Yesterday we met up with Naoko’s friends Tomo and Chie. Naoko runs a Japanese tea cafe on Vancouver Island we _love_. Whenever we’re in the area we drop by for some great tea and sushi. We’ve become friends and so when she heard we were heading to Tokyo she set us up with Tomo and Chie. We had such a fun day!

Having locals show you around is always the best way to see a place. We started off in Shibuya and we peppered them with questions about fashion and music and how the city works. Shibuya is a centre for fashion conscious kids. Tokyo is very fashion aware and people obviously spend a lot of money on their clothes. We went to the trendiest mall in the trendiest part of Tokyo and it was like a missing puzzle piece. Here was where everyone under 25 in Tokyo was being dressed. The mapping of clothes on the rack to people we’d seen all month on the street was near one-to-one.

From there we headed to Setagaya where Chie had grown up. She knew about this great little bakery. The place was nearly invisible it had some writing on the windowless wall but no distinct bakery feel. Apparently it had been a sushi place previous which I have no problem believing. They only make Japanese style baked goods so we picked up a variety of dumplings with a variety of stuff in them and then headed to the park for a picnic.

On the way we stopped off at a coffee place to pick up something to drink. This place did all their own roasting and I had an amazing espresso.

The park itself was really nice but their kids area was mind-blowing. It was a lot like you’d imagine Peter Pan and the Lost Boys live. It was a wooded area with kind of haphazardly constructed wooden structures with tarps draped over them as slides. Someone had started a camp fire and kids were lighting branches on fire and swinging them around. Other kids were destroying bits of wood with machetes while other kids climbed around on top of an old full-sized steam engine.

It was chaos and heaven! The sort of place that in North America is becoming more and more scarce. It was especially the opposite parenting philosophy of San Francisco. Here it was the law of the jungle and in SF it’s an over coddled padded room. It was refreshing to see.

After that we headed up to a craft bazaar that was happening. Here we found the Moneygami guy! We’d seen his stuff somewhere before but still can’t quite place where. He does origami with money. Often giving famous presidents, prime ministers and scholars wicked hip-hop hats. His stuff is great! He was putting on little courses in moneygami and selling his books. I sat down and turned a 1,000 yen note into an awesome little hip-hop Hideyo Noguchi.

While we were there we made up some Hexatubes and passed them around. They went over very well. SInce paper folding is much more common thing in Japan people seemed to get the Hexatube much more quickly here than in Canada or the US.

After that we perused the crafts on display. I got my portrait burning into wood which was pretty cool.

By then it was time for dinner and we retired to a bitching little Izakaya. The food was _so good_. Hilights for me include the avocado and tuna slices as well as the kimchi tofu. We all chatted about life, Japan, Canada, how things differed and how they were the same. It was a great evening. I even tried out some of the better Japanese whisky. It was very smooth. Possibly to a fault.

Dinner was great and the company was even better! One our best days in Japan for sure!

We met Justin Potts at the Tokyo Game Show and agreed to meet up another day. The day we chose happened to be the same day a Typhoon hit Tokyo.

We hadn’t been to Akihabara yet this time around and it’s close enough to walk to so we started the day walking out to Akihabara. It’s about an hour walk and was very pleasant. We picked up some snacks along the way and kind of haphazardly wandered towards Akiba.

Akihabara is nuts. It used to be the centre of Japan’s electric component industry. It’s still a great place to build robots but since the electrical industry has all wandered over to cheaper countries it’s burgeoned as the nerd capital of Tokyo. Giant six story arcades, manga cafes everywhere, and it’s Tokyo so shit gets pretty weird.

One of the famous things about Akihabara are the maid cafes. Cafes where your waitress dresses like a French maid and serves your coffee in a very demure manner. There are cafes where girls dress up in old-timely Japanese clothes, as cats, you name it. One of the duties of the maid is to pound the pavement and flag down potential customers. I bet on a pleasant day in summer flagging down nerds on the corner is a fine occupation. In the middle of a Typhoon it is less pleasant. But there they were! The dampness probably only adding to the moe.

As the typhoon got into full swing the umbrellas started to snap. I wore a BC style rain jacket and was impervious to the rain and the wind. In Japan the umbrella is pretty much the beginning and the end of rain protection though and typhoons eat umbrellas for lunch!

