They Pay You to Gamble Here

Tokyo, 10:15pm

I’ve been awake for most of the last 24 hours, and I am ready for bed but not quite, because it’s wrong to go to bed before 11, but actually because I don’t want to wake up at six. I’m staying in a capsule hotel, which is basically a hostel for older people, and with slightly more privacy. It’s nice here at the Lighting Hotel Asusaka in Taito City, Tokyo. I’m in the second-floor common room with another dozen souls winding down before we all, alone, shake hands with the cousin of death. A lot happened today, and nothing much happened today. I feel like my quest begins in earnest tomorrow, when I wake up in a distant country with a good rest behind me.

First off, I don’t know if I’ve ever carried this much weight before travelling, because nearly all of my backpacking travel has been warm weather travel. Swim trunks have turned into woolen button-downs, wind breakers to rubber raincoats, and I’m packing a laptop too. My shoulders are genuinely sore, which isn’t a feeling I can remember having before from pack straps.

The flight itself was spent next to a grumpy young woman who got very tired of being on the aisle seat when I got up probably 7 times over the duration. I did, as promised, puff mad Juul on that flight. Sometimes in the bathroom, and sometimes right there in my seat, 47H. I looked it up on reddit, and apparently all you have to do is just hold it in, and your lungs will absorb the water vapour you would have otherwise exhaled. I’m sure that’s not extra bad for you at all. But it worked, and I got to be a very bad boy, but in a victimless way, which is how I prefer to be bad. Also, as promised, I pooped exactly once, but not until the final hour. I was starting to get excited about an outcome I would never have predicted, but regularity prevailed.

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The woman at Japanese customs was really sweet to me, and her directions helped me find the portable WiFi that was waiting for me at the airport post office. After that I figured out in pretty short order how to load a transit pass, and finally, I was off to Tokyo from the actually quite distant Narita airport. I don’t know how fast that train was moving, but it was one speedy unit! It turned out I didn’t actually pay to get on the express train, so they just made me pay the difference. The interaction felt much more civilized than it might have, had I accidentally defrauded a train company in Canada. The ticket I got was charming, and I intend to keep it.

I changed trains at Uena Station, and found my hotel after about 10 minutes of looking around. Say what you will about Google, and I wouldn’t dare try to stop you, but wow(!) does Maps ever make things easier. Also, the transit here? I’ll come back to that after a few posts. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, especially with so much ahead of me. This city just hums, and calls you to whirr along with it. There’s so much here, and I’ve seen only the smallest part.

So, since there’s nothing that will exists in this space that isn’t at least a little tangential, get a load of this observation: Lighting Hotel’s water-pressure in the showers was heavenly. If that’s what I have to look forward to nation wide, I’m going to be a crappy conservationalist, which is different than my usual modus operandi, rappy conversationalist. 

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I washed my sweaty parts and went out into Taito, which was actually a bit more happening than I was expecting, largely because the area has come up so seldomly in my research. I’m out here because I got a great deal, but I’m glad that I’ll have to return here in the evenings for a week.

I ate at three separate restaurants over the last four hours or so. The first was a small grill with a street-front counter and two small patio tables. I ate a succulent piece of Kobe beef. It was exactly what I wanted, it was worth $10 bucks, and I had a small Kirin with it. I followed that up with another $10 meal, five different cuts of tuna nigiri, which was delectable and served with a lovely genmaicha tea, and followed that up with four pork Gyoza with a strange beer-and-wine-at-the-same-time cocktail that was actually pretty shit, but the Gyoza was great. I chatted with a Belgian 23-year-old named I-already-forget and the conversation was super dry but welcome at the end of a long day of not talking to anyone. In my experience, there are two kinds of Belgians; the kind that don’t generalize people, and bigots.

But between sushi and dumplings, something amazing happened. I walked into a pachinko parlour. You can not steel yourself against just how incredibly loud those places are. It’s like a room full of slots on PCP. And even though there’s no smoking signs all over the place, everyone is smoking. On top of that, there’s slots. I got freaked out and left, but then I realized I didn’t feel like writing or sleeping or drinking or walking or reading, and I wasn’t ready for meal three, so I went across the street to another pachinko parlour, which was across the street from yet another pachinko parlour. I was hurried down the escalator by a rabid crazy-bouncing ball bearing addict and found myself sucked out to sea by the riptide of smoke and sound. The next thing I knew, I was being ushered to an “easy machine” by one of the attendants.

It was perfect. I’ll post a video, probably to facebook, of this monstrosity when I post this entry tomorrow morning over coffee, but it was literally exactly what I expected a laid-back pachinko machine to be. Cartoon fish on a digital slot reel on the screen in the middle, bb’s bouncing wildly around them, and barely decipherable madness before me and indeed all around. And I was starting to get tired of it, slightly regretting putting $12 into the silly thing when another something fantastical happened: I kinda got the hang of it, and I started winning. This caused the toon-fish to be accompanied by a young-looking toon-babe clad in yellow bikini who let you know you were “super lucky” amid the clatter.

So, eventually, I spent all the balls I paid for, but the machine keeps a tally of what you’ve won – I won’t bother describing how that works in detail, it’s a thing you can vaguely capture if you’re there – and I took my card up to the front to redeem it for whatever the card’s value might be. Turns out, it carries two values. The first, is in the form of prizes. I won around 1500 points, which was good enough for a can of iced coffee and a tube of Pringles-like potato chips, and three individually wrapped chocolates with a candy shell (“I was not to leave any points unspent”, gestured my inside guy). That’s right, literally individually blister-packed m&m’s, but way smaller. The second value your pachinko points carry is actual money. I didn’t even realize I was for-real gambling. But at the end of the transaction, my faithful attendant gave me a small piece of gold in a hard-plastic shell like a tiny trading card, and told me where to bring it at a shop down the street. I still didn’t really understand, but I had not just had a cool time and won some free snacks, I also got exactly the same amount of money I’d put into the endeavour – 1000 yen. 10/10 will do it again and try a way more elaborate machine. I tried to explain it to the Belgian… Claire? I don’t care. I don’t Claire.  We walked together a block, and I bounced. I wrote this while listening to The 1975 – unlike Claire, I think I do like this music. I am ready for bed now, dear reader. Tomorrow, we will take in a museum, an art gallery, a shrine, and a park. Since our plans for the day after were tragically cancelled by our fair lady Corona V, we might even hit up some nightlife. I’m gonna sleep like an adult, because babies shit their pants at night and I’m just not gonna.