Day 13: Pussies and Dicks

Still reeling from our failure last night, we decided to challenge Sky Tree again today, so we went back to Kinshicho and walked back to Sky Tree.

But first, ramen for lunch:

Salty-ass ramen.

We ate at this interesting ramen place that served ramen with an extremely strong broth. For the lunch special, they also gave you rice with unlimited refills. I’m thinking that the broth is really salty because you’re actually supposed to eat it with rice after you finish your noodles.

Tonkotsu Ramen

When we actually got to Sky Tree, it was packed with families:

At the base of Sky Tree

Actually going inside, we tried to buy tickets to go up, but it turned out that all of the passes for the day were already sold out.

Inside Sky Tree

Apparently, this is the first New Year’s where Sky Tree has been open (it’s a relatively new building), so it’s been amazingly popular the past few days. In order to go up, you need to stand in line to get a ticket that lets you buy tickets. When we got there around 11am, it was already too late to buy tickets at that point.

Oh well, off to our next destination then: cat cafe!

Nekomaru Cat Cafe

In the Kinshicho station, we saw an ad for the 猫まる (Nekomaru) Cat Cafe nearby, and we decided to lick our wounds there. But mostly, to play with adorable cats.

The way it works is that there’s an increasing charge starting from half an hour and increases in 30min increments. During this time, you can play with the cats in there all you want.

ALL the cats in the cafe

All of the cats even have names and bios in case you’re interested.

There’s also a free drink machine that can be used as long as you’re in the cafe. (The “cafe” part, I guess)

Cat drinks

The place itself isn’t all that big, but there are plenty of places for cats to run around and play:

Inside the cat cafe

Still inside the cat cafe

Unlike maid cafes, you can freely take pictures too. So that’s what my party did.

Box cat.

Basket cat.

Undertable cats.

Bowl cat.

Rocket cat.

There also was this one cat who I’ll call “Boss Cat”:

Like a bauss… cat.

This cat got into a nice, comfy spot and then absolutely refused to move for anything. Even in the presence of toys, Boss Cat just stuck out one paw, as if to say: “here, I can’t be bothered to catch that thing, just put it in my hand.”

Whattabauss.

One fun thing about this trip to the cat cafe is that it seems like many of my party members are allergic to cats. I have pretty bad general allergies myself, so when I left the cat cafe, I was sneezing and my nose was running uncontrollably. One of my party members had trouble breathing. Another one turned really, really red. Fun times. Still worth it.

We then took a trip to Kawasaki in order to visit the penis shrine there. So we got back onto the JR and headed to Kawasaki Station:

Kawasaki Station

We had bought city day passes for the JR earlier, but it seems like Kawasaki is outside its effective range. Luckily, we just had to pay an extra 150yen to get past the gate (the closest station in range was Shinagawa and that’s the price from Shinagawa to Kawasaki). Still much cheaper than not using the day pass in our case.

Unfortunately, we didn’t actually know where the shrine was. Luckily, there was this handy-dandy display that had the local attractions nearby. We even were able to look up directions on how to get there using the thing.

Youkoso Kawasaki display

So we got out of the station and starting walking:

Streets of Kawasaki

At this point, it was getting dark. But we kept on walking…

…and walking…

…and walking…

It was a lot farther than we expected, so we kept on walking…

Eventually, we reached 若宮八幡宮 (Wakamiya Hachimanguu Shrine)

Wakamiya Hachimanguu Shrine

Wakamiya Hachimanguu Shrine Front

As you can see in the above pictures, it was already really dark by the time we actually got to the shrine.

Apparently this shrine is one of the few remaining fertility shrines in Japan. Enshrined here is this fellow:

WAIHAROTHAR

金まら様 (Kanamara-sama AKA Iron Big Penis Lord) is… more or less exactly what it looks like.

Where the ema are hung (ha!) you can also see flags denoting the enshrined:

“Hung” …*snicker*

There’s also this interesting statue on the floor with the ema:

Exactly what you think it is.

Took the opportunity to donate some money and make another prayer to the actual shrine.

The shrine part of the shrine

Again, I didn’t really have much to wish for. Maybe I should’ve wished to be more well-endowed? (笑)

Also took the opportunity to draw a fortune since I didn’t do it during New Year’s:

Hello Kitty Fortune, in fact

My fortune was 小吉 or “Small Luck”… which is… alright I guess? Oh well, tied it to a nearby branch anyway.

Tired of all the walking, we headed to the nearby metro station and headed back to Akihabara.

At some point, we headed back to the arcade and we took the opportunity to try some different machines out.

BIG! BANG! SMASH!

This air hockey table is ridiculous: after a certain point a whole bunch of big and small pucks are dropped onto the table (like 20 or so small ones and 10 or so large ones).

Three or us also decided to try out a print club (purikura) booth. Print club booths are more or less photo booths that let you take pictures, then doodle all over them, and then print them out, usually on sticker paper. In particular, we chose this one:

Oh❤My Girl

Sharp-eyed readers might notice the sign in the middle. It says “Girl + Boy OK, Boys OK, Girls OK”. There’s actually a section where only women are allowed. As you might guess, the target audience for these booths are definitely girls.

The interesting thing about this particular booth is that it had some postprocessing filter that “beautified” the subjects in the photo by doing things like adding really girly eyes, girly makeup, etc. Now, combine that with 3 dudes and you get something that I’m not willing to show the internet.

Also played Taiko Drum Master for the first time in a long time

Taiko Drum Master

We also played local Mai Mai, which is pretty cool. How it works is that you can link together local machines and play either with or against each other.

3-person Mai Mai

Actually, you can do this with most of the rhythm games in the arcade. For example, we also did this later with Jubeat.

Lastly, have a big-ass start button:

BIG ASS START BUTTON