Roppongi has quite a bad reputation. Located about 15 minutes from Shinjuku it has become some kind of foreigner centre. Go there for a night out and you will be propositioned by a collection of people promoting bars, strip clubs and even “massage” parlours. Once a girl grabbed my hand and said massage 3 times before I could wrestle my hand away from her.

This kind of thing has resulted in me giving Roppongi a bit of a wide berth when having a night out. Recently though I had to go there to get myself a Chinese VISA. As I had to get there ridiculously early I found I had plenty of time after to explore. To my shock I didn’t find people jumping out at me promising cheap drinks, cheap live music or cheap love but a rather nice bookshop. So after a bit of exploring I found a couple of interesting places that anyone who comes to Japan should check out.

F1 Pit Stop Cafe

I have been quite a big fan of F1 for the last 20 odd years, following the ups and downs of the drivers with much interest but I never expected to see an F1 themed restaurant. Inside is a treasure trove of F1 memorabilia, a load of celebrity signatures and even a Red Bull F1 car.

I came in at lunch time and the lunch menu had an optional salad bar and dessert but oddly every dish I could see on the menu was pasta. Is pasta particularly popular in F1 circles? Is that Bernie Ecclestone’s favourite? Why only pasta? Whatever the reason, I felt they missed a trick with the naming of the food. Why call something Spaghetti Bolognese, when you can call it David Coulthard This is my Year Bolognese? Why not have Ferrari Team Orders Lasagne or Champion’s Wall garlic bread? A missed opportunity indeed.

One more thing about the food is that they serve large portions for no extra cost, which is a bit of a bargain but I was not so hungry so I chose regular size. I was shocked that 2 different waiters had to check 4 times that I didn’t want large. Very odd, despite this strangeness the food was very tasty and I yummed it up.

Around the restaurant they had a number of TV screens showing an F1 race from 2009, can’t remember which it was though. There was also a shop were you can buy a large amount of overpriced F1 souvenirs.

As I left the bar I noticed that someone was eating steak and chips. Maybe I should have turned the page when reading the menu.

Official Website

Ludia’s Bar

This is an unusual one. Ever play any Dragon Quest games from Square-Enix? If you are from the UK then maybe not, only about 2 have ever been released there. Here in Japan however there have been countless Dragon Quest games and spin-offs made, it is really popular here. Despite never playing the games myself, I ventured in here and they really have gone the whole hog with it.

It is built to resemble a Tavern as seen in about a million fantasy stories but was a bit smaller that I expected and is a standing bar only. The food and drink all are given difficult to translate names and themes based on the video games, I especially liked the slime shaped niku man I ate, a clever little idea. On the bar there are a load of turkey legs and strange looking ball things under a heater, which is the last thing you expect to see when you walk in anywhere. The bar is also decorated with various swords and trinkets which I guess are from the games.

The staff (well the female staff anyway) are dressed like serving ladies from the games and here it all takes a maid café like turn. Maid cafés are hardly my favourite places in the world, the girls are basically paid to make chatter with you, smile and looked nice. One asked me in Japanese if I had played Dragon Quest 4, it has funny and interesting characters apparently.

For what it is worth, the food was rather tasty but I didn’t eat too much, I had just eaten a slap up (regular sized) meal at the F1 café so I was fairly full. I do think the menu is a little pricey though, my beer was 1000 yen. On the way out of the bar I got a loyalty card (hmm) and a slime fan for those hot summer days (yay).

Official Website

So these are just a couple of places of interest in Roppongi, I’m sure there are plenty more, I heard people say Tokyo Midtown is nice but I think it is just a posh shopping centre with a load of expensive shops and a Starbucks. Even though I was wondering around in the middle of the day, I felt I couldn’t quite escape Roppongi’s seedy underbelly, I often saw vans marked Escort Location Service with a seemingly endless number of girls in kimonos exiting them and walking somewhere.

Anyway, where ever you happen to be, go exploring, you just may find something interesting.

Have you ever thought about the front of lift doors? Those imposing grey portals are, in a way, a waste of space. This is not communist Russia, it’s nice to have an injection of colour instead of boring grey. Tower Records is one of many shops that have started to put adverts on their elevator doors.

Most are inoffensive enough, at the moment there is a nice one advertising the 70th anniversary of Puffin Books and a little while ago, there was one showing Unit-01 from Evangelion destroying Shibuya Tower Records. Which is an interesting way to advertise a DVD (and Blu-ray!) disc.

