Day 4 - Exploring Akihabara And A Strange Dinner

We began day 4 with breakfast at our hotel with Winn & Steve before catching a short train to Akihabara. For those who are unaware, Akihabara is considered the nexus of otaku culture in Tokyo, with manga, anime and video game related billboards, merchandise and activities aplenty.

Lauren and Winn had plans at 11:30, so we spent the first part of the morning in a Yodabashi Camera, shopping for music and stationery. If the thought of going to Japan for stationery shopping raises an eyebrow, now is probably a good time to give a little background on Japanese culture. Being a highly traditional nation with a massive professional workforce, pen and paper are alive and well here in Japan. Japanese offices, schools and businesses all make regular use of day planners, paper notes and take pride in excellent penmanship, which is even more critical with the use of the highly stylized Kanji alphabet. As a result the Japanese have managed to innovate in the field of stationary as much as any other nation excepting perhaps the Germans. In Japan, one can buy multi-colored erasable pens, mechanical pencils that refill with a shake instead of a click, and a myriad of ballpoint, fountain and gel pens that puts the selection at any American store to shame. We all spent a good half an hour exploring the stationery section and left with a bag full of new acquisitions, including several of Lauren's much beloved erasable pens.

Our next stop was the Tower Records music shop on the 8th floor, where we all picked up some more music before heading back down to the street level. We walked around Akihabara for a few minutes before parting ways with Winn & Lauren, who had a lunch reservation at Eorzea Cafe, a cafe run by Square Enix themed after Final Fantasy XIV, a game that Winn and Lauren play online together.

Steve and I headed to a nearby building that has 10 floors dedicated to beef restaurants and features an outline of a cow's head as its sign. On the top floor there is an excellent teppanyaki restaurant that serves Wagyu beef cooked on a flat griddle. Steve and I ordered a glass of merlot and the 130g lunch set, which consisted of 130g of steak, a stir-fry of bean sprouts, green onions, carrots and garlic, and a bowl of rice. The steak was perfectly prepared a nice medium rare right in front of us by one of the chefs, and accompanied by a selection of wasabi, horseradish, sea salt and two dipping sauces.

The steak meal Steve and I shared.

After our delicious lunch, Steve and I walked back to Winn and Lauren's lunch venue and sat down at a Honey Toast Cafe on the first floor. This cafe, as its name suggests serves a dish called honey toast which Steve and I wanted to try. Honey toast is essentially a large square loaf of white bread that has been hollowed out, toasted and then coated in honey, before being topped with whipped cream, ice cream and the topping of your choice (we chose banana with chocolate sauce). The dessert was tasty but very sweet, so we shared it to keep our blood sugar somewhere just beneath the stratosphere. While we were finishing up our honey toast, Lauren and Winn came downstairs from their lunch, so we finished up and continued to explore the area for another hour before all succumbing to the soporific effects of our meals and heading back to the hotel for a nap.

We spent the afternoon relaxing in our rooms before heading to what Lauren would only call a "surprise" dinner in Shinbashi. Once we reached the venue, we learned that the name of our restaurant was Kagaya: Frog is Stranger than Fiction. It's a one man operation where the proprietor serves a group no larger than 14 traditional Japanese food and drinks while delivering bizarre and hilarious entertainment. When we sat down, he brought us our oshibori (hot towels) by placing them on the head of a robot, doing a dance while humming the imperial march from Star Wars, getting closer and closer until his head was touching Steve's and he was stroking his beard before abruptly standing up and driving the robot up to the table for us to grab our towels.

He then gave us a drink menu, which is drawn in crayon on a children's workbook. You choose your beverage, and a style, which consists of one of six countries: USA, France, England, Brazil, China and Japan. I won't spoil the experience by describing the rest of our evening in too great of detail, but I will upload a video later that should give you an idea of what we enjoyed.

A couple of hours later, sated with delicious home cooked food and having laughed until we cried, the group retired back to the hotel, where we shared a bottle of wine in the spa lounge before falling into bed.