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The last time I visited Japan was in December 2010, with my fiancee & my friends. These are some of the fun things I learned from my trip. Enjoy.
1. When you go to a cafe & sit outside and/or next to the window, you will be given a blanket to keep your lap/legs warm (only during Winter season).
2. Most restaurants/cafes have a designated basket with a cloth cover at each dining table. When you are seated, you can put your purse and/or shopping bags in the basket to keep your bags clear from the aisles & to keep them from getting dirty.
3. Hotel rooms will recycle your bed sheets & towels for 3 days unless you put the “change my sheets” card on your bed. This saves a lot on cleaning & water!
4. When it rains, all shops/stores will put a plastic cover on all of your shopping bags so they don’t get wet. (This is the one thing I wish our stores had in the U.S.)
5. Dudes are paid to drive big trucks with giant billboards around town while blaring the most annoying KPop music by the popular Korean boy band 2PM. (Do you notice that I don’t like the band 2PM?)
6. During Christmas time, even though you are overseas, you will NOT escape Western Christmas music…You will hear it EVERYWHERE. You will also hear “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” & Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” about 50 times a day, while not really sure if the locals even know what the lyrics mean.
7. If you go shopping at a major department store, the sales people will try to sell you everything & anything. They are insanely pushy, but polite as hell about it.
8a. I love the clothing brand A Bathing Ape, & I’ve noticed that ALL sales staff at every single Tokyo region Bathing Ape (a.k.a. BAPE) store are friendly & cool. Although they can’t speak much English, they can understand it & try to speak it to make you feel welcome. (I have also found that the sales staff at the BAPE stores in NY & L.A.(which is now closed) are also friendly/nice.)
8b. Every single time I go shopping at a Tokyo region Bathing Ape store with my fiancee, we will get special treatment, we will make friends with at least one sales clerk. I don’t understand this, but I guess my fiancee just appears to be outgoing & perhaps that is why others tend to gravitate toward him & can talk to him easily…even when there is a language barrier. (P.S. If you are ever in Shibuya, Tokyo….look up a guy named Saito at the BAPE store in Shibuya. He is one of the coolest store clerks I’ve ever met in Japan.)
9. You will see cheesy American restaurant chains all over Tokyo (eg. Outback, TGI Fridays, Denny’s, L&L Hawaiian BBQ, El Torito, Sizzler), but don’t expect crazy lines out the door. You will only find that mind-numbing queue at Eggs ‘N Things (which came from Hawaii). The whole Western food trend has come & gone already. (Plus, I’m a little biased & think that the Japanese spin on Western/American food tastes so much better than the way it’s cooked back home.)
10. You will hear Western Pop music everywhere compared to Japanese Pop music (which is not played nearly as much as Western Top 40/Pop). I couldn’t escape the songs “We R Who We R” by Ke$ha or “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz when I was in Tokyo.
11. The new latest invention in Japanese technology: Otohime. Every public bathroom stall will have a device that will make a running water sound for a more discreet bathroom experience. You just press the button on the device & it will make a flushing noise to mask the sounds. You can eve buy this in a handy pocket device for travel and/or public use.
12. Most public bathrooms will have a “regular” stall with squat-in-the-ground toilets or “Western” stalls with sit-down toilets. I thought this was pretty cool…that some rather old fashioned traditions still remain.
13. Fruits are not as expensive as you think they are. It’s not as if every grocery store in town will have that $40 watermelon you saw on reddit.com/ebaumsworld.com. Ok, so compared to American grocery store prices, they are pretty pricey ($6 for 2 apples). However, they are much more beautiful in color & shape, much more sweeter, & bigger in size compared to our U.S. market fruits. So, it’s almost like getting more fruit for your money. Plus, the only $40 fruits you will find are the organic ones, grown on some special farm, & comes in a fancy wrapped box that are supposed to be for gift giving. Those fruits you will find at super luxe department stores like Matsuzakaya or Mitsukoshi…or at fancy grocery stores that specifically sell organic goods.
So, one of the opportunities I got to do while I was staying in Shanghai was to go to a night club event. The China division of Reebok (the fashion line) along with event promoters S.T.D. & KOZM Agency held an Asia-wide club tour called Angree Yung Robotz Tour. This event was, no doubt, created from the genius mind of VERBAL (½ of the Japanese pop band m-flo & 1/4 of the Japanese rap group Teriyaki Boyz), who is also the chief Creative Designer of Reebok in Asia. This club tour was to promote the debut album (Mademoworld) of popular Japanese DJ/singer/fashionista Mademoiselle Yulia (who is also signed under VERBAL’s record label) & also to promote VERBAL’s already released solo album “Visionair”.
