Gaijin Tonic

Hi! Excuse the infrequency of my writing lately (I’ve been out of the country for two weeks and my computer has broken. Sob.) Hopefully this PC problem will be sorted out soon. In the meantime, check out these videos of random drunk Japanese people!

I’m currently hunting for a new flat in my beloved Tokyo (which is no mean feat: finding someone foolhardy enough have a giant, accident-prone foreigner as a tenant is proving to be the mother of all headaches.)
Here’s a picture of one of the apartment rental agencies I’ve encountered. If anyone has any idea why “Ball Eggs” might be an appropriate name for a real estate agency, please let me know!

Electronic forces are conspiring against me this week. My PC stopped working the other day, and chose to beep at me incessantly instead, like R2D2 malevolently taunting me. I suppose it was about time my wretched old computer kicked the bucket- I’ve had it for four years, and it was second hand even then. It looks like the kind of thing you might see a serial killer hunched over in the “Saw” movies- splattered with food, with multi-coloured wires spilling out like a terrorist’s bomb.

This development is irritating, because only last week I bought a new keyboard, after dropping an open can of beer onto the previous one, rendering it sticky and useless. And now the computer itself has gasped its dieing breath. No more internet radio, downloading movies and music, MSM messaging, or Skype. My Gollum-style, shut-in existence has been disrupted. My lifeline to the outside world has gone, forcing me stumbling, blinking, out into the sunlight.

Being utterly computer illiterate, I resolved to fix the problem after a late-night drinking session, by kicking the conked-out contraption around the room.
This didn’t help, so the next morning I called a company to pick it up and fix it. The phone call, in itself, was very complex and gruelling in my broken Japanese.
They told me it was a RAM problem. (Don’t know what that means, but I suspect it has nothing to do with woolly, horned animals.) Apparently the motherboard is mother-fucked, and the best they can do is salvage what they can from my computer’s memory and stick it onto one measly DVD.
There were thousands upon thousands of songs and movies and TV-shows saved in that magic box, along with six years of photographs and writing. Almost all of which is gone for ever. Sob!

Jesus, I hope the PC repairman doesn’t find any sexy pictures. I don’t want to become the next Edison Chen!

Since I’m too broke to buy another computer yet, this means that, for the time being, I’ll be writing this blog on stolen hours at work (My job is rather undemanding, so it shouldn’t be a problem- I’ll just pretend I’m working, by writing stories in Microsoft Word then cutting and pasting them into here when no-one’s looking) or in the local internet cafe. At least Japanese internet cafes are relatively luxurious, with private booths, reclining chairs, and a selection of free drinks.
I’m currently sat in a booth now, surrounded by boxed-in insomniac internet gamers, and drinking some delcious free “Calpis”- a white, yogurt-tasting potion that looks as it sounds, (like cow piss.)

Santa Claus seems to have fallen on hard times in the dry season after Christmas. I spotted Old Saint Nick, covered in filth, rummaging through dustbins in Maedai-Mae in Tokyo. Clearly desperate for cash, Santa has taken to busking with a saxophone.

When bar-owners scratch their chins and try to think up appealing names for their establishments, they usually want words which seem inviting and up-beat. Bright and breezy words like Cheers, that bring forth images of parties and good times, names that would draw in customers like moths to the flame. Not so in Japan!
Take, for instance, Refrain. When you want to let off steam and go a little nuts at night, the last word you want to hear is “refrain”. It’s a word you’d normally see on a list of petty rules on the wall of a swimming pool.

“When you are in this bar, please refrain from eating, talking, drinking, smoking and chewing gum. Strictly no fun allowed!”

Speak Low is a bar with a name that would be more suitable for a library. I can imagine a waspish woman sitting behind the bar, hissing “shhh!” every time you open your mouth to speak.

There is another bar in Tokyo called Prison.

What less pleasing environment could you imagine for a Saturday night party, than a cold, sterile jail cell? A sign on the website says “welcome to prison.”

That’s as terrifying a phrase as I’ve ever heard. I wonder if, for the sake of authenticity, there is a tattooed psychopath waiting to attack you in the toilet. Don’t drop the soap when you’re washing your hands!

