On Saturday I held my friends' sayonara party in an Irish pub in Shinjuku (http://ultimatepubguide.com/pubs/info.phtml?pub_id=316) and it was really great. All my friends in Japan came, and then some. There isn't a whole lot you can say about the night, given that nothing exceptional happened. It was simply a fun, quiet evening in the pub. Just for the record, thanks for coming go to (in order of attendance): Anri, Osamu, Satoko, Tetsuya, Nori, Mayu-chan, (naturally the Japanese turned up on time followed some time later by) Kathleen, Stephen, Dave, George, Sarah Jane, Louise, Log, Dave and finally Iain. At first though there were problems, as Satoko and her family seemed distinctly uneasy with the very British practice of standing at the bar drinking. Fortunately only about 45 minutes passed before a table opened up. Kathleen (being pretty much fluent) then gently asked some girls at the adjacent table if they would mind swapping. Looking rather flustered at the audacity of the inquiry, or perhaps because Kathleen miscalculated the appropriate level of politeness, the girls up and left, leaving us with a triple table. I could go on to detail how we invaded and annexed every table in the annexe, and if I did you'd get a pretty good idea of the level of excitement to be had. It was basically just a pleasant quiet night.
Having got everyone there, I fully relinquished the responsibility for choosing where to go after the pub, and we ended up at ageHa@Studio Coast (http://www.ageha.com/), joined by Geordie Paul who I used to live next door to and Gwilym, who I never got to know despite being drawn to him and meeting him on my first day at work. It was really nice to see these guys again. At the club, Basement Jaxx performed an extremely poppy set while I wandered around from room to room. AgeHa is a really big club (with a 25 quid entrance fee) with a state of the art sound system, a pool, a tent full of cybertrance and yet it doesn't really add up. Somehow the best feature of the club is the elevated walkway which makes it pretty easy to find people on the dancefloor (especially if they have a giant white shiny head like Dave), despite the abundance of features. It might be a side effect of the size and layout, but I think, after some discussion with Noriko, that it's a combination of the clientele and the interior achitecture. It's a big club, but it doesn't have a regular clientele. Of the other main clubs in Tokyo, Womb (http://www.womb.co.jp/) is popular with music lovers and Yellow (http://www.club-yellow.com/) has a long history and with a lot of repeat business. They're also small. The effect is that at Yellow or Womb you can find your friends in a matter of minutes, and there is a very relaxed, easy atmosphere. At ageHa if your friends have giant white shiny heads then finding them on the dancefloor is easy, but you've also got to check the main bar (huge), the smaller room, the chill out tent, the pool area and so on. It's easy to get lost, and easy to lose your friends, and the other clubbers aren't nearly as friendly as in the other clubs. Even if I had more than another 5 days, I don't think I would go again.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy myself - I had a really good time, but I wasn't unhappy to leave a little early. Not unlike Japan.
