Six Days to Tokyo
It was too hot to sleep—the kind of heat where even lying still feels like effort—and two separate comfort sessions with Abby Winters and a particularly memorable Miley Cyrus sideboob had done exactly nothing for me. So I did what any reasonable person does at 3am with a five-week Japan trip starting in six days: I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole about Tokyo and emerged, three hours later, feeling genuinely better prepared.
The highlight was following a guy with disgustingly long hair through Super Potato, a retro games shop buried in Akihabara that is so dense with old consoles and cartridges that navigating the aisles apparently causes people to either burst into tears or ejaculate. Possibly both. Then I discovered the Game Boy Light—the last real Game Boy, Japan-only, the only one with a backlit screen. Worth hunting for, since my old grey unit—bought with Ines at a flea market years ago—has officially given up the ghost.
I also took a time-travel detour through an era when people walked around with phones that had long rubber antennas, visited sumo wrestlers, and watched footage that presented itself as cutting-edge content from roughly 1995. Then came the tutorials: what to do on the plane, what to do once you’ve landed, how insanely cool Tokyo is, how beautiful it is, how it will probably break your heart in the best possible way.
The actually useful intel came from Sari, who apparently never sleeps either. If you’re going to Japan, rent a SIM card—SoftBank offers them for use in your own iPhone, with calls, SMS, and data. Without a working number you’ll lose people instantly in the human whirlpool of Tokyo station and spend the rest of your trip wandering around like a confused tourist, which I refuse to do.
The rest of the prep is mostly handled. Travel insurance sorted. My MasterCard has been appeased with appropriate rituals so it doesn’t pull the same bullshit it pulled last time. Haircut booked so I don’t arrive looking like a Neanderthal and accidentally become the subject of a Japanese reality show about hopeless Europeans.
What I still need: ten missions. I don’t want to spend five weeks just drifting around looking at things—I want to have something to accomplish, something to report back on. Tracking down the last underwear vending machine? Hurling a live Pikachu off the Tokyo Tower? Getting a blowjob from the guy in the Hello Kitty costume? These are all viable starting points. Send me your suggestions. I’ll pick ten and hold myself to them.