Now that Nikon has taken the wraps off the D3 and D300 cameras, I can finally mention that I'm out in Tokyo on a press event to celebrate the launch, which is why I've been so thoroughly wined and dined (sake'd and sushi'd) over the last few days.
It's a bit hard to remember how the night started, but it really hasn't ended yet, nearly 24 hours later.
The group of assembled media and PR people headed out for a ten-course menu at a upscale restaurant in the upscale financial section of this upscale city. I'm pretty sure that I won some sort of status for being the guy who ate everything served. I'll post the menu better, but it did involve the word entrails, and one dish was served nestled between the recently-severed head of a fish.
The plan for the morning was to head over to the Tajiki fish market, the Blade Runner of fish markets (or for the non-sci-fi among you, the Fulton Fish Market multiplied by an insane asylum), a massively sprawling complex that supplies nearly all of the fish for the metropolis each day. Boats arrive from all over Japan, the Pacific, Australia and even the US and South America with fish for auction, sale and distribution. The central attraction of the market is the Tuna auction, where purveyors gather each day to bid on massive quantities of frozen seafood.
After the rib-stuffing meal of delicate and precisely presented food at the restaurant, my original plan was to get some sleep and get up at 4:30 to join the 5:00am group headed to the market, but instead five of us headed out to Ripponji, the Times Square-ish section of Tokyo—if Times Square still had hookers. Hookers that swarmed you and offered to give you a "free preview." More on that detail in a bit.
Jay DeFoore, a former PDNer had a friend in town, a crazy photographer-American named Monty who we were to meet at the Grand Hyatt hotel, and it was Jay's idea to go out "for a few beers."
Now, I'm not really painting the picture well enough. Our hotel, Le Meridian Grand Pacific has been providing us vehicles for tours and trips around this city. Last night, they provided us with a stretch-limo. It's probably an understatement to say that there are few limos in Tokyo, and it would not be incorrect to say that the length of the car exceeds the length of many homes in this city.
So we pull up to Monty's hotel and find him in the lobby with an ex-pat friend who has worked for Morgan Stanley here for thirteen years. Temporarily leaving our driver Roy and his collection of Eric Clapton bootleg concert DVDs behind in the limo, we head out for a bar.
Monty leads us shakily, loudly and already a bit drunk to a bar stocked with great wine, beer and hard booze. It was probably 11pm at this point and we downed a few drinks and beers while Monte, sotto vocce detailed the Japanese expression for something that's prohibited, a crossing of the arms at the forearms into an "x", which Monty embellished with the sound "boooonnnngggg" to further highlight the message inherent in the gesture. He had been bonged earlier in the evening while trying to get into a club.
After a few beers we decided to look for more happening action, and so back to our limo we headed to the seedier main strip in Ripponji, which was dutifully seedier. As we stepped out of our limo, (which finds parking accomidations simply by stopping on the right most lane and turning on the hazard lights) women snapped pictures of us on their camera phones. Kevin, one of the PR folks told the woman that he was World Fighting Champion.
Several hookers approached smelling the blood in the water. They surrounded each of us in turn offering us "free samples," and asking us to come with them. We demurred—the souvenirs I plan to bring home from Tokyo should not require antibiotics to treat—and tried to find a bar that Monty assured us would be the coolest thing ever. Tucked on a back street next to Hard Rock Tokyo (yawn) was a small bar that has had the same non-English speaking band for more than two decades, pumping out cover tunes every night.
Every night expect this night it seemed, since the bar was shut closed. Booonggggggg.
Monty tried to get into a club next to our club, where a very confused looking Japanese bouncer tried to explain to us that the bar was not taking Gaijin. He found someone else who explained first that the bar, with airplane-engine-decible music blasting from behind the closed doors, was closed. Then they explained it was closed to us. Monty was not having any of it, as the teenager tried to say that this was a members-only club. I tried to convince Monty that the membership couldn't be bought, it was in fact membership in the Japanese race. We departed.
Several super-bouncer sized African-Japanse (is that the politically correct term?) men tried to get us to head to their bars, giving us cards and offering us "free titty squeeze". As super-awesometacular as that sounded it wasn't really what we were in the mood for. Monty replied "thanks, man, but I have pussy at home." I'm not sure why Americans are seen as being brusk, but it was damned funny in context.