There is a certain joy in watching umbrellas flip inside out and the fabric tear off snapping spokes like twigs. I don’t know what it is. You would think the waste of materials and money and the knowledge that the owner is now going to get well and truly drenched would make it a sad sight. But it’s not. There is something magical about an umbrella being destroyed. Something unfailingly kinetic and dramatic.

Every time we stopped at a corner I’d watch for likely umbrellas and secretly root for the wind to quickly change directions and take their owners from behind. I took such glee in the sudden *poof* of an umbrella exploding followed by the battle weary owner’s accusative stare of betrayal at their once trusty umbrella.

I don’t know why umbrella exploding is so much fun but the local news even dedicated several minutes to umbrella-exploding montages whenever they could get away with it.

Sarah actually went through four umbrellas herself. Every time she lost an umbrella we would pick up a damaged-but-not-wrecked umbrella that had been discarded. She’d truck it along until it exploded and find another one.

So there was definitely some havoc breaking out but we were still keen for dinner with Justin so we decided to head to the train station a little early just in case. Well turns out that wasn’t necessary because the trains were simply not running. The subway was at the moment but there was no guarantee that it would continue to be at the end of the night so it looked like dinner was out.

Too bad! We ended up walking home again which was really fun. The rain and the wind was going like crazy but it was very warm. Neither the rain nor the wind had a chill to it at all so it was a very blustery, wet, but warm walk home. It was fun to watch the city cope with the weather. Clearly typhoons are not an unknown here. There were sandbags outside store’s doors the day before and everyone was pretty much getting where they needed to be. There were even people riding bikes while holding umbrellas. I dunno how they managed that one.

One of the reasons we get a place near Ueno is because it’s close to Ueno Zoo one of our favorite places in Tokyo. It’s probably the best zoo we’ve ever been to… I’m not sure who it’s really competing with on that front. I don’t think any other zoos really come close. And at 7$ it’s also one of the most affordable things to do in Tokyo.

Right as soon as we got into the Zoo we saw a change. Previously the adorable little Red Pandas had held the position of prominence near the entrance. Now the Red Pandas have been banished to the bowels of the bear section (they aren’t really in bowels, it’s a very nice area they live in now). They have been roughly displaced by their bigger, showier cousins the _Giant_ Panda.

Pandas are a zoos dream really. Rare, interestingly coloured, interesting history and cultural importance. Plus they are an active, human like, showy creature. So there was quite a crowd around the Pandas but it was still really cool to see them because they are rare, interestingly coloured, have interesting history and cultural importance. Plus they are an active, human like, showy creatures.

Moving on from the Pandas it seems like everything was having babies! There was a baby black bear, a baby kangaroo, baby cats, baby gorilla(!) baby everything! The great thing about youth is it makes you jump around doing stuff and harassing your elders all the time. Which is pretty fun to watch!

I also really like the Marmosets because they’re the only animal in the zoo that has any interest in humans. I don’t know if it’s my facial hair or that I’m always trying to mess with them but they seem to really like me. I could get a little group of them all following me around with their eyes. I like it when animals do this because you can make it difficult for them. You can peek back and forth around a branch or make them swivel their heads back and forth if they are looking behind them. Just some very simple interaction like following your head with their eyes and you can invent an inter-species game. Pretty fun.

I’m incredibly impressed with Ueno Zoo’s ability to strip away walls. There’s a really big lake filled with giant Lilly leaves. There are some big trees and little islands to one side on the lake which the Ring-Tailed Lemurs get the run of. The Lemurs have no walls, I guess they just don’t like to swim. We sat and had some hot chocolate while watching the Lemurs cavort around their domain.

They also have sloths in the trees growing in the middle of the path and Japanese Raccoons in the trees growing inside a high spiraled walkway. They also have Cockatiels outside with no cage. Last time they appeared to have flown away. This time they were present! Actually they don’t let the raccoons climb around in the trees anymore. They must have escaped!

The tiger also put on a hell of a show for us. Stalking around its enclosure and right up to the glass eyeing all the gawkers. You could easily imagine catching sight of one in the jungle and shitting yourself in terror.

So, well done Ueno zoo! We might even go back. There was apparently a baby Black Rhino we didn’t see!

The main attraction for us in Tokyo is the Tokyo Game Show. Yes because it’s a huge famous game expo, but more because I am presenting Incredipede at Sense of Wonder Night!

