My Crazy Night in Shibuya
Get ready to see a side of Japan you didn’t know existed
Japan is a country known for the civility and well-mannered nature of its people. Well, the nightlife in Japan is famous for the opposite extreme. They do a night out drinking a little differently over here. The trains stop running from midnight to 5 AM, so if you miss that last train, you just keep the party going until the morning.
I’ve had plenty of nights in Shinjuku’s famous Golden Gai. It’s 200+ tiny bars, all packed in side-by-side down six adjacent alleys. Nowadays, it’s constantly full of foreigners, and I use it as something of an escape from Japan. I know I can go there, speak English freely, and get rowdy with a bunch of traveling Westerners.
Recently, however, I pulled an all-nighter in a different tourist destination, one that is known for being the wildest and most crowded in Tokyo: Shibuya. In all fairness, I went to meet up with a friend that I made the prior weekend. He’s from the UK, and our intention was to just talk and throw back a couple drinks since we were both gonna be in Japan for a few months.
The night started slow. We went into a quiet bar and began sipping cocktails. There was a little bit of a foreshadowing of the events to come, personified in an American man who was blackout drunk, and stumbling…
