cocopunk

It didn’t start well. Rain, a broken umbrella, and locked park gates when I learned that the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden is closed on Mondays left me standing alone and wet on a street corner with already-tired feet at 8am. And besides, the Shinjuku pictured in my mind, streets and alleys bathed in neon glory, is not a morning locale anyway.

But the neighborhood managed to overpower my ignorant mistakes and turned my morning around. I had a good morning in Shinjuku.

After wasting precious, limited time and energy trying to find the park entrance only to discover it was closed, I decamped to a 7-11 to make plans. And to look for a replacement umbrella.

Unlike their famously airy sandwiches and utilitarian yet delightful onigiri, 7-11’s umbrellas are not in fact the reduced essence of a consumer good. Best stick with Muji for that. They are just cheap umbrellas and the plastic hinge wouldn’t stay open. They didn’t have any more at this conbini so I committed to sheltering beneath my limp umbrella like a broken bird wing.

I stared at the map on my phone while sitting at the counter — there is seating in most 7-11s — trying to figure out where to go next, and noticed a shrine nearby, so I figured that would provide something picturesque to kill time before lunch. Lunch was my only other goal besides the inaccessible park.

And the Hanazono shrine was nice. There were two Shinto priests behind glass reading some parchment in silence within the bright vermilion red wooden building while light rain dusted us gawkers with dew. Across the yard and beyond the tori gate you could see passing cars but the city felt far and away.

And then, as is so often the case in Japan, the sacred and profane live side by side, and I went to find the bars.

I knew Golden Gai, the notorious alleyways filled with micro bars that seat five or six people, was just around the corner from the shrine, so I walked over to have a look and take some photos. It was still morning, so it was mostly quiet and empty besides locals cutting through the streets on their way to work. But a couple of bars were humming with conversations and laughter spilling over from the night before. You’d walk through the quiet, narrow alleys and occasionally, mere feet away behind a rustling curtain or a slightly ajar door, you’d hear some murmurs, the clinks of glasses, and the laughs of regulars indulging in a little hair of the dog.

It was still too early for lunch so I wandered a few blocks away to stop for coffee at a charming little cafe called All Seasons Coffee. The woman behind the counter spoke English when I walked in but humored my halting, clumsy Japanese. Bless her. I feared nothing more than being perceived as an ignorant brute who would presume my language was the language that would be spoken, and even though it was, she let me try. Ganbatte ne. Sometimes the patience of someone nodding politely while you flail is invaluable.

Over coffee I realized that the ramen shop I’d been eyeing on the map was actually back in Golden Gai and operates 24 hours a day. It was 11am now which felt like a reasonable time for a meal.

I can easily say it was the best ramen I’ve ever had. Given that I hardly eat anything besides instant noodles, ramen-wise, that isn’t necessarily saying much. But it is true.

Ramen Nagi’s Golden Gai spot is a small place up red stairs that seats six, maybe, where you literally bump shoulders with strangers partaking in the best noodles of their lives too. And there were locals there, friends of the proprietors having a quick meal and catching up. Always a good sign.

I chose the ‘special’ from the machine and handed the chef my ticket. It had two types of noodles (wide and thin), pork chashu, dried little fish on top, an egg, piles of green onion, and I don’t know what else. It wasn’t tonkatsu but something different—some type of broth that had seemed to have everything from fish to beef and pork, anything and everything savory and salty and had probably been reducing in a pot for months if not indefinitely. I don’t know what it was. But it gave me the life-changing meal I had been hoping for. I’ll be craving another bowl for the rest of my life.

(I’ve since learned it was niboshi ramen with a broth based on dried fish. Ramen Nagi has a chain of destinations in Japan but their Shinjuku Kabukicho spot is their tiny flagship in the ramen sea. And I was lucky to go at 11am because when I left, a line was already forming.)

Then after resting back in Asakusa where I was staying, I had the best katsu curry I’ve ever had.

But again, the only Japanese curry I was familiar with came from packets so my expectations were easy to exceed. I have had good katsu in New York when Annalee graciously invited me to a team dinner back in a different blog life — another story and an unnecessary name drop— but I’d never had a proper katsu curry.

Curiously, after seeing the curry in their shop window, I didn’t find it on the menu and had to request it. It was a small point of pride that I was able to communicate that to the chef in my broken, American-accented Japanese. I had taken Japanese language classes in high school and then in college and, for a time, knew quite a bit in that formal, textbook style that real people don’t use, and had hoped those lessons 15 years ago would come surfacing back to the forefront of my language lobe. That didn’t happen. I did, though, manage the occasional exchange like this one, politely requesting my special curry. The coffee cashier from earlier had emboldened me with her encouragement.

Later I came back for another meal and realized they don’t list the curry on the English menu with the big pictures you can point at. You have to read the Japanese menu… or point to the plastic display in the window.

It was another perfect meal.

Afterwards I tried to summon the strength to go back to Shinjuku to get photos at night of the brilliant lights of Kabukicho. I wouldn’t mind the train ride (30 min or so) but the feet, legs, back, etc., disagreed. That was the biggest surprise I had found in Japan: I had aged since I last traveled and couldn’t walk endlessly anymore.

I had walked ten miles the first day I arrived, and another seven today. Moreover, you truly don’t realize how out of shape you are until you’re faced with a full-length hotel mirror that you can’t avoid. And it was strange that I was out of shape because I had been training on a strict diet of beer and spaghetti leading up to this. Nonetheless.

Nonetheless! I did go back to Shinjuku and took hundreds of photos of the nightlife. The atmosphere of Kabukicho was not… I don’t know, as fun and exciting as I anticipated. It felt more like a lot of shady attractions to profit off tourists domestic or otherwise. Which isn’t entirely true — I’m sure there are hundreds of actually good restaurants — but much of it felt like a sideshow with grifters in tow. Like Times Square, with fewer corporations but the same energy. Albeit I was their not to have fun, but for the slightly psychotic and sole purpose of getting cool images. And it did deliver.

I stopped by Golden Gai to gauge the vibes at night and the alleys were filled mostly with white people curious to see what it was like. They weren’t going inside the bars — neither did I, to be fair, and some of the bars don’t particularly want to serve foreigners anyway. But it was only 7:30 or 8pm, and frankly, time for the jet-lagged gaijins to sleep.

It was my second day in Japan, but my first morning in the land of the rising sun.

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_{Okay that’s a cheesy kicker, but c’mon, it’s a good one.}