Despite the ominous names, I’m sure all these bars are perfectly fun places to hit. Names can be deceptive. I mean, look at Goofy’s Bar. With a name like that, you’d expect the walls to be covered with Disney pictures, whoopee-cushions on the seats and a buck-toothed guffawing moron behind the bar, whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”.
Wrong! Take a look:

The owners of this Tokyo bar really weren’t thinking too hard when they decided to call it Liq Nuts, were they?

Not long after I’d first arrived in Japan, I inadvisedly got wasted on a school night and the next morning I had to get up for work, feeling like a rabid dog in its death throes. Fortunately I lived directly opposite a 7/11 which was full of potential remedies. I asked my room-mate’s Japanese girlfriend what was good for hangovers. She wasn’t sure, but wrote a request for a hangover cure on a piece of paper, in Japanese, for me to present to the convenience store staff.
I lurched across the road and handed my request to the bemused teenager behind the counter and he ran and found me a small glass bottle of elixir, which I glugged down, there and then. I quickly got over the urge to puke and was soon feeling just about ready to face the world.

I kept that handwritten request and made good use of it over the next few months. The same crumpled piece of paper was presented to a succession of spotty teenagers in convenience stores that year. In fact, it is still stuck to my pin-board, withered, faded and brown.

The Japanese are renowned for drinking heavily, and they have their own unique expression for “hangover”: “futsukayoi”, which means “drunk for two days.” You might like to exaggerate the level of your hangover by saying “mikkayoi” (drunk for three days) or “yokkayoi” (drunk for four days) etc.
Since businessmen are expected to get utterly trashed with their boss on a regular basis, there are plenty of hangover cures readily available in the shops of Japan.
What I was usually given by the convenience store staff were “genki drinks”. These are small, 100ml glass bottles of various potions which relieve all kinds of different medical complaints, from colds to loss of libido and, of course, hangovers.
Look out for the two bottles pictured below. They’re very effective at stopping booze-induced gut-rot, nausea and puking. A few minutes after necking one of these magic mixtures you’ll be bouncing around like Super Mario:

The sickly concoction pictured below is called Lipovitan D, and it was the inspiration for Redbull. It relieves physical fatigue and gives you boundless energy, but corrodes your esophagus like battery acid. (Having said that, I’m partial to the occasional Vodka and Lipovitan D cocktail at parties- guaranteed to give you the endurance and stamina of a Terminator, and make you equally as destructive.)

A popular pre-emptive hangover cure is to make a ramen shop your last port of call after a pub crawl. Gulping down a steaming bowl of ramen noodles before you hit the sack will nip your hangover in the bud.
Another age-old Japanese remedy is the humble miso soup. The nation’s favourite soup can be bought at most cheap cafes and restaurants for a couple of hundred yen, and seems to soothe the stomach and head in times of need.

Mari at Watashi to Tokyo endorses the miso method, and also recommends drinking green tea, eating grated daikon, or pushing pressure points.

I find that the amusingly-named sports drink “Pocari Sweat” makes you feel slightly less god-awful in the mornings by re-hydrating you and replacing lost sweat (hence the grotesque name). This is particularly effective if you’ve spent the whole night thrashing around on a dance-floor in a Tokyo nightclub.

The fruit, “Kaki” (persimmon) is considered a hangover cure in Japan. According to Metropolis magazine, their “combo of fructose, vitamins A and C and minerals is the secret”. The vitamins help metabolize the booze and break down the nasty toxins. Chomp on a kaki in the morning, and it will have the same effect as spinach has on Popeye.

Another natural remedy is kudzu, which is a kind of vine in the pea family. Powdered kudzu root has been an ingredient in traditional Japanese hangover cures for centuries. Desperate alkies take note- kudzu also suppresses cravings for booze.

Umeboshi pickled plums are also thought to relieve the morning-after problems. The pyric acid in umeboshi breaks down the booze in your body, settles your mangled stomach, and breathes life into your liver.
Asylum.com has some useful advice on post-piss-up umeboshi-munching: “For a normal hangover, bite off about a quarter of a plum and keep it in your mouth until it dissolves. For a whopper hangover, herbalists recommend popping a whole plum into your mouth. Continue to suck on it for about an hour after the plum has dissolved.”

