Japan 2026: Day 2 – Akihabara and Food Tour

(This is a write up of our trip to Japan this summer).

Day 2 (5/26): Akihabara Electric Town and Food Tour

We were up pretty early in the morning. Amy brought a special, single serving coffee maker because there isn’t much of a coffee culture in Japan. We got by in Tokyo with that gadget and some Starbucks instant coffee. Breakfast was onigri and the corn porridge snack. We also had the egg sandwiches that are kind of famous. They really weren’t bad.

I had to use Google Translate to figure out the toilet operations. Because of the use of bidets, the toilets and toilet paper aren’t as robust as what you find in the U.S. One of the kids, apparently not yet savvy to that fact, seems to have clogged the toilet. Fortunately, it was minor with just paper and not product residue. There was no plunger, but fortunately whatever the problem was had resolved on its own when we came back after leaving for the day.

We took a train to Akihabara Electric Town. The trains in Tokyo seem to work great: on time, interconnected, and frequent. Google Maps makes things really easy for the foreign traveler. Which is good because I often wasn’t able to make heads or tails out of the signage. The Suica Card is really slick – particularly if you have an iPhone. The Wallet app has the Suica card built in, allowing you to add funds via Apple Pay. That, in turn, allows you to pay your train fare with your phone – activated simply by sliding your phone above the electronic fare scanner at the entrances and exits. The trains were generally pretty affordable. From Shinjuku to Akihabara was 209 yen each way which, with a yen being .006 dollars, worked out to about $1.30. (I became pretty good at doing the mental math for currency conversion.)

Akihabara’s “Electric Town” is an area famous for manga, anime, electronics shops, and arcades. We looked around but ultimately did not end up buying much. Lunch was at at Hinoya Curry. Like most of the places, it was fairly small with a couple of tables and bar seating. Unsurprisingly, we had the curry!

We had some fun at the “HEY” arcade where I got the high score on Star Fox and Cole got the high score on Galaga. This isn’t too impressive, since I’m not sure how many other people had even played those machines. As we browsed the stores, we noticed that the legit manga sections of the store had a way of abruptly giving way to the porn sections.

 

 

 

We went back to the house for some horizontal time before the evening’s activity which was a food tour. It was back close to where we’d had dinner the night before, and we were able to walk to the meet up spot. Our guide was Yoshi. He seems to have had a lot of different jobs – some of which had him traveling to the U.S. a fair amount. He’d even spent a little time in West Lafayette, working for a supplier to Subaru. Our co-tourists were a trio from Manchester, a guy from Atlanta, and a couple from Canada. The Manchester couple apparently had side-gigs as concert photographers for rock concerts.

I was fairly hopeless at picking up Japanese words. But, for some reason, I immediately became familiar with the word “izakaya” – usually a small little bar serving food. Our first stop on the tour was an izakaya with a very narrow corridor on the first floor, leading to even narrower stairs to a small room upstairs which is where we congregated. Here we had beer, several kinds of sushimi, meat skewers, a chicken meatball, and stingray fin. The stingray fin was particularly good – a hint of sweetness and an odd texture that was strangely satisfying. The second stop was a standing bar with fried meat skewers (one of which was Wagyu). There was also edamame, potato salad, and more beer.

The third and final stop was the best. It was at a bar in the Golden Gai. This is an area with six narrow streets connected by even smaller alleys and something like 200 tiny bars. Yoshi took us into one, up some stairs, and into a bar room with a semi-circular bar and stools around it. It was just us and the bartender here. I had a shot of habushu – a liquor that tastes a little like Jägermeister and is made with some kind of process involving a pit viper (habu). Then there was karaoke. Not at all my kind of thing, typically. But Yoshi got us started, the bartender participated, and then we were all singing together. Country Roads is a fan favorite – everyone knows it, and the range is not challenging.

 

 

We then headed home, stopped by a 7-11 for some sugar to use for our coffee, and everyone was asleep by 10.