Tanoshii Tuesdays: Robot Restaurant, Tokyo, Japan (B)

Tokyo can feel surreal sometimes. Everything is foreign, from the kanji letters on the flashing neon signs to the meals of pork-laden noodles or tempura-fried shrimp on display outside of cramped restaurants. The crowds are absurdly intense, often dressed from the slightly strange – oversized tunics on women, handbags on men – to the downright bizarre – Harajuku girls in platform boots with pig-tailed blue hair. Even the smells are odd, from the sweet, grass scent of tatami mats that pervades indoors to the strangely absent smell of garbage outside on urban streets.

One tourist attraction has gathered many of the intensely Japanese elements of Tokyo and rolled them up into a tightly packed ball that explodes nightly into rooms on a couple floors of a Shinjuku building. I’m talking about the Robot Restaurant. Talking is one thing; experiencing is another. An evening at the Robot Restaurant is an assault on all the senses: Eyes are dazzled by the gaudiness of the interior; ears thrum from the rock music, the taiko drums and the high pitch voices of the dancers; mouths tingle from drinking the cheap Chu-hi or Ninja lager; noses twitch from the smell of popcorn; and hands tingle from clapping in delight at all the weirdness that surrounds you. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).