Hontonii?

You have to hand it to the Japanese - they don't disappoint in proving that all those weird stereotypes you've heard or read about them are actually true. I was emailing with an acquaintance who recently moved to China but has visited Tokyo a couple times - a Chinese American male, and asking what I thought about Tokyo so far, he noted that his takeaway after visiting a couple times was that: "Tokyo is the most alien place on earth." I could not have put it better myself.

Spend a weekend in Tokyo out on the town and you realize that all those stereotypes you've heard about Japan and Japanese people aren't stereotypes at all but simply facts.

In the last 15 hours I:

• went to dinner at a restaurant where for some reason they had a bunch of animal and other costume heads that you could put on during dinner, and the table next to us, a manly looking bunch (I have to note "manly" here because that is SO rare in Tokyo - you never really see very many manly men, but this table was full of manly looking men - all with chests and arms that bulged underneath their shirts and crooked noses evidencing previous breakings) of K-1 fighters spent their entire dinner donning panda bear and mouse headpieces;
• went to a club where the people danced hard core hip hop in sync (IN SYNC, like aerobics class, but dressed in baggy jeans and fros), where at same club there was a "hair station" and a "nail station" so that if you aren't looking picture perfect or didn't come looking your best, professionals are waiting to curl or straighten your hair or reapply your fake nails (I really should have taken a picture of this but my camera was in my purse, which was in a locker - all the clubs here have a locker hall where you can keep your belongings so you don't have to dance holding your purse or risk getting it stolen);
• went to a second club where the ugliest, strangest looking white men were managing to hook up with decently cute looking Japanese girls;
• went to the 24-hour family store because my friend wanted to check out costumes, where we discovered "slipper mops" (furry animal slippers with a mane of microfiber tassles on the bottom so that you clean your floor as you walk through your apartment), "eyelash wig" (a superstrength mascara that one of my friends swears is like a wig because it actually adds fibers to the ends of your eyelashes to make it longer and thicker - I was dubious but I have to admit her eyelashes were super long and thick and she swore she hadn't had the fake extensions applied that everyone here does), S&M type underwear (including the Borat-style unitard-thong), as well as a roast sweet potato stand in the middle of the store;
• passed a gaggle of identical tiny black French bulldogs chilling in front of the grocery store next to my house;
• went to buy milk for my cereal but discovered that on Sundays the grocery store carries these extraordinary bento boxes brought in from different regions, so opted for bento over cereal;
• and later today will head to Harajuku to brave the teenyboppers and costume enthusiasts in order to find our hizzoween costumes for next week (although by the looks of yesterday, Halloween is already in full swing in Tokyo - half the people out and about were decked out in full costume).