Alan lubin lets the toy decide

Tip number three: Never drop your guard.

If you walk the pavements of Tokyo frequently enough - you will be hit by a bike. The Kamikaze spirit of the Japanese lives on with these two wheeled moving accidents.

No matter if you are on a pedestrian crossing or the pavement, always remember that bikes have right of way and they will often be ridden by somebody with absolutely no spacial awareness. This combined with a dangerously high centre of gravity due to a shopping basket overloaded with shopping, children and dogs - piloted by a cyclist engrossed in coversation on a mobile phone - is your recipe for spending the rest of the week with rubber burns up the back of your legs.

Unhindered by the fact that the cyclist is riding a fully laden womens shopping bike (men and women) these maniacs can reach impressive speeds ensuring that in your time in Tokyo - you will be hit by a bike. And it will be your fault.

Tip number four: Avoid Shinjuku station.

No matter how unavoidable the situation might seem. Never, ever try and and navigate your way around Shinjuku station. That way madness lies. It would take an award winning feat of signage to help even the most ardent traveller direct their way around this hell hole and they didn’t even come close.

There are around 15 different train lines that operate out of what must be the biggest station in the world - and trying to follow the signs is nigh on impossible since they are intermittant at best and more probably just random. The style of the signs completely changes depending on which part of the station you are in and I am almost certain that in the few hours that the station closes at night - mischevious employees alleviate the bordom by switching them all around.

Tip number five: Always wear good socks.

In the UK can afford to be blase about the standard of your hosiery. As laundry day approaches you can, quite rightly, assume that wearing some tatty hole ridden socks will go unnoticed as you can wear your shoes from the second you leave home until the moment of your return. Not so in Japan. In Japan wearing substandard sock wear is like playing a clothing based game of Russian Roulette, with opportunities for humiliation scattered throughout the day.

At any given point in time an uplanned trip to somebodys house, a trip to a restaurant and even a visit to an office can result in the discomfort of trying to walk around whilst gripping the front of your sock with your toes, in order to hide what everyone else in the room is painfully aware of. We all know that everyone in Japan takes their shoes off indoors, of course we do. But as a westerner you will do it with rubbish socks on. And you will only do it the once.

With Unazukin out of reach and my life back in order I have a paradox of sorts. I am able to blog but have no Unazukin to blog about for at least until the end of the week. In view of this I will be using this brief interlude to pass on my limited knowledge about Tokyo until normal service is resumed. I wrote it down in a notepad when my Vaio bit the dust. I feel like Mork. Hello Orson this is Mork calling Orson.. I have learned much of this bizarre and wonderful land..

Tip number one: Never use a taxi.

No matter how late it is. No matter how well known the destination. Never ever use a Taxi. The driver does not know the way. The only qualifications you need to become a taxi driver in Tokyo are:

1) a short back and sides.
2) a pair of spotless white gloves
3) a passenger door that opens automatically.
4) possibly a driving licence.

Taxi drivers in Tokyo, in general, have absolutely no idea where they are going. Unless you can direct the taxi from the place you entered the cab to the place you want to go - you are stuffed. The double edged sort is that whilst taxi drivers have no idea where anything is, they will be to embarrassed to admit it. So when you ask the driver to be taken to the well known central location he will say “Hi Hi” (trans: yep no problem climb in) withouth alerting you to the fact that he is already lost.

After approximately 5 minutes the chin stroking will begin. He will ask you to repeat the destination. Alarm bells will start to ring - but not loudly enough for you to say “stop I am getting out”.

After 10 minutes of pretending that he knows how his Sat Nav device works you realise it is just for show as he hands you a street map of Tokyo along with a magnifying glass so large that it makes you wonder if he is avoiding other vehicles by using “the force.”

After 15 minutes he will phone a friend and then another friend but to no avail - none of them know where Mark City in Shibuya is either. Then the penny drops - all his other friends are taxi drivers too.

After 20 minutes he will stop the car, get out and try to ask people in the street while the meter keeps on ticking. This is a pointless exercise because of tip number two.

Tip number two. Don’t ask a stranger for directions.

Why not? In the short time I was there I learned to say it in Japanese. “XXXXX doco desuka?” - so what’s the problem?

The problem is that unless the place you are looking for happens to be the place where the stranger lives or works - they are unlikely to know the answer. In my brief glimpse into the Japanese way I got the destinct impression that people in general don’t really get too involved in anything outside of their specific area of interest. And that most probably excludes the place you want to visit.

Now this might seem a little stereotypical - but try it and see. Go to a part of Tokyo - lets say Shibuya - and ask which direction you need to walk in to get to Shinjuku. In my unscientific estimation there is a 95% chance that your stranger will not know the answer. It is, however, a 100% certainty that they will be too embarrassed to admit this and will point in a random direction - hoping the you will just go away and stop making them feel so uncomfortable. If you ask four strangers it is entirely possible, within the space of a few minutes, to get different 4 people to point to the four different corners of the earth.

More golden Tokyo tips tomorrow.

Ok.. things have been a bit sketchy of late - Unazukin got confiscated by AG and to be fair that was the lightest punishment i could have possibly received. After all - at almost a moments notice - i upped and went to Japan and stayed with a random girl who emailed me via the site. The Vaio blowing up was probably kharma for my selfish decision. I say my decision - although as always I did put the question to Unazukin and.. anyway i’m getting a little bit ahead of myself.

