somewhere up in tohoku, i breached the "danger zone" of my remaining line of credit, in fact one evening i even had to perform an emergency capital infusion lest my card get declined trying to book accomodations for the nightthis bailout was financed by selling some shares of warner bros. discover ($WBD) i had lying around from when they were spun off from AT&T a couple years ago, i got a bit of a windfall when the value suddenly surged after paramount skydance announced a bid to acquire them and sparked a bidding war with netflix. resigned, in my safely-secured business hotel room that night, i finally sealed my fate and booked my flight out of japan, giving myself a few final days to wind things down and take care of my "unfinished business" (mostly buying stuff) in tokyo. i decided to go out in style and for my last few nights booked at "anshin oyado", a "luxury" capsule hotel in, where else, akihabara. i'd found out about it at the start of the trip when i'd gone to akiba's honey toast café with my friends, while we were waiting (honey toast always seems to take forever) i was facing this tv on the wall playing promo videos on loop. one segment was an ad hyping up anshin oyado, it was pretty convincing: bathing facilities in the basement with a sauna and artificial hot spring, open bar from 5pm to 3am, free soda machine and snacks like popcorn in the lounge, big manga library, all-you-can-eat free curry in the morning and instant ramen in the evening. i pointed up at the screen and quipped to my friends "look, they've made Guy Heaven". after hearing so much about it, i HAD to find out where it was, so i looked it up on my phone and it turned out it was literally across the street, you could see it out the window behind mealso, the reason anshin oyado was being promoted in the honey toast cafe is that it's owned by the same parent company, pasela resorts.

anshin oyado was a quick walk away from the station and close to all the action, it's right around the corner of the big blue EDON building that anchors the bottom of akiba's main strip, which runs along its central throughfare chuo-dori. my initial plan was for my stay there to serve as something as a writing retreat, as always i was feeling the pressure from the ever-burgeoning backlog that i hadn't been able to make much of a dent in due to weeks of constant movement and exciting new experiences that only made it grow. the lounge at anshin oyado seemed like a perfect workplace for me with its unlimited free coffee and the lack of pressure to leave if you stay too long without buying something, the main thing keeping me away from coffee shops and the likethe drink bars at family restaurants offer the unlimited coffee i need, but i've noticed a lot of them don't have free wifi, presumably to discourage freeloaders from using them as offices, exactly the sort of thing i'm trying to do. but the best part about it is that when the bar opened in the evening i could seamlessly transition from coffee to alcohol, keeping the flow of performance-enhancing substances going all dayi really wonder why more places don't do a morning cafe to evening bar transition like they do in, say, gochiusa... though in japan i did finally encounter a place that does that, a chain called pronto. in the middle of the day, i could emerge for a couple hours and take care of the "unfinished business", which shouldn't take too long considering i was already right at the heart of akiba. ⊕it goes without saying that my accomodations at anshin oyado were MUCH better than at the last capsule hotel i stayed at

of course, things went off the rails almost immediately the same evening i arrived. i put my stuff up in my capsule and then headed down to the lounge, the bar was already set up and the working conditions seemed good, it was almost disconcertingly quiet in there for how full it was with dudes hanging out in the provided loungewear, only in japan could you get that many people in a room and have it be more silent than the average american library. i claimed a cozy chair with my laptop and then went off to the bar... the problem is that i cannot be trusted to pour my own drinks in these situations, i always try to eyeball it and inadvertantly make them way too strong, an issue that only compounds as i get drunker and my ability to pour carefully and judge volume deterioratesthe other night i was already pretty tipsy and tried to pour one shot for a rum and coke right into a tumbler, afterwards somebody commented "bro that's half the glass". anyways, i ended up getting almost wasted and spent most of my night in the lounge reading wikipedia articles and giggling, then the next morning i had my first decent hangover in a while. after three cups of coffee in the lounge and forty-five minutes, with great effort i managed to churn out a single clunky and completely worthless paragraph before giving up and heading into the electric town.

stepping out of anshin oyado onto the street was jarring, anshin oyado really does feel like a peaceful refuge from the crowds right in the heart of akiba. now that they'd had a month or so to refresh their stock without me around i hit up some of the usual haunts like volks, that was a mistake because somehow they'd dug up even more tkmiz goods from somewhere, where do they keep finding this stuff? i bought a shimeji simulation shirt that i ended up wearing the next couple days around akiba since i had no other clean shirts and didn't feel like doing laundry right before leaving. i also explored some new places, like the imposing SHOSEN BOOK TOWER that marks the southeast corner of the district, they do this neat thing where for each subject/category ⊕i had no idea there was pasmo merch, let alone a robot mascot. i'm a pasmo loyalist, i still use the original pasmo card i got when i first went to japan ten years ago even though it's starting to look really beat-upthey'll stock doujinshi on it alongside traditionally-published books. for me though the standout was the incredible floor they had dedicated to railways, they had shelves of merch arranged by railway in the same way that other stores in akiba arrange merch by franchise. in one corner there was a bin full of old network maps from inside tokyo metro cars for only 500 yen each, at that price i picked one up even though there was no way i could get it back home in my bag without damaging it.

