No airs and graces. No faffing about. Just no nonsense, back to basics, beer and food.
An old school, back to basics, Tokyo bar
Food and Drink
Tokyo street food, on a cold day
The likes of coffee shops and restaurants offer some relief on cold Tokyo days. But hot noodles. Bought cheaply. And wolfed down often frighteningly quickly. Really take some beating.
Shrine maidens and convenience stores
Japanese shrine maidens (miko) clearly have to eat, and it’s obviously absurd to imagine that they have lunch in austere rooms, silently eating freshly cooked rice and some boiled vegetables. Yet at the same time, simply popping into the convenience store like the masses of more conventionally dressed salaried workers, somehow seems rather incongruous.
The morning after the very long Tokyo night before
That drunken, falsely confident feeling of, ‘one more can’t do any harm, I’ll be fine’, generally results in a sore head, or more often than not, horrors far worse. Times when the comfort of a bed and the shaky embrace of feeling sorry for oneself slowly but surely win out the day. But how much those horrors must be magnified when waking up. In daylight. Outside a grotty convenience store. Really doesn’t bear thinking about.
Tokyo drinkers in a wonderfully grubby drinking den
Tokyo may lack some things, but not drinking establishments — not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet despite many being lavish and elaborately decorated affairs, it’s almost impossible to resist the dirty little places down dark alleyways that offer wonderful, character-filled glimpses of the past. Cramped escapes that happily exist in the modern world, but very rarely give the changing times more than a cursory glance.
