Tokyo is mental. Mental mental mental. And it's huge. After landing in Narita international airport I took the JR Express train to Shinjuku station, one of the worlds busiest train stations in the centre of Tokyo it handle over two million people going through it a day! After a bit of wandering I finally found my hotel, it was lucky I printed out a map though, with it's foreign (mostly kanji) signs, with its vast office blocks, narrow lanes full of restaurants and such, Tokyo can be a tricky place to find your way around in!

After having a nap and meeting up with Maya, my Official Japanese Translator, we took a walk around Shinjuku. One of the most crowded areas in Tokyo this place is full of skyscrapers adorned with hundreds of neon signs, a rather tame and non-threatening red light district (in Kabukicho) and lots of cool and kooky hidden restaurants, sake bars, arcades, shops, temples, and I found a graveyard just a minutes walk from my hotel with two hissing stray cats guarding it. The other side of Shinjuku has some more upper class shopping areas as well the Metropolitan Government Building, a cool mini Petronas Tower type building that you could go up the top of for free, check the photos link down the end for the pictures I took!

I could have probably spent the entire week exploring Shinjuku alone, but the next day I was taken to the shopping area of Harajuku which is filled with Japanese school children and clothes shops for Japanese school children. Actually there are loads of good clothes shops around here and a road called Omotesando, after a bit more walking I ended up in Shibuya which has that famous intersection of roads, the Shibuya Crossing, which is one of the busiest uh......areas for people crossing the road in the world! The world's largest record shop (a Tower Records with nine floors) is also located around here as well as a large amount of really tacky and touristy bars, the worst and most famous if which is a club called Gas Panic which is infamous as a place where gaijin (non-Japanese people) go to pick up Japanese girls. So in the interests of research I went in and had a few drinks, it was pretty empty as it was Tuesday night though. Also the place was terrible, it'd fit right in to Temple Bar. Definitely not skkatter approved!

On Wednesday I took a 30-ish minute train right out to an area called Mitaka to visit the Studio Ghibli museum. Studio Ghibli are the guys that made such famous and great anime films as Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle (actually that wasn't so great), Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, My Neighbour Totoro and many others. While a bit small, I thought the museum was pretty nifty, they had a load of storyboard artwork, stills, models, a giant cat-bus toy for the kids (which I really wanted to play in), a giant metal robot thing, and you got to see an exclusive unreleased short film by the studio in a cool mini-old school cinema! It's mostly for kids but I'd still recommend any adult interested in the films to check it out.

But what about the nightclub action I hear you ask? Deep House Fanatic Shinya (who used to live in Dublin, you may have seen him down at D1 back in the old days) kindly took us out to three different clubs, Womb, Loop and Yellow. Womb was our first port of call on Friday night with Ian O'Brien DJing and a live set from Nathan Fake. I'd seen O'Brien before and he really disappointed me this time, he played a fairly unexciting house set with a bit of Detroit techno thrown in. I'm not a fan of Nathan Fake and his live set bored my poor little socks so I spent most of the night in the smaller room upstairs where some Japanese resident guy started off well with some weird spooky minimal stuff but then progressed onto this cheesy vocal house crap that everybody seemed to go nuts for. The smaller room also had this "VIP" area (in Japan they don't spell out the letters, they just say vip like a word that rhymes with dip, funny eh!?) where if you paid an extra 2000 Yen or something (14 Euro ish) you could sit on some seats in a less crowded area. The day before two people I was having dinner with commented on how I looked a bit like Jude Law so at Womb I told Shinya to tell the guy minding the VIP area that I was Jude Law and wanted to get in for free but the guy didn't believe me, probably because he wasn't blind. Despite the poor music (they get a lot of good acts over there though, Technasia was on the next week!) I had a great time in Womb. The sound system is miles ahead of anything in Dublin, the crowd were pleasant and enthusiastic about the acts playing and there was no trouble or pushing or any other mouldy drunken behaviour that is characteristic of practically everybody Dublin nightclub I've been to. There weren't any security staff that I could see, unless you counted the slim attractive girl taking our money at the door. Perhaps she was an expert kung-fu samurai or something? And for the uber-train spotters, the nightclub scene in the new Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film "Babel" was filmed in Womb! Also Womb was voted 2n

