Antique Junk Japanese Disco Thumb War

While the title of this post may seem like total nonsense, it accurately describes a night out in the lovely bedroom community of Noborito.

Widely known as a good place to change lanes, Noborito is in fact a rather heady hotbead of random insanity. It's a place with gusto, character and just a hint of attitude. Translation: it's dirty, but it can be lots of fun.

Take this shop for example.



During the day, the Antique and Junk is a lovely place to buy old furniture at somewhat hefty prices. I appreciate the little bit of guesswork involved in sorting the Antiques from the Junk, but I guess that's the essential fun of Antique shopping anyway. At least this place is honest about the fact that 90% of the stuff you'd buy there would be worthless to 90% of the people to whom you'd show it.

Of course, perhaps from the owners of the establishment started by renaming some of their old junk "antiques" and making a killing. This killing allowed them to open the business of their dreams.

Fast forward to dusk, and you might find that the owners of this lovely establishment had slightly different dreams than your average Antique shop proprietor.

The elderly lady behind the cash register heads off for the night. At some point, someone brings in the larger merchandise that spends the day outside, safe under the protection of a heavy coat of dust. The furniture will make an excellent coat rack for the patrons that frequent the Antique & Junk during the evening time. Presumably, a few regular customers start drifting in, and the place goes through a transformation that might be unique in all of the world.

In fact, this change demonstrates might be the only way to tell the difference between the Antiques and the Junk:


Come on back and get trashed!

You see, the things they really value have been put away carefully, somewhere safe them from the wrath of wild, sake-fueled gesturing. After sunset, the Antique and Junk is no more. With a slight change to just about everything except the address, the very same store is happy to play host to a cadre of crazy people.


...host to crazy people that are allowed to drink next to a massive shelf filled with Antiques, that is! Fear not, dear reader, the "wa" was not disturbed for the upstanding customers at the Antique and Junk.


Indeed, it's quite an experience, one that's made even better by the people who are actually AT the bar. The Shop Master, for one, is friendly and welcoming. He also speaks the English that you learn from drinking, rather than the type you learn in a classroom.


"Hey Dudes!! Take it easy, eh? Do you know Phil??"


The atmosphere is made interesting by bright lights, western music (eg, rock, disco, etc) and exceedingly friendly regular customers.



Within 20 minutes, the fellow on the left had

1) Decided we were his best friends ever.

2) Purchased a round of drinks.

3) Shaken my hand in the traditional grip 14 times.

4) Shaken my hand with two handed "special care grip" 9 times.

5) Gotten involved in a massive thumb battle, and encouraged everyone else to do the same.


ER... So, let's see if you were paying attention, as we now have all the ingredients listed in the title.

...

DRUNKEN JAPANESE DISCO THUMB WAR IN AN ANTIQUE SHOP!!!

And then there was one....

Shortly after my arrival in Japan, a friend tried to prepare me for the cultural differences that are inherent in food (er, "scare the shit out of me") by describing various fanciful and different foods that seem strange to the Western palette. For example, he described how sushi could be pulled still-wriggling from the tank and killed in front of you.

"Yum", I responded at the time, and stand by that assessment after eating said wriggling fish numerous times. My friend proceeded to describe natto (fermented soy beans), taco (octopus), basashi (raw horse meat) and finally suzume (fried sparrows). I've managed to find and consume all of these things during my travels, with the notable exception of the sparrows.

Now, this isn't like eating a chicken, where the meat has been nicely chopped up so as not to resemble a live bird. Sparrows, as you may appreciate, are somewhat smaller. Thus, the easy solution is to skip the whole "chopping" crap, and just spear the suckers on sticks and roast them whole.

Interesting... to say the least. So, I've kept my eye out for them, but my Japanese reading skills aren't quite up to spec yet - without appetizing pictures, I am sometimes not all that sure what I am ordering. Mind you, this plan hasn't steered me wrong very many times.

-------

Fast forward to Saturday night at Hanbey, the basement Shibuya Izakaya that looks like 1950s Japan, and serves everything at 1950s Japan prices (grand total for a huge dinner for seven and three rounds of drinks: 16 000 yen ($160, or about $20 per person). This place is especially fun if you enjoy a few rounds of deep fried everything.




Of course, to compliment this, we were also imbibing a bunch of delicious shochu. Shochu, of course, is a rice or potato based drink that comes with the best designed glass EVER.



I touched on this some time ago, but I still love the system. The glass is served inside a small box. The glass is then filled past overflowing, until the liquor fills up the box as well. Then, as you drink it, any slop that spills out of the glass splashes into the box. You then simply pull the glass out of the box, and pour the box-booze into the glass, and quickly make it belly booze. Genius.

Here, you see our waitress pouring shochu into our eager glasses and boxes.



Be sure to note the amused grin on her face. This picture was taken immediately *after* I made a fateful request.

"Five of what you recommend, please!" (あなたのおすすめを五つお願いします！）


Suddenly, amid some fanfare and laughter from the wait-staff, five very small, very ugly looking bird carcasses appeared. I say "carcasses", because sparrows are generally cute. These looked more like shriveled up zombie-bird skeletons, covered in some sort of demon sauce. I never hesitated on the still-moving fish, or even the scorpion, but suzume are not an appetizing thing.

Especially when it seems to gaze back at you from the skewer.


See?