Yesterday, while waiting around for friends in Shibuya (which seems to be something I have to do a lot) I popped into Tower Records and was greeted with this:

Here the guy is saying something along the lines of “Do you want me to stop?” while I think the girl is saying “When will you stop?”. Then at the bottom it states in English “How long does a kiss take?”

Hmm….

Move along 1 lift and you can see this:

Here the guy seems to be saying “But I dare not stop.”, while the English at the bottom says “But I don’t let you stop”.

Hmmmm……

CONTEXT PLEASE TOWER RECORDS!

No wonder manga gets such a bad press sometimes in foreign countries with stuff like this plastered all over lift doors. I’m sure to those who know the story and characters presented here this is all sweet, innocent, lovely and bunny rabbits or whatever but to me it looks like someone being sexually assaulted in a lift.

Which is not what I want to see while shopping on a Sunday afternoon.

Recently a taiyaki shop opened near my house. Given what it sells, I really don’t think the location is the best. I don’t give it more than a year before it closes down. It does give me an excuse to talk about taiyaki though.

Taiyaki is basically made with something similar to waffle batter traditionally containing anko sweet bean paste inside. For some reason it is baked into the shape of a fish (hence the name taiyaki or “baked sea bream”). It is really quite tasty and when I first bought one I don’t think I even knew what anko was so I thought there was some kind of Chocolate in there.

Recently I think taiyaki stalls and shops have been getting more and more creative and been putting thing such as custard, chocolate and the incredibly delicious strawberry cream. The aforementioned local taiyaki shop even sells savoury ones, some simply have a cheese filling but others go the whole hog with bacon, sausage, lettuce and mayonnaise, sometimes they even sell okonomiyaki filled ones. This has unfortunately lead me to have whole takoyaki dinners, the bacon, egg and mayo taiyaki followed by a yummy strawberry cream one for dessert. This combination cannot be good for me!

Taiyaki are very famous in Asian countries and often crop up in the most surprising of places. In fact, a children’s song released in the seventies called Oyogi! Taiyaki-kun (Swim! Taiyaki) is the best selling record ever in Japan. The story of the song is about a taiyaki who escapes the production line to the sea and has a good time but in the end gets caught and eaten by a fisherman. I guess the story resonated with salary men of the time who wished to escape there own dreary existence but in the end they knew that it would be too difficult. The last line of the song goes something along the lines of “I’m just a taiyaki, this is my fate”, I guess the salary men of the seventies felt the same way as they were being stuffed into the train during the morning commute.

These days people are constantly taking photos, it’s just so easy with the likes of digicams and camera phones, everywhere snap, snap, snap. With all this amateur photography going on, I picked up pretty quickly that the Japanese also say cheese before taking a photo.

Armed with this knowledge I was very happy that during my first trip to Odaiba, a Japanese family asked me to take their picture. So I put the viewfinder up to my eye and shouted “Say CHEESE!”.

I got nothing, no response, no reaction.

Slightly embarrassed I took the photo, gave them the camera back and made a hasty retreat. You see, Japanese people do indeed say cheese, or more accurately “Hai, Chizu!”, before they take a picture. However it seems to be for no apparent reason. Saying cheese is an attempt to get the person whose picture you are taking to smile but in Japanese the ZU sound will only ever get people to make an O with their mouths and all look as though they have just solved a difficult problem.

Although it seems impossible, there is a way to get Japanese people to smile when taking their picture. All it requires is a simple maths problem. Just say “1+1 is?” (ichi tasu ichi wa?) and people will reply “2!” (ni). The “ni” should create a nice wide smile in your quarry.

Ironically if you tried this in England people would just say “two” and look as though they had just solved a difficult problem.

The iPhone has become mega popular in Japan, it seems as though almost everyone has one. Softback, the sole carrier of the iPhone in Japan, has made significant ground on its rivals because of Apple’s swanky device. This is despite (according to my friends) having much worse coverage.

DoCoMo, the number one mobile operator in Japan has decided to hit back with a multi-celebrity led advertising campaign. Who should they get in an attempt to muscle business back from Softbank?

Squeaky clean J-pop starlet (and guilty pleasure), Kaela Kimura.
Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader.
Tom Cruse’s mate off The Last Samurai, Ken Watanabe.

That’s just about the strangest combination of people I’ve every seen try to sell anything. Also they all seem to be saying: “I am <insert name here>’s mobile phone”. It doesn’t really seem to make sense to me.

Anyone ever seen an odder mix of people advertising a product?