Leaving Hakone, Romancecar

Today was our final morning in Hakone. After a quick dip in the onsen we had an in-house breakfast at 7:30am, which consisted of a small salmon collar (which was kept nice and warm over a small heater) and some pickled vegetables:

After checking out from the hotel, we walked to Hakone-Yumoto station and took the Romancecar directly to Shinjuku Station. Since we had booked a seat reservation for this two mornings ago to pay for the surcharge, and the Hakone Freepass covered the base fare for the Romancecar, we didn’t have to pay anything extra. The seats in the Romancecar also rotate 180 degrees to face the direction of travel, which we’d never seen before:

Arriving at Shinjuku Station, we simply had to show both our Hakone Freepass and our Romancecar seat reservation to the station staff at the fare gate to exit.

Shinjuku/Kabukichō

Our hotel was situated directly in the middle of the Kabukichō red-light district——since I’m traveling with family, it served as nothing more than a strategic location since due to its close proximity to Shinjuku Station (the busiest train station in the world). Exiting the east exit of the station, we found we had to walk through this intensely busy crossing to get to our hotel:

Kabukichō is one of Tokyo’s most notorious entertainment districts——in terms of its sketchier elements, the area is filled with pachinko parlors (gaming establishments that act as a loophole to Japan’s gambling laws) and bottakuri bars (bars that target intoxicated foreigners by advertising low drink prices but then surprising patrons with exorbitant hidden charges and fees when it comes time to pay). However, during the daytime and weekdays, the area is actually quite typical and clean:

Here is the view from our hotel window——we had to book two separate rooms to accommodate our family of four, since for some reason the hotel didn’t have a room with two queen beds available for us to book (could be a Japanese thing with the small hotel room sizes). My parents took one room, and my brother and I took the other:

Brunch: Curry

While initially walking to our hotel for check-in we saw a sign for CoCo Ichibanya, a curry chain that I was already familiar with from their several locations back in Los Angeles. Although it might seem like we were playing it safe by choosing a chain we already knew, we were actually really interested in seeing how the Japanese locations differed from their American counterparts in both menu and price. Their ordering system used a tablet attached to the table which was relatively confusing, but our waitress also magically happened to be Vietnamese (the third or fourth time this has happened to us) and was able to take care of us:

For reference, the average meal here was about ¥1,200 (about USD$8.30 when we went, $7.65 as of December 2024). The CoCo Ichibanya locations in LA are ridiculously overpriced even for the American market——just a base curry rice without any spice or add-ons would sink you about $12, and adding literally anything to it would cost you $17. Curry rice is also a relatively trivial dish to make, even with the fried katsu, so there really is no justification for how expensive it is in the US. Combined with how strong the US dollar is against the yen, you can buy two bowls of curry here for the price of one in LA.

Exiting the restaurant, we found ourselves exploring the area around our hotel. There was the ridiculously large Don Quijote discount store chain, whose parent company stocks a lot of shelves in Japanese specialty markets around Los Angeles (and even has locations in Hawaii that we visited a while ago). We found a lot of familiar items, but didn’t find that anything was cheaper relative to US prices or even to other parts of Japan——we attributed this to tourist pricing alongside inflation within Tokyo:

Tōkyū Kabukichō Tower

We stumbled across the Tōkyū Kabukichō Tower, a 48-story mixed-use skyscraper that had just opened a couple months before we visited. The building contains a variety of entertainment and recreational facilities, including restaurants, movie theaters, multiple hotels, and even a sauna. We only stuck around the bottom couple floors and messed around in the namco TOKYO arcade:

This was our first (but certainly not our last) encounter with a wall of gacha machines like this. We also messed around with the rhythm game arcade machines that accepted 100 yen coins for play:

Evening Walk

Later on we walked to the actual Shinjuku area outside the Kabukichō district to go shopping and exploring. There isn’t much to say here, it was a hyper-urban area that was extraordinarily busy for a weekday evening with I’m assuming to be the result of summer vacation:

Omoide Yokochō

For dinner we found the Omoide Yokochō alleyway, which was a really ambient, intensely crowded alleyway filled with lots of bars and small restaurants:

We found a small yakitori restaurant that appeared to have open seats and decided to try it out. The interior was extremely cramped——we had to duck our heads just to walk through——and we were led to the back where we climbed up an almost ladder-like staircase to reach the second floor loft area. Upon being seated at a foldable table (which felt oddly out of place for a permanent restaurant), we were informed that we had to all order non-water drinks (minimum ¥350) before we could order any food (which was also a bit pricey). This immediately sketched us out since we weren’t informed of this prior to being seated, so we left without ordering anything.

Emergency Dinner: Korean Soup

At this point we were starving to the point where anything would pass, and we found a small Korean restaurant called Kim Cafe less than a 30 second walk from the outside of the hotel elevator. This restaurant was actually quite delicious and offered a variety of Korean soul food dishes. We ordered a hot stone bibimbap, a noodle soup dish, and seolleongtang (ox bone soup):

After this we decided to call it a night and head back to the hotel. Here is the same view from our hotel window except at night: