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Table: $6 | Bed: $16 | Toilet: $7000

Someone who is good at the economy please help budget this room rental

B R

B R

— 4 min read

April 15, 2023 | Tokyo, Japan

(Credit, of course, to @dril for this title)

The flight from Sydney exceeded ten hours. Sleep was fitful. I took the monorail from the airport into downtown Tokyo, but foolishly grabbed a cab rather than just going the rest of the way by subway. This took longer, was more expensive, and didn’t even drop me particularly close to the room I was renting. It was the last car I would get into for more than three weeks.

Traversing through a series of winding alleys, I arrived at the address and went through an odd process to check in. The “front desk” was virtual - an iPad was just inside the door where you called a human, put your face up next to your open passport, and they gave you the code to a box with your key to your room.

I kinda intentionally did not opt for a “western style” room. Part of this was for immersion. But chiefly it really fell to cost - Tokyo is expensive as hell, and a hotel like that would be on the edge of ridiculous for the full week I was here. Now, what I got was a loft about the size of six phone booths.

This isn’t actually a problem. It’s just me and it has all the amenities you probably need. Only thing really missing is an actual place to sit down - besides the toilet.
And what a toilet! While probably not the case in Japan - where these are standard everywhere; literally, public toilets in train stations look like this - the cost of this toilet in the US would exceed everything else in the apartment together. Particularly the mattress, which was sub-dormroom quality.

But this was a Saturday evening. The only one I would have in Tokyo. It wasn’t yet late, so let’s go out.

Holy shit. No filter here.

So I was staying just outside of the area known as Shinjuku. If you’ve ever seen some stock footage of Tokyo where the population of a medium sized American city appears to be crossing the street all at once - that’s this place.

You walk though here to get to the queer part of town, which was my target. One drink, scope out the area, head back and sleep for an early morning for sightseeing.

Let’s review some immediate flaws with this plan:

  1. Thinking Tokyo is anything like any of the other cities I have visited.
  2. Believing for one moment I would meet no one and just have just one drink

Let’s take these one at a time.

Cities in east Asia have to build up. A given building will have potentially a dozen (or more) bars or other venues in there and navigating that is a mental shift. To say nothing of the underground. Map apps range from okay to almost worthless in these environments. There are huge implications to this that I will go into in future posts.
If I stop to take a picture of everything interesting or novel (to me) in this city, I will never get down any given street. There is just too much. I have a to suppress the urge to take a picture every 60 seconds.

I am actually lucky I found the Aiiro Cafe. If it was another bar, the chances are it would be on like the fourth floor and I would not have thought about even looking for such a thing (yet).

But Aiiro is ground floor. And helpfully it still exists - not guaranteed given my source was Lonely Planet. It’s a shoebox that they manage to stuff an entire full bar into, including a DJ setup with a sizable turntable. You and the patrons have basically no choice - you spill out into the street.

I really had pushed myself to go out right after I got in because it was Saturday and I was worried it would be dead every other day. This was mistaken. Upon nearly every revisit it was similarly packed - I suspect because of how friendly they are with foreigners

I met two jovial men of increasing inebriation while I was there - one a transplant from Scotland who had been there for a decade, another from Australia who had also just flown in and repeatedly exclaimed he was going through a midlife crisis. I would leave with neither, but I would meet up with both in the coming days.

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