The website What Japan Thinks conducted a survey of Japanese people to find their preferred hangover cures. The internationally accepted technique of drinking water topped the list, and sleeping came second. So, the familiar methods still seem to be the most reliable.

For the last couple of years I haven’t needed any of these remedies, though, because I take “ukon” before I go out drinking. Ukon is a miraculous turmeric supplement pill that you take before boozing, and it stops you getting a hangover. You could guzzle down a litre of whiskey and still wake up feeling as fresh as a daisy. Invaluable!

Anyway, as everyone knows, the best thing for a hangover is drinking heavily the night before, so I’m now going out to do just that.

St Patrick’s day is always a big event on the drinking calendar, and in Tokyo, the city of convenience, it will be celebrated a day early, on March 16th, so people can get smashed on a Sunday instead of a Monday. There will be a parade at lunchtime on Harajuku’s Omotesando street, which invariably seems to feature some Irish wolfhounds, a few baton twirling cheerleaders, a brass band, a giant inflatable pint of Guinness, a man inexplicably dressed as Sherlock Holmes with a dyed-green handlebar moustache, and a drunk football team in green T-shirts.
This is a great day to visit the city’s Irish pubs, which are guaranteed to be packed with cheery, red-faced revellers swigging stout, whiskey or lager with green food-colouring in.
Here are some pubs you could try:
Dubliners, which has live Irish bands, and is offering shooters of Jamesons and Baileys for 500 yen (in Shinjuku: 2F Shinjuku Lion Hall, 3-28-9 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-Ku, Tel: (03)3352-6606; or in Shibuya: 2F Dogenzaka Center Bldg, 2-29-8 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-Ku, Tel: (03) 5459-1736)
Paddy Foleys, Tokyo’s oldest Irish pub, which has Irish dancers (B1 Roi Bldg, 5-5-1 Roppongi, Minto-Ku, Tel: (03) 3423-2250).

The stories I’ve written that consistently get the most hits are one about a penis-themed festival in Kawasaki, and one called “beer and bikinis” about Japanese beer posters.
This is largely down to people Googling the word “penis” or the word “bikini” and then finding my site. Now, I can see why people might be drawn to something called “Beer and Bikinis,” as they are two very fine things, but the story isn’t so great. To compensate, I made a much better post featuring lots of women in bikinis holding foaming glasses of beer but, bafflingly, no-one ever reads that! I’m curious to see what happens as a result of me writing a post called “penis and bikinis.”

Today is Valentine’s day. In Japan this means men are lovingly showered with gourmet chocolates and gifts, and women get absolutely nothing at all. Yes, the roles are entirely reversed, like in some weird parallel universe! At home I’d be lucky to get anything more than a card on February the 14th, but that’s not the case here. When I was working for a conversational English school, Japanese housewives and schoolgirls would indulge me with boxes of expensive chocolates and home-made cakes. While this is brilliant news for me, it’s an utterly crap day for Japanese women.

The concept has been freakishly warped en route to Japan. March the 14th is “White Day,” which is when men, in turn, are expected to buy presents for the women who gave them chocolates. By then, of course, there’s no risk involved! A guy can give a gift to a girl, safe in the knowledge that she is keen. There’s no embarrassment, rejection or hurt pride (unless, of course, you’re a Japanese girl.)
So, in a curious twist on traditional romantic roles, the men take on the timid, submissive role, while all the boldness, risk-taking and chivalry is done by the ladies. Gotta love this country!
And they wonder why so many Japanese girls run off with foreign men.

What am I doing tonight? Well, my boss has decided to have a leaving party for a co-worker, and I have to go. On Valentines day of all days! Clearly he has all the romantic instincts of a nine year old misogynist. If I had called my ex-girlfriend in England on Valentine’s Day and said “Sorry, let’s cancel dinner tonight, I’m going out drinking with the boss!” I would have arrived home to find my clothes and belongings strewn all over the front lawn, shortly before having my balls ripped off with a pair of pliers. Evidently, Japanese wives are endlessly patient. And at least, if hubby spends the most romantic day of the year out boozing with his pals, it means the wife doesn’t have to spend all day slaving in a hot kitchen, baking chocolate cakes.
Ah, Tokyo, city of romance.