Shinjuku

Next stop was Shinjuku.

It's a pretty busy, touristy place, but it's where I first discovered the awesomeness of Japanese arcades. Unfortunately you're not supposed to take pictures inside, but I did snap a photo of the result of my second ever play of the game Jubeat.

At Taito arcade, there's a whole bunch of Jubeat, Beatmania, Groove Coaster (aka Rhythmvaders), and Pop'n, which are all fun (there are also 3 or 4 other rhythm games that didn't entice me) but the winner in my opinion is Sound Voltex.

The controls look like this. The knobs on the left and right are analog - you have to turn them to the music.

Oh and by the way, I spent 7 or 8 credits (100 yen, or about 1 dollar, each) playing these rhythm games the first day, and I got pretty damn annoyed, because every time I would start the game, it would force me through a minute long tutorial.

These arcade cabinets are all hooked up to the internet, and they store your progress with the help of a card called an e-amusement pass. I thought maybe getting one would stop the tutorials.

So, I spent 10 minutes walking around trying to find an e-amusement machine, before giving up and asking one of the attendants there. She sends me to the second floor where I mime some more at another attendant, who then shows me how to buy the pass. I go back up to the rhythm game section, start up Jubeat, and then I have to register the damn thing. So I randomly fumble through the menus, make several guesses and finally figure it out. As you can see above, the first image shows Guest-03 and the second image shows my name. It's a pretty cool system though — in both Jubeat and Sound Voltex, you level up and unlock songs (and... some other stuff I really couldn't figure out) as you play.

But yeah, once I got the pass, I had to stop watching the tutorial every time, hooray!

Then I went to a cat cafe. They were all very docile, but they were really only "friendly" when you had food. I mean, I guess they're cats. They looked very healthy, despite apparently feasting on tourists' chicken.

Also, despite foreigners being something like 1% of the population, almost everyone at the cafe was a foreigner. Most of them seemed to have American accents. That made me feel slightly disgusted and touristy...

Near Shinjuku Station

Horse meat for lunch!

All you can eat shabu-shabu for dinner!