Day five 

Thursday January 15

Apparently this is often a thing in Tokyo, but our apartment lease stipulates no instruments. If we were looking for a permanent place that would probably be a dealbreaker, but for temporary stays, for something small and in budget and as close to city living as this is, OK, fine. Walls are paper thin, things need to be quiet, I get it. So for rehearsal Maja has come up with the idea that we can go and rent a private karaoke box. Among many other things, Tokyo is famous for this concept and is absolutely full of them. We find one in Toshima City. This is a chain karaoke box company and we’ve found ourselves a four storey building with ten boxes on each floor. We’re on floor three in box 302. It’s perfect. We book a three hour slot and pay the little extra for all you can drink drinks. And the box comes complete with a telephone so we end up with a rehearsal room with actual room service. Every band should have one.

This sets us up for a great rehearsal, afterwhich we head out into this particular city in search of a bar. We head into one of what we’re calling the vertical high streets and decide to make a beeline for a karaoke bar a few floors up because, why not? 

This is my first experience of this concept and it’s more like entering an apartment block than an establishment of bars and restaurants. These buildings are denoted by strings of signs on the outside lined vertically to let you know what’s on each floor. Once in you enter exactly the same kind of lift you would find in a block of flats. Select your floor. Once there you could be faced with any number of block solid metal doors, each one advertising what kind of establishment is behind them. Pick one and just open it and walk in.

We’ve entered Bar Ace. A small, intimate but very classy looking space. Inside we enter we find just three people hanging out in gentle and amiable conversation – the guy behind the bar and two out front – a man and a woman. They are very welcoming so we’re like why not? What happens next is all quite amazing as the atmosphere goes from gentle to raucous as the five of us make our own little party in this whiskey bar. Everyone takes turns doing karaoke, then we’re invited to play a few of our own songs which go down incredibly well. After this, the man out front buys first one bottle of champagne and then another, sharing each generously with all of us. And Veuve Clicquot champagne at that – you can pay upwards of £120 a bottle for this in a bar in London. Then, when it’s time to go he declares that he’s picking up our bill. We leave, with all kinds of thankyous well wishes and congratulations going on. 

Day six

Friday January 16

I’ve realised there’s been a lot of, ‘We wake to…’ in all this, and here’s another one. We wake to a message from the owner of last night’s bar saying the Japanese version of lovely to have you here, please come back again. I know anyone of a business would say that because they want you as a customer, but I think we can also read that as an invitation to play there again. Maybe we’ll even plan something with him so he can let his friends and regulars know. This all means we now have five gigs in our itinerary with three this week; none of those three had been arranged before we came here. And of those three places, including of course, Ruby Room, we’re quite sure we’ll be playing them again, which kind of suddenly bumps our agenda up to a potential eight shows. We’ve been here just six full days.

One of those shows is tonight at a place called Bar Say, which was organised by those two guys we met on our first night out in a bar here. That happened on Monday, our second full day in Tokyo.

We arrive to see that Bar Say is in a similar setup to Bar Ace – on the fifth of six floors of another of the vertical high streets.

What follows is a wonderful night of karaoke, and live performance from us. At peak there are only ten people in the place, including us. But it’s such a small and intimate space that this feels like a crowd and a really big atmosphere. The male host Bonny – the friend of our Monday night friends – as well as the female owner – the eponymous Say – could not be more welcoming. And as well as talking a lot with Maja in Japanese, they also make sure to include me as much as possible.

Once the entertainment part of the night gets going, in between bouts of karaoke we play two sets  – one of three and one of two. The reactions to our own songs are huge and we are also finding ourselves joining in more and more with the karaoke. Here we our own songs as well as being constantly invited to be part of someone else’s mini set.

At the end of it all we leave behind the sounds and emotions of another epic night, wrapping as much of them as we can around us as we make our way home. This takes three trains, which we thought was going to be a mission, but really isn’t. Especially not when you’ve got the thoughts of a night like that to keep you company.

Day seven

Saturday January 17

Well that was an epic first week. We’ve decided we’re going to be taking it easy enough for the weekend, especially as Maja’s been continuing to keep up with work during all that.

Day eight

Sunday January 18

We don’t want to blow the entire weekend, so we get ourselves out and about today, but it’s still quite a slow start before we’re ready to head off to Shinjuko. This is the home of the busiest train station in the world, and as we emerge into the sunshine, I see why. Once again, we’re in what looks like the centre of an enormous city. Now I’m starting to get just the beginning of an idea of what Tokyo is. I ask Maja if this is the city centre and she introduces me to the concept that Tokyo has many places that could be considered centres, but there really isn’t one place that is universally accepted as such. Instead, apparently there are six places that could possibly lay claim to being so. One of them is of course Shinjuko with its busiest train station in the world. But then, Ikebukuro, where we’re currently staying with its status of having the third busiest train station in the world isn’t among those six. So it’s quite crazy to look around me now, see a place that screams city centre and discover that it might not be, or that there are a whole bunch of places in this one city alone – Tokyo that is – that have an equal claim to city centre status that this has. I really do want to take some photos and video, but at the same time I also just want to take this place in as we wander through it towards Shinjuku Park. 

This is just a gentle walk through an idyllic escape in the centre of it all in the possibly not centre. Through here, Maja wants us to go to a tea room, which is a brilliant appropriately low key yet significant experience on this Sunday outing. The tea room is in a traditional Japanese building, the kind you imagine when you think of soft panelled walls and doors that are pulled to the side rather than pushed or pulled open. With our late start we have just about caught this place open. Then when we emerge back into the park, we hear the chimes that announce it is about to close. But no-one around us is rushing to the exits or even rushing to rise from their picnic blankets. So we take our time as well. 

Outside and we have one more totally relaxing destination as we immerse ourselves in the hotspring baths of Shinjuku before heading to dinner in the restaurant there. We have done weekend.