I have never been to a night club in China, & this was going to be my first experience. I’m so thrilled (for lack of a better word) that I got to spend my first experience with VERBAL…my idol & my inspiration. To be honest, this whole night was not planned at all. It just happened by chance…really unbelievable chance. Here’s how the story plays out:
My fiancee & I were walking around the Jing’an district & were looking for a place to eat lunch. Our crazy awesome superfuture travel guide had recommended 2 restaurants for us to try: Bull Noodle (a soup noodle place) & Bistrow (a classic hamburger joint). We ended up eating burgers at Bistrow (which were out-of-this-world delicious), & while we were heading out of the restaurant I noticed a basket of flyers by the front door. I noticed a cool postcard with an interesting robot drawn on it, so I took one…thinking that I’d just keep it for the cool artwork. Upon further inspection of the postcard, I noticed the name VERBAL written in large font at the top of the paper. I also recognized Mademoiselle Yulia’s name as well. That was when the gears in my head started turning & I knew I had something interesting in my hands. I quickly turned to my fiancee & showed him the flyer. Needless to say, since he is as big of an m-flo fan as I am, he was completely stunned. How could one of our most favorite/respected/idolized artists be performing in our loaction & within the exact dates we will still be in town? How is that even possible?! Would you say it was a miracle? Perhaps, but it was as though an angel flew down from heaven & bestowed a golden ticket upon my grubby little hands.
Skipping all of the parts inbetween, let’s jump to the night of the club performance. The beginning of the night started of fairly standard. My fiancee & I could not concentrate on anything else other than the club event. We tried to go sightseeing during the day, but ended up going back to our hotel early to rest up & change our clothes. We ate a very rushed dinner & got to the club early. Well, actually, we got to the club at the exact time stated on the flyer, but according to the local staff…the actual club performance would not be taking place until 2 hours after the given time. After getting into the club, there was not much exciting things going on. There were supposed to be 3 guest DJ’s spinning music that night. I think they were local DJs. The first two DJs to perform were really bad at pumping up the crowd & setting the mood. We just could not wait for the main act & we didn’t care for the opening DJs. The music they played was very choppy & did not blend well.
One highlight of the night was my fiancee & I met a guy from California who quit his job & was taking time off to take a vacation around Asia & to”couch surf” for a few months. When the main act came on stage, everyone was rushing to the front of the stage (which was just a long table-style DJ booth), especially all of the event photographers. The whole place was packed with locals & foreigners alike. The mood for the night was insanely amazing! I just couldn’t believe I was standing less than 5 feet away from my most idolized artist! Mademoiselle Yulia was the first of the 2 main acts to grace the stage. She started off by mixing her own version of “Take Over Control” by Afrojack. Of course, she was pimping her collaboration headphones with the brand WESC. I am not a fan of the avant garde hipster artsy look, but Mdm. Yulia pulls it off with electric blue hair to perfection. VERBAL also has an interesting apparel repertoire. That night he was wearing a hat that looked like an old school samurai top knot hairstyle. Sure, it must’ve made him all sweaty & hot, but it really looked cool on him. That hat really made VERBAL’s hair look like a top knot style. Anyway, the music was freaking AWESOME! The crowd really got pumped up when VERBAL started mixing some classic m-flo songs into his set list.
For me, the biggest highlight of the night was when VERBAL constantly kept looking over at my side of the club room. I guess he couldn’t help himself when there was a rabid m-flo fan standing next to me, who kept chanting “m-flo!” & “How you like me now!!” at the top of his lungs. I know VERBAL likes to take fan snapshots during his performances…so I was super excited when he pulled out his iPhone to take a photo of the crowd. I was even more super excited when he took a picture of himself with my side of the crowd. He took 2 pictures of the audience on his iPhone & then shook the hands of as many people in the audience as he could. So basically, I got to have 2 pictures taken with VERBAL on his personal cell phone & I got to shake his hand twice! To me, that is even better than going to an actual m-flo concert because that’s about as close as I will ever get to being near VERBAL or any member of m-flo at all. Another highlight of the night was toward the end of the event when Mademoiselle Yulia got on stage with VERBAL & they were giving away 2 pairs of autographed sneakers. They threw each shoe one-by-one into the audience & my fiancee caught one of the autographed shoes. He almost caught the second shoe (to complete the pair), but somebody else grabbed onto the shoe with a death grip & yanked it out of my fiancee’s hand before he could get a good grip on it. Overall, this will be filed under “BEST MOMENTS EVER”.
Also, please check out the venue photos of the Shanghai stop from the Angree Yung Robotz Tour:
ANGREE YUNG ROBOTZ in SHANGHAI 2011 8/19
And here is a photo of the autographed shoe:
Rabbits & Foxes 
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