Check-out of Hotel Kawase was at 10am so I carried my bags to my new hostel, Hostel Bedgasm. I had booked this hostel weeks in advance so that I'd be sure to have a decent place to stay in Tokyo for at least part of my stay.
Visiting part of Ginza yesterday reminded me I had yet to see Nissan Crossing, which had been recommended to me by someone I'd met in the State Library of Victoria. Emerging from Ginza Station, the showroom wasn't difficult to find.
The showroom has only four cars on display on the first and second floors, but the real reason I had come was for the cafe hidden in the back of the second floor showroom. They have a latte machine there that will "print" a picture the baristas take of you into the crema atop your latte. Of course, I had to try it, and here's the result!
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| LOL |
For ¥400, it's a fairly inexpensive gimmick.
Above the Nissan showrooms are Sony showrooms, and I had some fun playing with the fancy cameras and headphones. But for anyone who has been visiting multiple massive electronic stores in different parts of the world like I have, your eyes begin to glaze over pretty quickly at all the different models that are all just marginally different/faster than the previous one.
From the Nissan Crossing building I roamed the same street until a Yamaha sign caught my eye. Yamaha Ginza is a 13-floor building where the bottom floors are dedicated to showcasing instruments, sheet music, and CDs and the top floors are concert halls and music classrooms. The selection there is pretty incredible. As far as pianos, they had a Yamaha CF4 on display, as well as an 88-key Bösendorfer that I didn't catch the model of. And, of course, dozens of other less premium grands, uprights, and player pianos. Electric keyboards were a separate floor. Wind and percussion instruments had their own floor, as did stringed instruments. The Yamaha CF4 was selling for ¥12,000,000, and there was even a ¥1,200,000 violin bow for sale and plenty of rare, large, or otherwise impressive ¥1,000,000+ instruments. I tried out both the CF4 and the Bosendorfer. I liked them both, but the CF4 felt more familiar underneath my fingers.
From Yamaha Ginza I stopped by a toy store, but again failed to find an Otamatone. From the toy store I got pizza from a British-themed restaurant beneath the street before looking for a metro station I could get back to the Hibiya Line from. Along the way I got lost within the massive Shiodome underground walkway among a sea of salarymen and career women coming home from work. Eventually I found a metro entrance that I could transfer from to Iriya Station, near my hostel.
Back at the hostel I met some other guests that were going out for a live J-POP performance and I decided to join them. The venue, Pasela (or "Pasera" -- depending on if you go by the name on the building or the one on their Facebook page) Resorts Akiba Multi Entertainment, is located in Akihabara.
The entry fee was ¥1500, which gets you entry, a "voting coin", and a credit slip worth ¥1500 to be used on food or drinks. The concert was on the 7th floor and was one of the most unique experiences I've had thus far in Japan. Photography was prohibited, but their website has some good photos of the venue and what the show looks like. The performers that night were part of a collective known as Alice Project. Alice Project employs bands of young Japanese women that lip sing to idol metal pieces. Idol metal is a subgenre of Idol music and culture. What that means in practical terms is that young, kawaii Japanese women perform dance and music pieces on stage that are a blend of J-POP melodies and heavy metal riffs. The audience is nearly all Japanese men, some young, some old. The video below is one of the most popular songs from the main act that night:
I hadn't expected anything like it when I heard "We're going to a J-POP concert", but seeing it live was awesome. The crowd activity was way more organized than any other concert I'd previously attended. Each girl wears a colored sash and colored glow sticks are given out to audience members. When (for example) the blue sash-colored girl has the spot light during a performance, all the members with blue glow sticks will run to the base of the stage and thrust their sticks into the air. There were tenor-filled chants the audience would shout out in sync with the music, almost as if they were background singers. I had no idea how they knew when and what to chant; it was all very impressive.
Here's another performance by a much more famous idol metal group, Babymetal. The piece is called Gimme Chocolate!! The lyrics are all about how bad they want chocolate but they're afraid it will hurt their figure.
I find this all extremely entertaining, but it's hard not to find a tint of perversion to pubescent girls dancing and singing on stage for vast crowds of mostly men. But it's just one small part of Japanese popular culture which, given the high value placed on kawaii (cuteness) in everyday things, seems a not too unnatural outgrowth.
The voting coin they give you is supposed to be used to vote for your favorite girl. It was only later that I found out that the voting results are tied directly to each girls salary.
After the concert we went back to the hostel, then trudged through the rain to a bar a 15-minute walk away. I never got the name of the bar, but all drinks and kebabs on their menu were only ¥280 each exclusive of tax. Of course, we absolutely pulverized ourselves on the delicious appetizers and drinks and the bill still came out to ¥1700 each. Oh well 😋
It was an extremely fun night!
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