Gaijin Tonic

Here’s a funny poster from a bar in Futamatagawa, Yokohama. It says “Finish your beer. There’s sober kids in India!” An amusingly sarcastic sentiment, but surely it’s lost on most of the customers in this suburban boozer.

The other day in Yokohama’s Chinatown district I discovered tins of alcohol-flavoured sweeties named “Beer Drops.” I’m not entirely sure it’s wise to introduce kiddies to booze at an early age, but perhaps alcoholics could suck on these things at work, to prevent getting the shakes, in the same way chain-smokers make use of nicotine patches.

I spotted another establishment in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa which makes colourful use of the English language.
When a lady wants a hair-cut, she usually looks for a hair salon which is stylish and sophisticated. And what could be more classy than a place named “Guts”?

This is a clothes shop in Shimokitazawa, a trendy area of Tokyo. Presumably most of the customers are incontinent kung-fu fighters.

I’ve found another contender for the mantle of Japan’s most ridiculously named DJ. “DJ Cak” is hot on the heels of “DJ C*nt” and “DJ Pile of Dog Sh*t”

The mysterious “Amazon Club” in Yokohama, near Bashamichi station, is another oddball eaterie I recommend checking out. That is, if you can find the joint- the restaurant is hidden on a quiet, innocuous street, in the basement of an office building. Upon entering, you find yourself in a deserted and nondescript, old-fashioned waiting area, which is decorated in a way not dissimilar to the hotel in “The Shining,” where are small sign instructs you to speak into an antique black telephone, and then the staff will sneak out of a hidden door to usher you inside.

It’s not clear what the hell the theme of the restaurant is supposed to be, (as far as I can see it has nothing to do with the Amazon river.) I’m told it’s an attempt to replicate the spirit of the secretive hideouts that US soldiers frequented in the fifties. It’s a dimly lit, cavernous place full of unusual decorative objects, like Betty Boop statues and pickled snakes in laboratory jars. A large cage containing a giant green statue of the Creature from the Black Lagoon was hanging precariously over my table. A trip to the toilets involves navigating your way through numerous hidden doors, which you have to press switches and buttons to open. (This novelty can wear thin if you’re busting for a piss!)

The food and drinks were tasty, reasonably priced, and the eclectic menu included such exotic delights as cactus and scorpion, which you can enjoy while marveling at the bewildering decor.
All of this adds up to yet another typically demented and fun night out in Japan.

Info:
The Amazon Club
B1 Yokohama Bldg, 3-9 Kaigandori,
Naka-Ku, Yokohama-Shi 231-0002
Tel: 045 664 6101
Website: The Amazon Club

Here’s a picture of a late-night sports bar called “Bar Holic” in Kichijoji, Tokyo. Honesty is clearly their policy.

“Variety is the spice of life,” as the old saying goes, and this holds particularly true in Japan, where a trip to the local convenience store will reveal a mind-bending cornucopia of products, from green-tea Kit-Kats to Chardonnay-flavoured Fanta. The same adventurous spirit is applied to alcoholic drinks.
Anything is possible. In certain watering holes, even such a traditional drink as sake can be bought with a dead lizard floating in the bottle to spice things up. This exotic beverage would explain the phrase “pissed as a newt.”

If that’s not grotesque enough for you, you might like to know that it is not unheard of for the Japanese to drink sake mixed with turtles’ blood. This is considered to be an aphrodisiac, but it ain’t much of a turn on for me, I can tell you! Similarly, deer-penis sake is an expensive delicacy. This is also an aphrodisiac, but presumably not for the deer. It reminds me of a bad joke:
Q: What do you call a deer with no eyes?
A: No eye-deer.
Q: What do you can a deer with no eyes and no penis?
A: No f*cking eye-deer.

Of course, such drinks don’t appeal to the younger generation. They are more fond of chu-hai, which are sickly-sweet alcoholic fizzy drinks.

When I first arrived in Japan I was regularly guzzling this stuff at work, innocently believing it to be lemonade, and wondering why I was feeling woozy and getting headaches in the afternoon. There are a mind-boggling selection of canned chuhais in the fridges of convenience stores in Japan. There are even alcoholic variants of the amusingly-named soft drink, “Calpis”, including the gut-churning “Calpis Fuzzy Navel.”

Recently, enterprising booze-makers at Awa’s have concocted a chu-hai which has a foaming head, like beer. Quite why anybody would make such a potion is beyond me. Presumably they were pissed on their own products when they came up with the concept.

I myself am a beer man, and I am certainly spoiled for choice in that department. Aside from the nationally popular lagers manufactured by Asahi, Kirin and Sapporo, there are plenty of local micro-breweries across the land, producing products with charming names like “Nude Beer.”

In order to compete, some of the smaller companies are using increasingly inventive brewing techniques.
If it takes your fancy, you can buy a chocolate-flavoured beer known as Choco Bear Beer. Pass the sick-bucket please. It sounds like an idea fished out of Willy Wonka’s waste-paper basket.

Or perhaps you’d like to try the revolting-sounding “Bilk” which is a mixture of beer and milk. Apparently it’s a fruity beer aimed at women, and was conceived as a way to use up surplus milk. I balk at the idea of drinking Bilk. I suspect Bilk tastes like cow-piss, but you may be surprised to learn it is not made by the Calpis company.

Even the kiddies are catered for, with the non-alcoholic “Kodomo No Nomimono” (Kids’ Beer) ensnaring consumers while they’re young.

Once these youngsters develop a thirst, as they grow they can move on to Choco-Bear Beer and Calpis Fuzzy Navel, and then onwards and upwards until they themselves are adults and can design and market their own hideous and bizarre moonshine.
So there you have it- just a few of the wild drinks on the shelves of Japanese liquor stores and cocktail bars. If you were to buy all of the above-mentioned drinks and pour them into a large cauldron, it would make the most sickening and lethal party-punch known to mankind.

A pleasant person at Nipponster has interviewed me and put it on their site. Very flattering for my ego, but I can’t help but think they’re misguided maniacs for choosing yours truly!
You can check the interview out here, in two parts:
Nipponster Interview Part 1
Nipponster Interview part 2

Me and a buddy went to a Japanese hip-hop club the other day, drawn in by the flyer above. Can you guess why?
I have to say, the women in this club were throwing down some eyeball-scorchingly raunchy dance-moves. Evidently they’d seen a couple of sleazy “2 Live Cru” videos on MTV and taken them way too seriously, but I wasn’t complaining. These dance-hall divas were also doing some impressive acrobatics which resembled a jaw-dropping mixture of Flashdance and the Chinese State Circus, throwing themselves all over the room, body-popping, bouncing off walls, and waving their arses in the air. The only ladies who weren’t dancing were in wheelchairs, or hobbling around on crutches, apparently injured while attempting overly-ambitious dancefloor stunts.
Luckily I had my trusty disposable camera at hand!

*Note the crutch behind the couple dirty-dancing in the last picture!