Saturday night and it was a trip to a club called Loop. And this place was great! A really small (150 capacity) club, it reminded me of Wax in a way, except a really well laid out Wax with a classy bar, cocktails, free tasty snacks (!!), a separate bar and dancefloor area, stellar sound system and great DJ set-up. Unfortunately for me it was cheese-tastic house night for some reason. Shinya calls it deep house for some reason. I really like house music, you know, Environ, Perlon, anything with a 303 in it, italo, proper old disco, Eevo Lute, Playhouse etc, people probably think I hate it with all this "they were playing shit house music" talk, but seriously, it was bad. I think I was just unlucky with the night, apparently Alan Smith loved the music when he was over, so says Shinya anyway. But I still had a great time, they were doing these banana smoothie drinks at the bar and I had the genius idea of getting the barman to add a shot of vodka to them which made for a hazy night indeed. It wasn't packed like Womb (or the rest of Tokyo) which was also a welcome change. Once again no security, friendly locals, great service and sound system, what more could a body want? I definitely recommend checking out Loop if you ever make it over to Tokyo, no matter what music is being played you're bound to have fun.

Our third official club stop was at Yellow the night before I went home. Shinya says Yellow is better than Womb but if it was up to me I'd rate both of them very closely together on the cool club-o-meter. The God Of Good Music was obviously having a laugh with me though as Michael Mayer was headlining and we got to enjoy, or rather endure a horrible assault of that electro-house anthem muck that's popular in a lot of Dublin clubs (I thought I'd escaped it, argh!). I tried booing loudly but the sound system there is so good nobody could hear me. It's a shame because the guys on before him were pretty good, a DJ called Toshiya Kawasaki and a guy who played a great live set of sparse but danceable techno called Saikoss (I think). We ended up leaving early, Mayer drove us out! Another great club though, Tokyo nightclubs put ours to shame in so many ways it's made me reconsider ever going out in Dublin again.

I was going to end this post with a small paragraph entitled "other Tokyo highlights included..." but that wouldn't do justice to the most amazing city I have ever visited. There's so much to see and do, go check out the view from Tokyo Tower (Japan's own version of the Eiffel Tower). Visit the hi-tech gadget nerd paradise that is the Electric City area of Akihabara. Visit Sensoji Temple (Tokyo's oldest temple!), make a donation and see if Buddah dishes you out a good or bad fortune. Eat raw horse meat (yeah!) in one of the many traditional Japanese "stand up" bar/restaurants in Shinjuku (or anywhere im Tokyo!). I could go on for ever, practically every bar, restaurant, club and shop I went to was special, the Japanese are obsessed with attention to detail that just makes the city so.........cool, for want of a better word. And it's so clean! 50 million people and they keep the place spotless!

The only problems I had with Tokyo were pretty minor ones. A lot of Tokyo is really crowded, on the Wednesday I was leaving it was a public holiday (21st of March, Equinox!) and there was a queue at every flippin' cafe in a five mile radius of my hotel. Also it's tricky getting around if you don't speak Japanese or read Kanji. I found the over-the-top politeness everywhere you go a bit fake and grating. But I did find the Japanese people in the non gaijin pubs really friendly once I struck up an admittedly difficult conversation with them. Also they have some really wacky systems and procedures. It's against to law to smoke on certain parts of the street, but still not illegal inside pubs, clubs and restaurants. Apart from these small niggling things my Tokyo holiday was one of the best I've ever had and I'll definitely be heading back to this city from the future as soon as possible. Special thanks has to go out to Maya who helped with translation, took me to all the sights and helped me not miss my plane home. Domo arigato Maya!!

Anyway I know you're all fed up of reading about how great a time I had so go check out the photos. I've got some videos too which I'll be putting up soon. You probably won't see me out in Dublin for the next while as I'm broke from this Tokyo trip and I'm also going to Detroit in (Derrick) May for DEMF. Also my holiday has given me a newfound revulsion for Dublin so I'm going to stay holed up in studio SKK and play records for the next while until I've acclimatised to this filthy, unorganised, loud and grey city once more.