A direct flight from Amsterdam to Tokyo is about 13 hours. I’ve now been awake more than twice as long. I can… feel sound? I can smell colors. Japanese jetlag is the big one, the sort of temporal distortion that puts a little fear into you.
Am I going to be like this permanently?
Check-in at the hotel doesn’t start until 3pm I am told with the utmost politeness. Of course my bags can be left. I can come back any time before midnight. They don’t know how much I need to shower and lie down. I am desperate to change my t-shirt, but settle for shoving most of my backpack’s load into the suitcase and head out to Akihabara.
This is a dumb idea.
Akihabara is the electronics district, previously known as the go-to place for all things computers and games and now mostly an anime/waifu stomping ground. Akihabara is crowded. Akihabara is bright. I’ve come packed for a New England leaf-spotting season and Tokyo is like the inside of your car when you’ve parked at the beach all afternoon.
Akihabara sounds like this, everywhere.
Luckily or cruelly, Akihabara is home to three BOOKOFF, the bizarrely named, indifferently punctuated thrift chain. Not to be mistaken for HARDOFF, which is the exact same concept with a similarly styled logo run by a good friend of BOOKOFF’s CEO, BOOKOFF is one of my favourite stores in Japan. As the name suggests, but in Japan no way guarantees, they sell books, and a bonkers range of other items.
So of course I had to go to all three, and by the time I left the third I was experiencing a light out-of-body waviness. Thinking food might save me, I stood in line for what I thought was a soba restaurant but turned out to be a fried pork cutlet joint. This is the second time in as many trips I’ve queued for what I thought would be noodles and ended up eating deep fried bits with rice.
It was an excellent, debilitating amount of food.
Thankfully it was now time to check in, and it’s taking all of my willpower not to just go to sleep right now. I mean, look at how inviting this is.
To avoid that near certainty I’m going to venture back out. But those stories can wait until tomorrow.1
Substack won’t let me footnote the title. It refers to the frequent trucks driving around with anime idols festooned on their sides, blasting out delirious pop music.
It begins! 🙌