one of the most pressing bits of "unfinished business" was to try and pick up another pair (or three) of MUJI shorts, i'd bought some at the start of the trip and they were so comfy i'd worn them nearly the whole time since. unfortunately they were now definitely out of season and i didn't find any at MUJI's akihabara outpost, but there was an outside chance they might be available at MUJI's ginza flagship store. there was also a little art exhibit i wanted to see at the tsutaya books in ginza, so i decided to head there next. i set out on foot walking south instead of taking the yamanote line down a couple stops, ginza's within reasonable walking distance of akiba and it's not like i was in a ⊕mmmm yes, fine arthurry. along the way i passed through the little skyscraper district in otemachi, the tall buildings and the spacious street grid feel foreign compared to the dense mid/lowrise sprawl and nearly medieval street networks in the rest of tokyo. i happened to know from prior experience that a lot of the subway stations in the area were connected by long tunnels, so i descended down into one to see how far i could make it underground. the answer ended up being "all the way", a distance of about a mile or so... unfortunately MUJI ginza didn't have any shorts, though they did have a corduroy jacket that caught my eye. i hopped on the yamanote line back to akiba (confusingly, the station closest to ginza is called "yurakucho") and spent the rest of the evening sampling various arcades, eventually determining that the pop'n cab with the most comfortable spring weights for me was this old CRT model hidden in the back corner of hirose entertainment yard (annoyingly, when i went back literally the next day it had mysteriously disappeared).

the next day was the long-delayed final day of my trip, and i had a full slate of festivities planned with the only two people i knew in the city. for dinner, i was meeting up with the sino-canuck owner of the airbnb i'd stayed at with my friends for the first month of the trip, he'd come by one day to engage us in a conspiracy to show the house to a real estate agent in secret because apparently he had some beef with the management company in charge of running the airbnb and didn't want them to know he was trying to sell it. we hit it off pretty well and my friends ended up going to hang out with him the exact same night i was off in akiba meeting shibs for the first, he'd wanted to meet up with me too but i'd been out of tokyo for a while and only managed to squeeze it in on my very last day. we were going to be meeting up in ikebukuro so i went a little early to raid their book-off (made some great finds there in the past) and look for shorts or that corduroy jacket in MUJI... i found no shorts and after debating it for thirty minutes, decided not to buy the corduroy jacket (i own it now though). then, i finally gave up and went to a bookstore selling new books in order to fill in all the gaps in the manga series i'd been putting together piecemeal buying cheap used copies at book-off. i met the airbnb owner there and we went to a good neighborhood tonkatsu place, i must have made a good impression because later he messaged me and made a vague job offer to help run another airbnb he was considering buying or something.

⊕saizeriya "business" meeting... if you know where to look you can find this picture from the opposite perspectivenaturally i also met up with shibs that night, it ended up working out perfectly because he had his own dinner commitment and wasn't available until after 9. i went down to his place to retreive my suitcase and then we headed off to akiba together, where i depositedmy bag at anshin oyado. i'd known for a while exactly where i wanted to throw my "going-away party": saizeriya. the "main" saizeriya in akiba by the station closes a bit too early for much late-night revelry (10:30pm), but if you walk up chuo-dori towards ueno there's another one that's open until five am. since we'd both eaten dinner already it was a strictly sipping wine and snacking on sides like mozzarella, foccacia, jamon serrano, very classy, the kind of thing i imagine spaniards and italians do on a nightly basis. in the end we sat around chatting for something like two hours, guzzling three bottles of wine and finishing up with a dessert of tiramisu. at some point shibs decided fuck it, he was staying out past the last train even though he had work the next day, the spirit of the true salaryman was in him, can't imagine the lame jive turkeys back home making such a noble sacrifice of their "precious eight hours", in asia they still know how to drink and party.

when we stood up to leave saizeriya i noticed that it had pretty much emptied out, when we'd arrived it had been bustling and we'd been lucky to find a seat. inside the elevator, i saw that there was a maneki neko karaoke in the same building on a different flow, so you know where we went next. the drinks kept flowing at karaoke, and for the first time i can remember we actually extended when they called us up to tell us our time was up. i don't remember much but i think we had a vague summer/end of summer theme going with the song selection, the only thing i can clearly recall is ending on a powerhouse performance of 君の知らない物語, to a sober observer it probably would have appeared like i was in the middle of some kind of attack, standing there shaking violently while screeching. i once heard somebody say that karaoke has the greatest difference in enjoyment level sober vs. drunk and i definitely agree, in fact for the best results i have to be pretty close to wasted.

