A cheap round-trip flight to Tokyo cost us about half as much as the bullet train both ways, and is probably slower, so we went to Tokyo by air. Peach airlines is a Baby Airlines. It looks like someone gave their baby a toy airline to play with: they have their own terminal with - as far as I could tell - only one gate all their flights use, and you have to check yourself in on machines that inexplicably don't work until about an hour before takeoff. They weigh the checked bags on a little bathroom scale and carry them over to a conveyor to scan. Even the chains that mark out where the lines should be for check-in or baggage drop-off are made of pink plastic like a baby's toys. It was the most messy airline we have been on. It was so unorganized that they didn't even begin boarding until after we were supposed to take off, and didn't give any notice of delay that we heard: everyone for all their flights were sitting on these cute little daycare seats in one common area. We had some noodle soup at the airport restaurant until we could check in and drop off our checked baggage.
We never managed to find a CS host in Tokyo so we booked a hotel there. Our hotel was in the area of Nippori, a pretty seedy neighbourhood with Pachinko casinos and bars. At night we thought we saw very modest prostitutes and their pimps on the corners. A helpful man in a suit saw us checking the map on my phone and showed us how to get to the hotel, very near the train station. It was pretty nice, if tiny like every hotel in Japan.
One of the first things we did was go to find a place to exchange money, but the only place that would do that was inside a private railway line - and they had the temerity to suggest we buy a platform ticket to access it. We ended up just withdrawing more cash from a 7-11 ATM, the only ones that accept our cards.
We had some coffee and cake in an Excelsior cafe in front of the train station, mostly because the name amused us - the coffee wasn't very good. The nearest subway station is actually a good 10-minute walk from the train, or one stop on the loop train line which we avoided using because it's not included in our subway pass. We walked maybe halfway there and stopped in for dinner at a local bar.
Some of the bars in Japan have a cover charge. We only discovered this at the end of our meal, which was annoying. This type of bar serves deep-fried skewers that you dip into a big tin of sauce that is rarely replaced, so they discourage double-dipping. There's usually some simple side dish: here it was just a head of cabbage. I tasted skewers of all sorts of things and had a local beer. Then I noticed someone drinking a beverage called Hoppy, and looked it up. It's basically very-low-alcoholic beer (less than 1%) which tastes very like beer and which was popular in Tokyo during alcohol rationing after World War 2. They mixed it with sochu (some kind of Japanese vodka made of potatos or any starchy grain) to get it back to beer strength or higher - in this way they could have a cheap beer-imitation. I ordered that and although both beverages taste pretty horrible on their own, the combination was actually pretty palatable... though I wouldn't want to make it a habit.
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