Tokyo 'r Us RE-ENACT

Here comes the continuation of the last post. As most of you know, Japan is the leading country when it comes to the cellphone business (or at least I think so). The cellphones are nicely designed with alot of functions such as e-mail, bluetooth, IR, internet and other stuff. Almost every Japanese person has a cellphone and as soon as you see one stepping into a train they sit down or stand there, pulling out their phone and starts playing with it. The cellphone is really a must in Japan, and in Sweden too of course. You want to be able to keep contact with your friends and such.

The biggest problem with Japan and cellphones, however nice and advanced they might be, are the operators. The biggest operators are DoCoMo, AU by KDDI and Softbank (in this particular order when it comes to popularity). Of these three only two are offering a prepaid service and those are KDDI and Softbank. DoCoMo stopped their prepaid service since apparently some people used these kind of cellphones for criminal activities. KDDI and Softbank were are also saying that there were criminal activities and in order to get a prepaid cellphone you need to be able to identify yourself and have an address in Japan. As a temporary foreigner in Japan, this is the worst nightmare. The thing is that you need an alien registration card and you won't be able to get that if you're only here for 90 days.

I've been running around to almost every Softbank shop and gotten a "No" at every single one of them. 99,9% says that I need the alien registration card which identifies the user and has the address printed on the card. The problem is that you have to be a "permanent" resident here or at least live here for a year or so in order to get one. In any case, me and David enetered a Softbank shop in Akihabara and here one of the salespeople told us that the Softbank in Roppongi accepted passport as means of identification. The reason why the shop in Roppongi does that is because of the amount of foreigners there... I'm not sure I was following that argument though since Akihabara is quite attractive for foreigners as well, but whatever.

In any case, me and David went there today to check it out. The way to Roppongi is quite far as it is, even with train and it became even longer as we took the wrong train twice. First we went as usual to Shinjuku where we were going to siwtch from Keio line to Sobu line. We switched to Sobu line alright, but towards the wrong direction. After like 8 stations or more we suspected it was the wrong way. We took the right train back at least and kept going until we got to Akihabara. Here we switched to Hibiya line and we managed to take the wrong train again here as well. Fortunaly it was for like only two stations but still. The distance between Akihabara and Roppongi is far enough as it is so two extra stations felt pretty unecessary. Two hours later we were finally in Roppongi.

Before we went to the Softbank shop we found a small okonomiyaki place. Okonomiyaki places in Japan usually serves you a bowl with the ingredients for you to fry yourself on a hotplate. And it's pretty fun actually. For a typical western man / woman they would probably look oddly at the host and wonder why they're not getting served already made food. The place was run by an older lady and it was that sort of place which probably not alot of people go to except for it's regulars. As we entered there were two older ladies sitting there already chatting with the owner. The food was good and after our stomachs were full we started to head for the Softbank shop, which was near the restaurant. It was a pretty big shop so I had high expectations but unfortunaly it was for nothing. Once we came in they said that they were waiting for a shipment for prepaid phones (you can't buy whichever phone you want. They need to be a "prepaid phone" in order to work with the prepaid service). Something had gone wrong and they didn't know when the shipment would get there at all. One week, one month and so one. 100 Softbanks shops later I'm still standing without a cellphone. In worst case I have to go with KDDI, but their phones are old and are more expensive than Softbank. I'm gonna try to see if one of the Japanese volounteers can help me out and subscribe under their name instead.

After the phone hunt, we went to Roppongi Hills. At first we both thought it would be some sort of hill (you know, a green one), but it was rather a hill of buildings. There was an alright view of Tokyo Tower from there as well. There were other buildings as well such as Asahi TV Building and something called Mori Tower. Never heard of the tower before and from the looks of it it was some sort of office building. There were som sort of television or movie activity going on in the Hills but we never understood what it was. There were alot of people watching though. Here're some pictures.













So I went to the supermarket earlier and spontaniously bought a bottle of tomato juice. It looked quite alright when it said it had some other stuff in it such as carrots. I don't think I've seen anything like this in Sweden so I wanted to try it. How was it you ask? It was like watery ketchup except for the good taste. After a few sips I couldn't drink anymore and switched to milk instead. The Japanese milk is actually epic.