A while back I got an email from a girl called Akiko (or Akichan to her friends). She told me that she was a huge Unazukin fan and told me that if I was ever in Tokyo I should pop by her Unazukin themed cafe for an ice cream. I wrote back saying that Tokyo is top of my list of “must visits” but that it’s a little bit out of my price range. We corresponded for a while and it turned out that any friend of Unazukin is a friend of hers and if I could get the flight - she would sort me out with somewhere to stay. No funny business like - just a place to crash.

I casually checked the prices of flights. I wasn’t seriously entertaining the notion, but was surprised to see that Air France were doing a special for £400 quid.. Now with my accomodation sorted - that is no more expensive than a week away in a B+B in Torquay (and probably cheaper than a trip to Scotland if my previous journey was any kind of indication). Given that I work freelance, I figured could probably still work on the plane and in Tokyo whilst enjoying the city in my down time (thanks again Sony).

I consulted Una and given that she would be going with me at no extra charge - she jumped at the chance to visit her homeland. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject with AG. I thought of loads of different ways of trying to dress it up - but there was no reasonable way to say “A random girl wants me to visit her on the other side of the world and I have consulted my toy who says that i have to”. So I just came out with it.

She wasn’t thrilled but to be honest she knows me well enough to know that when I want to do something I cannot be talked out of it. I don’t mean to say that in a way that makes me come across as a “mans man who knows his own mind and does what he wants when he wants” sort of guy. I’m not. I’m not proud of being so stubborn but there is something mildly obsessive compulsive about my make up that eats away at me if I am not doing something that I have set out to do. Really, I get quite odd about it. Not quite rocking backwards and forwards muttering.. but not a million miles from that either.

So Japan then.

I’ll be brief about the place in general. A million people have probably been there, had a proper look round and explained it better than I ever could. I on the otherhand spent most of my time trying to buy and fit a new hard drive into this erratic laptop. My work got behind and i’m still catching up - this combined with the confiscation of Una are the two main reasons for my equally erratic blogging.

Akichan was a lot of fun. Her cafe (if I were to be a little more accurate i’d probably call it a booth or stand - probably got lost in translation) is in Nakano district and is very cute. It is resplendant with it’s Unazukin banners and Unazukin cutouts surrounded by fairly lights riding in a wheelbarrow being pulled by a squid on top of it all. It sold what we would probably term as an eclectic mix of delicious foodstuffs. The three main items where Ice Cream, Crepes (french style) and Squid balls (balls of squid - it wasnt that odd)

What do you know - i have a pic..

And let’s just see a close up of the Squid nonchalantly pulling a wheelbarrow filled with fairylit Unazukins..

The crepes and ice cream are amazing. God alone knows how the good people of Nakano stay so damned thin. Nakano is an interesting place - the jewel in its crown for sat Otaku’s like me has to be Nakano Broadway which has an infinite number of comic and toy stores. I was hoping they might have rare limited edition Unazukins there (although buying one would have put my Una’s nose out of joint) but the toys in Nakano Broadway were, in general, of the more adult variety. Granted, some of them were fairies but they were a little more anatomically correct. Well correct for somebody who has had some serious breast augmentation.

So as I said at the start of this ramble, Una was taken from me on arrival into the UK. Not by customs and excise attmepting to see if i had tried to exceed my allocation of school girl underwear by trying to force a used gymslip inside of Una’s delicate shell. She was confiscated by an angry AG who gets annoyed enough by my bizarre life choices without having a plastic scapegoat to pin the blame on.

Oh my god. I’m finally able to get back and use my blog.. I’ve been out of action for two completely seperate reasons - both of which the blame rests firmly at the door of Japan.

The first reason is that the fifth and last ever Sony Vaio that i will ever buy - totalled itself. Again. I am now on my 3rd hard drive this year as this Vaio attempts to beat my last one to claim the coveted “Shortest Life Span of any PC owned by Me Award”. I thought that last years Vaio that managed to stop working completely after just a year was a temporary blip but it looks like it is the continuation of a downward spiral in build quality that has this time resulted in me losing all my data twice in just over 6 months. Anyway - it has took me ages to get every thing back on its feet. It wouldn’t have taken so long if it were not for Japan dealing a much kinder but never the less devastating blow to my blogductivity. I will tell you more later in this post.

First the soup. Oddly enough it was whilst editing this short video that my laptop bluescreened and welcomed me back with the now familiar message “Operating system not found”…

As explained in my last post - I took Unazukin to our local Asda and then into the tinned food isle. I allowed her free reign to pick 5 ingredients with which to create an entirely original soup to be named in her honour. Below follows a ground breaking recipe that is set to change the way that the world looks at cuisine.

Unazukin soup

1 tin Marrowfat peas
1 tin peaches (in syrup)
1 tin mushrooms (creamed)
1 tin Tellytubby spaghetti (Thomas the Tank engine will do if you can’t get Tellytubby)
Sardines (tinned)
2 tsp chopped parsley

Place the ingredients into a pan, stir and then blitz with a hand mixer. Heat gently until it starts to boil and remove from heat. Ladle into bowl. Sprinkle chopped parsley. Enjoy.

The video recipe can be seen here.

Why doesn’t it show me eating it? Because it stank. I was retching as I was stirring it and the noxious scent wafted from out of the pan. I had planned on eating it but it really made me gag.. Sorry. But I’m no stuntman.

Anyway - the second reason that Japan has been lowering my productivity on all things blog based? I’ve just spend the last few weeks there. I received a mail from an Unazukin obsessive who claimed to have an Unazukin themed bar and invited me to come and stay. It seemed like a bit of an oddly generous thing to do but then who knows maybe she asked her Unazukin (probably as the option that she didnt want to take) and it told her to do it. Some sort of bizarre universal Unazukin conciousness, that I have aluded to before, is what probably told my Una to advise me to accept..