Life After Last Call

Last night I ended up chatting with my Metam director a bit too long and missed my last train home for the first time. I ended up in Akabane, the northernmost outpost of Tokyo before it transforms into Saitama, where I learned a few things about what I had always thought to be just a sleepy transit station on my way to Shinjuku:

1. Three hours’ stay in an internet café in Akabane costs only ¥1000. That got me a sealed private room with a reclining couch, a massive flatscreen TV and an average-sized computer monitor for less than the cost of karaoke or a capsule hotel. The sign on the building even advertised, “We compete with hotels!” However, these bounties were securely guarded by a room full of porn, twelve varieties of individual-use sex toys in the bathroom, and a tissue dispenser mounted right beside the couch. Sadly, I couldn’t find any contact fluid, though I did follow the lead of a polite guy with a full-scalp tattoo and asked to borrow a phone charger. They took a copy of my gaijin card in the porn room, which conveniently doubled as reception, while I wondered whether this was simply done for future blackmail purposes. For the record, the place where I stayed in Hiroshima had been much more above-board, though perhaps not as private.
2. As a result of its being the last stop on one of Tokyo’s latest-running lines, Akabane has an unlikely concentration of nocturnal activity. There were at least a dozen people flaked out on the concrete in front of the station at 4:00 in the morning, and in the single block between the net café and the nearest McDondald’s, I received more offers for “massages” than I’ve encountered even in Shibuya.
3. McDonald’s breakfast starts at 5:00 a.m., and French fries at 4:15 aren’t really very tasty.
4. The first train out of Akabane is at 4:45.