A passing Argentine told us to go to a bar on the lower section of one of the buildings, and we took him up on it, worried that we'd stumbled into somewhere that was going to harvest our organs. It seemed too good to have a bar that offered a ¥500 drink ($5) of anything on the menu for our first drink. The fluent Philapino-Japanese waitress Victoria was utterly fluent in English, Japanese and Tagalong. She was also rather cute, and brought us drinks quickly and with a smile. We still thought we might be killed at any moment, although it seemed that we were actually just at a really nice casual bar. The free laptop access for customers (with the laptop not locked down) and the free pool table finally eased our fears, but we moved onto another place lest they end up needing a spare kidney in the barback.
Monty had snuck out and found us a nice cozy (smoky-as-hell) bar with a few Japanese-Japanese and some relatively cheep beer. We played some pool and darts with the locals (beating them handily at pool thanks to them scratching both on the break and on the eight-ball, and continuing to play as they tried to convince us that neither of those are game-losing moves in Japan. Uh huh.
We also played some Foosball, and it turns out that Jay's a ringer. We slapped down the PR guys twice, gaining much prestige for Team Awesome.
At about 4am we decided it was time to head home, so we tracked down Roy and suffered a long drive while a pirated Don Henley concert played on the tv in the limo. Don Henley suXxor. Roy was great, taking us anywhere we wanted to go, and I proclaimed "Roy is my Shogun!" which I think is a handy (and more PC) translation of "Roy is my home boy'" (or, more correctly but still incorrectly using the N word).
We strode into the hotel lobby as the newly-awake Nikon PR team waited for media folks to come downstairs to go to the fish market. They saw us coming in, having been up all night and said "you guys are rockstars."
In true Rockstar fashion, Kevin and I ran to our rooms, switched into shorts and headed back downstairs. A chocolate-croissant provided by PR steeled our resolve and we pushed on to the market.
There's no real way to explain what it's like. In every direction a flow of people run around, drive around, cary fish around. It's insane. The closest I can come is the scene in Fifth Element where the stream of flying cars whiz by in every direction, spinning people around, almost killing them constantly.
Diesel powered, most of the carts at the market are driven by using a large pressure-senstive wheel on the top of a giant drum-shaped engine. They pivot on a dime, pass by each other with mere inches between them. I was almost killed a good dozen times or more. Probably a lot more. As these vehicles wheeled past I sort of started to space out. The colors, sound and noise were too much. Half-a-dozen of us took pictures all over the market.
We shot the Tuna auction where flash-frozen tuna created swirling pools of fog inches above the floor and men with hooks poked and prodded the massive fish in order to assess its quality. Standing on benches men shout out the number of each fish and its price, selling it to the highest bidder. Single fish (more than 6 feet long) are worth thousands.
In other sections we watched fish get dispatched in every possible manor. Heads were partially chopped off as the massive fish bled-out. Some were filleted quickly and precisely while staked down to tables. Things get worse, and since some of you are a bit squeemish, I'll skip some of the more graphic details.
I was both disgusted and very hungry at the same time.
Our reverse-ex-patriot Japanese guide (by which I mean he is Japanese and lived in the US for decades) guided us over to the small row of shops lining the market where the workers eat after their shift. Rain started to trickle and then picked up to a steady drenching as we stood under an overhang and waited for some of our group to get their return to the hotel sorted out. Most didn't want to have sushi for breakfast, but Kevin and I, still drunk, were dying for good sushi.
And good sushi we got. In fact, the shop that Kazz, our guide picked had the best sushi I've ever had, ever. Small (only ten seats at a bar) and intimate, it made the fish at places like Nobu, Monster and other places look like what you get from the grocery store. We started with a twelve-piece order but then continued to order more and more. Sea urchin that dissolved on the tongue. Eel with a homemade sauce on it that was perfect. Each piece had a killer umame. Kazz asked a stream of questions of the owner, a woman who told us that she opened the shop more than seventeen years ago, and has been a wholesale fish distributor for thirty-five years.
Our final piece was called Dancing Shrimp (Danielle, you might want to stop reading now) which is made by taking a live shrimp and parboiling it for a moment, taking the head and the shell off, and presenting it to eat. Perfect. Wonderful. Technically alive.
For those thinking of coming to Tokyo, do it. Find a reason to come here. Find a local though to be your guide, because we wouldn't have gotten that experience without someone to act as the social lubricant (as the guidebooks I have keep saying) to a society that's thousands of years old and astoundingly amazing. And I'd never have had the best sushi on earth.
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