it was striking how abandoned akiba seemed at 3am after we left karaoke, seeing chuo-dori and its bustling shops and wide sidewalks totally devoid of people gave it a practically post-apocalyptic atmosphere. contrary to what you might think akiba isn't a nightlife district at all, the shops all close at 8 (after opening pretty late around 10 or 11) and then all the bars and even arcades close around midnight just before the last yamanote train. the otaku are night owls but not party people, instead of staying out they all go home to unwrap their purchases, play video games, watch late-night anime, whack it to doujins. we stopped at a convenience store for the final drinks of the night (early morning?) and then shibs launched an impromptu tour of some of akiba's hidden spots, i suppose now that there was no chance of revealing them to the uninitiated. the first one was akiba's back alley shrine pretty close to the convenience store, i'd heard about it before but never been there. when we got there, what caught my attention more than the shrine was the gap between the buildings right next to it. although tokyo's thin little towers may appear to be so densely packed that they're attached to each other, more often than not they're freestanding buildings with their own four walls that maintain a slight distance from each other, forming a tall narrow "no-man's land" between them. the gaps are usually strategically concealed or otherwise barricaded, but in the back-alley one of them was bare and easily accessed, blocked off with no more than a cursory 立入禁止 cone sufficient to stop 99.9% of those who encounter it.

drunk as i was and with absolutely nobody around, i had no qualms about stepping over the cone and exploring the gap. it was about two feet wide, windowless walls going up 8-10 little japanese stories up on either side, large stones underfoot. it was unexpectedly pure, no windows, no exterior AC units, and of course it was japan so it wasn't disgusting and filled with trash or graffiti like you might expect anywhere else. the opposite end appeared to open onto the main street, but it was so sheltered in there that you could imagine that even in the middle of the day the sounds from the street couldn't reach you back there, you could lean against the wall there safely cocooned from the outside world. we leaned on opposing walls next to each other in the gap and savored the solitude, sipping our beverages while chatting. i've tried to find where the gap was on google maps but failed, i was too drunk to remember exactly where it was, it's possible that it only opens up and reveals itself in the middle of the night to those still left in akiba.

the second and final stop on the impromptu tour was at the opposite end of the district, the "creepy vending machine corner" just across the bridge to the south. i'd been to this one before so it wasn't as interesting, but it was conveniently close to anshin oyado when we decided to call it a night there, shibs hailing a taxi home from akiba for the first time (the verdict: cheaper than expected considering tokyo's notoriously expensive taxi fares). i stumbled back into anshin oyado, and since it was after the daily cleaning hour (2-3am) hit up the basement bath and sauna for a bit before retiring to my capsule.

i woke up a bit before noon feeling pretty messed up but not nearly as bad as i should have been considering the amount i'd drunk... it was possible that i was actually still a little bit drunk and that remnant was keeping the hangover at bay. i hadn't been able to determine anshin oyado's checkout time, but just to be safe i decided to clear out before noon and head to the airport even though my flight wasn't until the evening, after so many close calls i was finally going to make good on all the times i swore that i was going to be responsible the next time and get to the airport well in advance. i went down to the locker room and haphazardly stuffed the contents into my suitcase, mostly a bunch of manga and other last minute purchases, i didn't have the mental bandwidth to try and pack more carefully and was basically running on autopilot. at checkout i thankfully wasn't hit with any additional charges, then made my way out into the crowds outside. my plan was to just walk straight up chuo-dori to keisei-ueno station and hop on the skyliner direct to narita, there was no way i could handle navigating akihabara station in my current condition just to save a few minutes by riding two stops on the yamanote line.

of course within a few minutes of me setting out it started raining, luckily nothing too serious, just a light sprinkle. i also had an ulterior motive for going by foot, and on my way up made a slight detour over to the mandarake complex 2 building to buy another train destination placard i'd promised one of my friends, even though i'd had plenty of time to buy it the past couple days i procrastinated until it came to that. normally i probably would have been too lazy and/or ashamed to make the stop, but still being a little drunk and out of it gave me enough of a mental shield to stuff myself and my giant bulging bag into the tiny elevator, ride up to the 7th floor, and have the staff help me pick one out from the case. i remember quite vividly that as all this was happening, the speakers overhead were playing "driver's high". afterwards i shambled down to keisei-ueno station just fine, making one final stop at the keisei store in the station to purchase the 2026 edition of the keisei wall calendar.

my flight was out of narita's terminal 3, which i've never flown from before. it doesn't have its own station like the other two, instead you have to get off at terminal 2 and then walk half a klick down a long sequence of passageways. like the budget airlines that call it home, terminal 3 is no-frills: aggresively boxy, low ceilings, ducts and pipes left exposed, the food options presented mall food court style. naturally i hadn't printed out my booking yet, i was relying on finding a convenience store at the airport, and sure enough terminal 3 had a lawson equipped with printing facilities. i found a table nearby, got out my laptop, put the pdf on my flash drive, and went over to lawson to print out my plane ticket... to SHANGHAI!