Japan: Day 5 – Tokyo Drifter

Lots of time to kill today before a 5 PM flight back to California. Time to hit the street. Speaking of hitting the street, where else in the world can you plop down for the night on the sidewalk and just go to sleep, both legally and safely? Only in Tokyo. This guy is wearing a $300 suit; it's not like he's a vagrant. He just had a rough Friday night and needed to take a rest. There's not one piece of trash on the ground in the entirety of Japan, so add "cleanly" to my original query.

Shinanoya is one of the oldest and most-respected whisky retailers in Tokyo, so stopping by the storefront was an absolute must.

A huge, expansive, and eclectic selection of whisky awaits you inside. I cleaned up in here. There were some serious gems on that shelf.

Somehow, some way, Chris and I just stumbled upon this gigantic fish market. We had heard that visiting a fish market was something we should do in Tokyo, but we didn't know where it was and didn't want to waste time searching one out. Yet, despite our laziness, we still ended up at the fish market just by meandering right into it. To get an idea of how big Tokyo is, let me give you some perspective: just this fish market is the size of Union Square (including the mall). I'm not kidding. You have a selection of seafood that is as big as all of our department stores put together.

Whatever you want from the ocean, it's here waiting for you inside this box.

Then I spotted these empty wine bottles in a department store window display: 1997 Lanessan and 1997 Potensac. There's no way these two bottles didn't come from K&L. We bought practically the entirety of both vintages from these two Bordeaux chateaux, so the odds that these two bottles were purchased in tandem anywhere else is pretty much zero. What are the odds? A Japanese businessman probably visited the Redwood City store, bought these from Jeff Garneau, flew back across the Pacific, drank them, and used them in his window display.

Big Tokyo, small world.

-David Driscoll