Would you like a drink?

Lemme see that ID. You over age 20? Well, then welcome friend, you're old enough to drink in Japan.

Where pray tell does one drink in Japan?

I'm expanding a bit today on the drinking blog I wrote early last month.

Well, you can sit around your 100 square foot apartment and sulk like a loner drinking back your cheap domestic happoshu beers all night long, or you can go hang out with friends.

The Japanese are very much social drinkers. They love to get wasted with friends and family.

Karaoke bars, hostess clubs, family reunions, street corner vending machines, adult movie theaters. The Japanese love to hang out and drink.

Their favorite place to drink by far is the izukaya. The izukaya is a strange cross breed of bar-cum-TGI Fridays.

With heavy emphasis on drinking a shitload of beer.

So, we're in Tokyo, the night before a typhoon hits, and we were already looking at scrubbing our trip to Disney Sea (I swear to god this blog is coming soon, very soon...)

We found that we were not going to find an open restaurant that could seat our entire party. There were 6 of us, and it wasn't going to be easy to seat 6 people unless we were going to drink. So, a friend of a friend of Fenris' wife suggested an izukaya. Sure!

I had no fucking clue where we were going, but the streets look like this, just to add to the confusion of not knowing where we were or where we were going.


This is in Tokyo, somewhere near Tokyo Tower. That's about all I know.

The place we found was called Nijyu Maru. It means "20" something. I dunno. It's early right now and I'm too lazy to Babel Fish the Maru part.



So, we all sit down around our table, and we start to order our food. This whole process is vastly different than ordering food in the US. Your waiter is essentially there to only bring you food and nothing more. Everything's ordered from a wireless touchpad. I've been to several izukayas and they all seem to adopt this handsoff ordering. I guess it saves the waitstaff from having to deal with gropey drunks.

The drink menu consists of this: Beer in 4 sizes, whiskey, wine, and girly drinks. At no point did the menu say what kinds of beer we could pick from, but I suspect people don't really get picky about their beers in a place like this. It all tasted like Asahi to me anyway.

Food is all over the place.


Yeah, if you're hungry for an order of twiggy breadsticks they got you covered.


Meat skewers. If these are chicken, they're called yakitori







Okay, so we were ordering random shit from this menu. We got chicken bits of things, beef bits of things, bread sticks that were 2 feet long with ranch dipping sauce, all sorts of weird shit. They were ordering pretty much whatever they wanted. I told them I had to see something in person. The menu suggested all sorts of fantastical weird ass items, and this would surely top all of the weird ass items in terms of presentation.

The hot dog pizza.


The thing on top.

We ordered it, and lo and behold, 5 minutes later, out came this massive 3 foot long flat bread pizza thing.


Hot dog + Ketchup + Cheese + thin crust flat bread = Pizza?

I had a few pieces of the hot dog pizza. It was surprisingly tasty.


What I look like after 4 beers. Yes, I'm normally that blurry after 4 beers.

The dessert menu had me confused. We could get some sundae crap or mackarel? Uh? What? Nah, I'm fine, thanks.



Fenris had warned me previously that Japanese girls (we were the only two guys in a group of 6) have a tendency to want to embarass the men they're around when they're around other women. Fenris demonstrated this to me first hand with his wife several times before we reached this particular night.

I made an offhand remark about one of the girly drinks being especially odd looking, and unbeknownst to me, they decided to go ahead and order the damn thing FOR ME.

I used to drink this crap way back in the day, mostly because I wasn't a big beer drinker back then, and beer had a distinctly bitter taste I couldn't deal with. Now I drink it quite well and appreciate it.

I didn't want to drink this damn thing. At all.



I did.



The whole night ended up being a decent affair. The whole group of us chatted a bunch about why I was in Japan, why I was taking pictures of pizzas, and that my Japanese was really mediocre. Other conversational topics included things in Japanese that I do not understand but are clearly hilarious by the amount of laughter the topics elicited.

And then the bill came.

Japanese dining follows a strict tactic. All bills are split equally by all dining participants. If you eat $10 of food and your companion eats $40 of food, you're both paying $25. Suck it up. It's the way it is.

Unfortunately, I'm kinda picky on my foods I eat, and I wasn't having anything that had tentacles, suckers, fins, spiny shit, or just plain unidentifiable.

If you were to tally up the beer I'd had, the portions of the food I'd eaten, etc, girly drink nonwithstanding, I'd probably had about $15 of food and beer.


That's roughly $142, thankfully with no tip.

One member of our group left after a few drinks, and she pitched in $10 or so. The rest of us split this all equally. It wasn't horrible paying double the amount, but it blows when you really know you're buying other people's food for them. I'm a splitter that splits on items purchased, not on equal share.

But, then I'm a cheap bastard.

Well, we got back to the hotel room and found out the unfortunate news that a typhoon was scheduled to hit Tokyo that next day which was effectively killing our plans for going to Tokyo Disney Sea on Saturday. Major bummer. We decided instead to go to the Tokyo Auto Show which had just opened that day.

The Tokyo Auto Show will be the next blog. Expect lots of pictures, lots of confusing concept cars, and japanese girls in skimpy PVC and latex clothing.