.

In Bayhall, you can marvel at Japan’s uninhibited hip-hop fashion at it’s most shameless. Expect lots of girls in flat-caps and terry-towelling jumpsuits, and boys in back-to-front baseball-caps, super-sized jeans and absurdly voluminous T-shirts (thanks to these guys I can buy clothes which actually fit in Japan.) A lack of restraint, and the absence of vocal “player-haters” in Japan has led to a flamboyant street-style of it’s own. It’s OTT and old-skool, and Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav, not previously respected for his sartorial taste, seems to be the style-guru of choice.

There’s an almost entirely Japanese crowd in Bayhall, but it’s a good-natured, friendly scene, despite the moody gangster affectations. Although the rappers have copied the posturing and delivery wholesale from their US counterparts, the gangster ethic has been lost in translation. Most of the lyrics are about love and life-affirmation. For example, one popular local act is called “Murder One”, but they’re more likely to be found in Tokyo Disneyland than in court for a homicide trial. I bet they don’t even litter. Real Japanese gangsters have curly perms and listen to enka.

Info:
Yokohama Bayhall

3-4-17 Shin-Yamashita, Naka-Ku, Yokohama-Shi 231-0801
(045) 624-3900

Visitors to Japan tend to fall prey to the power of booze rather than narcotics, thanks to the scarcity and astronomically high cost of drugs in Japan. That, and terrifying rumours of ludicrously harsh prison sentences for drugs offenses, in jails where inmates get whipped senseless with rubber hoses and have large objects shoved up their bums by cackling sadist guards. Yikes.
So I was surprised recently when a group of English teachers employed by NOVA corporation, were busted for cocaine possession. And I’d like to know how they can afford coke on a teacher’s salary!

When I first came to Japan a few years ago, magic mushrooms were readily available in “head” shops throughout the country, but annoyingly they were banned in time for the 2002 world cup, due to fear of hallucinating foreigners wreaking havoc.
Still, if you’re really desperate, there is readily available a repulsive-tasting legal liquid E concoction. It’s sold in bottles claiming to contain massage-oil, by furtive-looking vendors on the streets of Tokyo. This stuff makes you go nuts for about twenty hours, so you may find yourself boogieing until the next afternoon in sordid after-parties full of recently clocked-off nighclub hostesses and strippers, (which isn’t so bad!) But, on the down side, you also get chronic diarreah.