Shack Attack

Drunkard's Alley, Shibuya

Tokyo's unapologetic development can get a little tiring sometimes- inside the circular Yamanote line, it's hard to escape towering skyscrapers, manicured lawns, and hordes of pedestrians, heads down, headed from one train to another.

Sometimes, though, you find a respite from it all, a little piece of "shitamachi" (literallly 'downtown,' but means a traditional, working-class neighborhood) tucked away between department stores or besides train tracks. Conversation, laughter, and the smell of ramen waft out from half-closed paper doors, and you feel like you've gone back in time thirty years (or so I imagine; I wasn't exactly around to compare). After a pretty lame Myspace happyoukai (presentation party), my friend Dominic showed me one of these hidden alleys ("Drunkard's Alley" is his moniker for the street).

Nonbei, as the sign calls it, is about a one-minute walk from Hachiko, right next to the Yamanote tracks. If you want to see what it looks like by day, check out Shibuya246's post on it.

This Is How You Grill It

Jason Dearborn, Six Apart's network ninja, came out to SAKK last week to help us out with flipping the whole network infrastructure over. I helped him out Saturday, took him for a total gaijin tour of the town afterwards, and then popped in Monday for a little more work and some yakiniku.

I love me some Yakiniku! Seeing a huge plate of tender, boneless cow come up and grilling it right on the table is a prime experience.

This was the first plate to come out. It's got some stuff I'm not really used to eating, like heart, liver, and stomach- it took a while to figure out what the parts actually were, because the Japanese for cows' body parts is different than that of people. The heart was pretty good, the stomach was pretty bad, and the rest was in the middle. This plate was seasoned with salt and pepper, and we dipped it in lemon juice.

The "Epicwin" plate, by which I mean nothing but normal, tender, boneless, marbled beef. I wanted to eat ten of these (we actually ended up ordering another later, which was a great plan). This plate produced one of the best, if not the best, beef experiences of my life, partly owing to the excellent bbq tare (sauce).

Not shown: the Failplate, a collection of the stringiest, more internal organ-y pieces of dead cow I've ever seen. I didn't bother learning all the names, but every one of them was part of some bodily system or another.

Grilling! It smelled so good.

Of course, more important than the meat is the company, and you can't get much better than the SAKK IT team and Six Apart's resident network ninja. Jason flew all the way from San Francisco to help us flip the network around, and he and I had a great gaijin night on the town Saturday (hint: click "play backwards" in "options" for the slideshow to make chronological sense).

More, and bigger, pictures live over at my Flickr.

Other news in bullets:

• I went to a totally lame Myspace Happyokai (presentation party) with my friend Dominic yesterday.

• My little sister is on twitter and blip.fm. Her username is "petiteshack," which amuses me to no end.

• It's been eight months! I can't believe it. We're celebrating like we do every month, with an all-exchange-student (what else?) drinking party.

• I found a firefox extension that blocks facebook, twitter, google reader, and all the other sites that suck my time away. I'm so much more productive now.

• I'll be starting a really cool job next week. More details later.

• I'm head over heels in love with markdown.

Time for bed! The future is bright.

P.S. if you don't have the money or time for real yakiniku, try the virtual alternative (thanks, yojimbo!)

Nobel-winning Economist Tells Japan What's What

Paul Krugman (a Nobel Prize-winning economit who write an excellent blog for the Times) visited Tokyo this morning, and Fuji TV followed him around.

Krugman scores Japan's attempts at revitalizing their ailing economy (via Japan Probe)

• Lowering expressway tolls to a fixed fee of 1,000 yen - 40/100 points. This might only increase sales of gasoline, and will cause traffic jams.
• 12,000 yen in free money to every resident - 0/100 points. Krugman notes that similar policies have been tried in America and have achieved nothing.
• Giving “eco points” to consumers who buy environmentally friendly appliances - Still under evaluation. As there are few details available about the final form this plan will take, Krugman cannot give it a score. (But he does find the idea interesting.)

The 12,000 yen ($120ish) voucher program is the stupidest idea in the world. When you give a population with a high savings rate a chunk of money, they save it (duh). If they want to secure their economy for the long term, Japan needs to end its culture of salarymen pretending to work, teachers pretending to teach, students pretending to learn, and the government pretending it can work itself out of this mess without welcoming in long-term, skilled foreign labor (or getting people frisky enough to reverse the declining population).

Eikaiwa in Chuo-Ku

I teach an English conversation class (Eikaiwa, or 英会話) once a week in Chuo-ku. It's the highest hourly wage I've ever gotten- 4000 yen (about $40)! Granted, it's only one hour a week, and I probably have an hour round-trip commute, but that's still bank.

Class starts at 6, and there was an unusually pretty sunset going on.

Sheltered conveyer belt tunnel...because the non-sheltered non-conveyor belt tunnel five meters away isn't good enough, I guess. It's a randomly luxurious 50 meters of the half-kilometer walk between the station and the office.

What the hell does this sign mean? "Deformed people holding hands may be found to your right" is all that comes to mind.

These escalators are automatic- they don't move unless they detect someone boarding them. You can mess with them by trying to go down the "up" escalator; they flash and bark really angrily.

Triton is a huge complex, made of three skyscrapers (Towers X, Y, and Z) clustered around a massive plaza. I work on the 24th floor of Tower X, at a company called Autodesk.

Until Star Trek Comes Out in Japan

I'll be riding the Oedo line, the most 70's spaceship-looking train in existence.

The red stripes on white paint, the trapezoidal profile, the aging interior, the industrial cockpit- parts of it are more Rebel Alliance than Galactic Federation, but either way, it's definitely retro sci-fi. It's not just looks, though- I was nerding out on wikipedia and discovered that the Oedo line uses a linear motor. If I understand the article correctly, it's like a non-levitating maglev- it still rolls on wheels, but it's dragged down the rails by a magnetic field. Cool!