They taste something like what I imagine zombie birds to taste like too, if they were properly prepared. They weren't all that bad... mainly they were really quite crunchy (a whole skeleton and a beak will do that), but also surprisingly rather bitter. I thought the sauce was the bitter bit, but one of my dining companions informed me that the sauce was actually sweet, and was there to cover some of the bitterness of these skewered swallows. Man, those were some pissed off, bitter birds.

I wonder why they're so bitter. Maybe all the other birds have huge expectations in when they find out what kind of bird the Swallow is. "You're a cute bird, baby... wait... *you're* the *Swallow* bird??? Awesome. Let me give you my number... and you can drop by my nest any time..."


Anyway... I guess I can honestly say that suzume were actually a bit of a bump for me. I had to chase them with a skewer of tentacles to get the taste out of my mouth.



And the "one" food remaining? Why... "fugu" of course. The food that can actually kill you. Of course, I'll certainly take suggestions for other strange things to eat.

Truth in Advertising

Now this is an establishment that knows how to advertise!



I bet the owner isn't 'strong at drink'.


Barf: to vomit, or throw up. aka, what one does after waaaay too many drinks.

Baka Gaijin

I am sometimes a rather foul and offensive person, I have to admit. I may do it all in the name of comedy, but I can most certainly be a rude boy. Still, I would like to think that somewhere, someplace, there is someone who has managed to behave in a less socially acceptable manner in persuit of drunken laughter from his or her peers.

The other weekend, to my great joy and to the disgust of most of the other people present, I was soundly upstaged by someone who was willing to dispense with and/or eliminate even more dignity than I (um... at that particular time).

Here is a delightful picture of this cheerful gentlemen sport humping C, who is one of the managers (not mine). But, this is not any sport hump - oh no. This is a BEER flavoured sport hump.


Be sure to note that she is only 83% disgusted, because she is still smiling.




/And no... before you go all assuming stuff... the only part of me in the picture is my thumb covering the lens.
//EDIT: BAKA actually means "foolish" or "stupid", rather than "disgusting" or "foul" as I thought. Still, I've been using it in the correct context. Collocation with "Gaijin" is definitely common.

Mostly dead. Entirely Delicious.

I would like to say that I am not a squeamish man in terms of what I eat. I figure that since my ancestors bitch slapped their way to the top of the food chain, the least that I can do to show them that I appreciate all the hard work. In my opinion, the best way to show this appreciation is to not shy away from eating things that said ancestors bitch slapped on their way to the eventual signing of the Kyoto Accord, formation of the WWF, etc. In short, I try to stick anything put in front of me into my maw.

With that disclaimer for the following tale out of the way, I can safely say that I love sushi very much. VERY much. And not just those sissy rolls that involve things like “cooking” in the preparation process. Thus, you can imagine that I live in Japan with quite a lot of excitement about the entire eating party. Occasionally, I even get some strange surprises. Like finding a place that offers uber fresh sushi near my apartment as the team was on the way home from Yomuriland-mae.

This sushi restaurant also had an amazing extra little thing on the menu that made the sushi even better…. a little special called “All you can drink for two hours” for UNDER ONE THOUSAND YEN. That’s 980 Yen… or about $9.80CDN at the current exchange rate. Draft or bottles, hard liquor, wine, you name it. Two hours to guzzle as much as you can. OK, raise your hands if you think that this would be the best thing ever…

Yeah. Me too.

To top it all off, they happened to serve a few things that would make a certain ex girlfriend of mine want to call the wraith of the heavens down on my head (…cough….uh…er…again…).

That’s right! This joyful place served both RAW WHALE and RAW HORSE!

The whale is held in my eager chopsticks, and the horse in Nick’s. Yep, they happen to taste pretty awesome, actually. Well, whales wouldn’t be so freaking endangered if they didn’t taste so good. Sheesh. And as for Mr. Ed, well, I now know that you can not only ride him to lunch, but eat him for it too! No cooking required. It was tasty-good!



Shocked? Offended? Hungry? Hopefully all three, because I hate to say it, but the real shocker actually came in the NEXT course.

Fish that was so fresh it was only barely dead. I mean BARELY DEAD. They pull it from a tank, slice off the sides, skewer it and serve it. Probably in not much more time than it took you to read this paragraph. This means that your fish is rather fresh.



So fresh, in fact, that it is still twitching on the table for the duration of your entire meal. A good twenty minutes of occasional jitters and fish flips. Seriously. The mouth opens and the fins jitter, the gills flip every few minutes….. all while you much away.

I wanted to show this poor fish just how much I appreciated his good work on the table, so I made a point of holding bits of said dinner up in front of said fish’s eyes before I ate, which understandably guarantees me the same fate if/when I am abducted by little green men with a taste for Burentomeat. But seriously, it was good, and I wanted the fish to know. It was So. Freaking. Good. Perhaps the best sushi I’ve ever had, and we snagged this little offense to western sensibilities for about 500 yen. I also snagged a few videos, so if you are interested, email me and you can watch us guzzle fish meat in fuzzy camera-phone-vision and drunk-stereo sound.

After we were suitably shitfaced and full of fish for under twenty bucks, we hit up the local karaoke bar, belted out our lungs and made it home incident free!

...


To prove how sober and incident free the night was, here is a picture of me being felated by Santa Claus.



Thank you and good night.