Shane’s Japan Trip Report Day 10

Day 10: Komazawa Olympic Park, Tokyo Ramen Show, Indian Food and Starbucks in Shinjuku

Japan Trip Report Day 10…It’s Saturday morning and we really don’t have anything planned. We’ll see where this day leads and I’ll report back later.

In the morning, I went across the street to the Internet cafe to send some emails, etc. It cost 470 yen for 40 minutes, which is about standard. Also standard for an Internet cafe in Japan was the fact that they had no non-smoking area, so even though I was the only one in the place at the early hour, the cafe still reeked of smoke.

Komazawa Olympic Park

After I got back to our apartment, we walked about a half hour to Komazawa Olympic Park in Setagawa/Meguro area. This park was built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and is basically a massive sporting complex, with many athletic fields, stadiums, and most prominently, a jogging/cycling/walking course that circles the park, and which, typical of Japan, was packed with literally hundreds of runners. There were also several soccer and baseball fields, all with games going on. There was even a skateboard park. It was definitely a beautiful park with a lot of energy, and it made me wish I brought my running shoes with me.

Tokyo Ramen Show

Also in full swing at a large plaza bordering the park was the Tokyo Ramen Show.

Japanese are nuts about ramen. There are ramen bloggers who literally sacrifice their health by devoting themselves to traveling around Japan eating ramen 3x a day and writing about their experience. Ramen shop proprietors spend years perfecting their flavor, and work around the clock, often simmering their secret soup stock throughout the night in pursuit of the perfect bowl of noodles. Ramen fans, in turn, will line up for hours at the most popular ramen shops for their chance to eat a delicious bowl of ramen.

The Tokyo Ramen Show, a week-long event, featured about 20 or so of the best ramen shops from throughout the country gathered in one area serving up their own unique concoctions. Entrance to the event is free: each bowl of ramen costs 750 yen. The most popular booths had lines of hundreds of people willing to wait 1-2 hours just to eat a single bowl of ramen. It was quite a sight, and I regretted that I don’t eat meat, and therefore ramen, because many of the offerings looked pretty damn tasty!

Home-delivered Soba Feast

After we got back home around noon, as you might have guessed by now, lunch was waiting. Today’s menu was home-delivered soba, called demae in Japanese. In contrast to the paper and Styrofoam containers one might get with home-delivered food in the U.S., in Japan, demae is delivered in ceramic and lacquer dishes. Basically, you eat and then leave the empty dishes outside your door, and then the delivery service comes and picks them up later. Of course tipping is neither expected nor required.

I ordered kuruma-ebi (a large shrimp) tempura cold soba (I tend to prefer cold soba to hot soba unless it’s very cold outside), and it was quite good as expected. Naturally, the soba alone was not sufficient so Oba-san felt obliged to set out about eight other dishes of grilled fish, pickled veggies, and other little Japanese dishes like hijiki (a seaweed dish), okara (not sure how to describe this), potato salad, and others I can’t remember and didn’t have room in my stomach to eat.

Visiting Oji-san

After lunch, we went to visit my wife’s uncle (Oji-san), the husband of Oba-san, who had a stroke last year and is now living in an assisted living facility. Confined to a wheelchair and not really able to speak, it was kind of sad to see the once-vital Oji-san. We took him for a stroll in his wheelchair to the local grocery store, where is favorite thing to do now is buy goodies for his visitors. We wheeled him around the store as he pointed at various items, which we put into a cart. Within minutes, we were at the register checking out over 5,000 yen in snacks. He’s quite wealthy, so money is not a concern, but we were all stuffed and couldn’t eat a thing that he bought.

My wife and I decided to walk home and stopped at UniQlo, a chain clothing store that is kind of like the Gap of Japan back when the Gap was cool. UniQlo has tons of stylish, low-priced clothes, and I ended up buying a brown fleece jacket for about 1,200 yen. Pretty good deal!

Indian Food and Starbucks in Shinjuku

In the evening, I met a friend from San Diego, Takako. We met outside the Shinjuku South entrance, a popular meeting place, among hundreds of others doing the same, and ended up at a nearby Indian restaurant. Now in Japan, there is quite a big Indian population, so just about every Indian restaurant you enter will be Indian operated. However, in this place, there wasn’t an Indian face in the kitchen. While this might set off alarm bells of inauthenticity in other cultures, this is not a problem at all in Japan. Japanese have an amazing ability to master international cuisines. For example, Italian restaurants manned by Japanese chefs are almost universally excellent. Likewise European-style Japanese cake shops and Japanese bread bakeries. But Indian food?

Yappari, no worries. The food was excellent. We each ordered a platter of two curries, rice, salad, man, and a samosa for 1,650 yen, reasonable by Shinjuku standards. After eating, we headed to the Starbucks at Shinjuku Southern Terrace. Now in the U.S., service at Starbucks is friendly-casual. In Japan, friendly-casual doesn’t exist. Instead, service, as it is everywhere in Japan, is exceedingly polite. In addition, once ordering, the cashier calls out the order and the entire staff sings the order back in unison with smiling faces, as if they are all overdosing on happiness pills. It’s actually quite weird and amusing at the same time. I might have to get a video of this.

After a soy latte and some conversation, reminiscing about life back in San Diego, I made my way back home for the night, feeling very happy to be back in Tokyo.

Proceed to Shane’s Japan Trip Report Day 11–>