SOWN is a two hour show at the Tokyo Game Show showcasing odd and wonderful games. It’s a bit of a tonic for the main expo hall. The main hall is all big-budget games which tend to be pretty conservative in their design. If you were spending twenty million dollars you’d be conservative too. I was invited to present Incredipede at SOWN so that’s why we’re spending a month it Tokyo before leaving to meet Ron and Arlie in the Philippines.

The expo floor itself was pretty fun. Like I said, it was mostly dilled with shooters and rythm games and sequels to shooters and rythm games, but there was some good stuff too. A bunch of asian colleges had really nice booths with a half dozen games each. Their games were reliably bizarre and crazy. Not polished at all, but wacky as hell. So we spent most of our time playing those games.

We also played the new Final Fantasy (what? 13? I dun remember) but playing a game that is all plot and menus is pretty hard when you don’t speak the language. We did spend a bunch of time playing Soul Calibur 5 because I can apparently spend any arbitrary amount of time playing Soul Calibur. The Playism [playism.jp] booth was pretty damn rad too. They had a bunch of indie games that were really fun. We ended up hanging out with the playism guys as well as the indies showing at their booth.

One of the stand out oddities was BrainKiss. Two people don headbands and clip a thing to their ear and then stare into each other’s eyes. The game then tells you if you are interested in each other. One of the guys who works on it was showing it to us and he spoke perfect English. He was noticeably nervous about a couple playing it. I don’t think he had high confidence that it would return the verdict we wanted. But we braved the machine and stared longingly into each other’s eyes for fifteen seconds. Sarah apparently loves me but I didn’t do so well :/ I blame my nervousness about my talk!

The talk itself was really fun and went really well. I’ve written more about it here.

The day after the talk we met up with Pierre and his girlfriend Chinatsu. Pierre moved to Tokyo to teach English about four years ago. We met up with him last time we were in Tokyo (about four years ago) and haven’t seen him since! It was great fun hanging out with them. We started with lunch and then hit up Kinokuniya books. Kinokuniya is my favorite book store in SF. If you visited us in San Francisco then I probably dragged you there. There aren’t many of them in the world, a few in Tokyo and then one in Japan Town SF, but their collection of art, design, photography, and architecture books is amazing. The one in Shinjuku we went to did not disappoint. Among the treasures we were flipping through an amazing frog photography book considering art styles for Incredipede.

Chinatsu knew about a Nepalese fair that was going on in Harijuku so we jumped on a train and headed out there. It was really fun. There must be a fair Nepalese population in Tokyo because there were a lot of vendors with only Nepalese characters on their signs. I walked up to one of these and spied some mutton stew that was fantastic. I get bored of Japanese food pretty fast so this was a really nice switch. Also there was wrestling! High flying, pile driving wrestling! So that was pretty fun. We also took a nice walk in the park to cool down from all the choke-holds.

After that we wandered the streets of Tokyo. This is definitely one of my favorite pass times. We walked past lots of interesting places. Including an invite-only jewelry store, a vw micro-bus with a pizza-oven in it (serving lunch at a farmer’s market), a giant lit-from-inside paper mache samurai being paraded around the street being followed by three huge Taiko drums plus lots more. Tokyo is an amazing city. We stopped for coffee in a Blenz (Canadian themed!) before heading off for dinner. Pierre and Chinatsu showed us this amazing neuvo hippy,Indonesian curry place called Magic Spice in Shimokitazawa. Here check out their website, it’s a pretty accurate representation of the mood they have going: http://www.magicspice.net/

The food was really terrific and it’s one of the few places in Tokyo you can actually get things spicy.

After dinner we wandered into an _amazing_ store called Village Vanguard. It blew my mind three separate times. It was kind of like a party nick-nack shop you might find in Canada but instead of having chincy crap it had amazing stuff. Including: the wooden keyboard I’ve been lusting after for years (mind blown), a Theo Jansen build-your-own-Theo-Jansen-thing model kit (mind blown) and several Japanese copies of “1000 games you have to play before you die” which happens to contain Fantastic Contraption so I got to show Chinatsu and Pierre my game in print (mind blown).

By that time it was 11:00 and after all the roaming around we were pretty tired so we said farewell for now and headed home. That was yesterday. Today we’re taking it easy and just writing a lot of emails and blog posts. Tomorrow? God who knows in this city.