Tokyo's Roppongi District

            A lone white-haired Japanese man in a shiny grey suit reels across the station concourse, somehow contriving to stay upright. This impressive display of drunkenness is in keeping with the action above ground. In Matsuya, a 24 hour restaurant specializing in dirt-cheap bowls of gyudon (beef, rice and onion) one boozehound has passed out with his head on the table, while another irritably barks ‘nani sore?’ (what’s that?) when the waitress brings him the food he ordered three minutes before. 

          This is Roppongi, Tokyo’s famous entertainment district, at one in the morning. Visit during the day, and it seems fairly normal. On a hill a short distance away stands Tokyo Tower, the city’s appealing red and white Eiffel Tower clone. An elevated road emblazoned with the word Roppongi divides the famous road crossing. There are the usual convenience stores, coffee shops and fast food joints, and the pedestrians are largely Japanese. Yellow taxis pass with customary frequency and you can hear subway trains below the road as you walk over vents in the sidewalk. 

          Scratch the surface just a little, however, and you get hints of the metamorphosis that occurs at night. You might find yourself wondering why a shoe has been abandoned beside a giant flower pot, or what goes on at enigmatically named places such as ‘Night Kiosk’ and ‘Mask’. Then are the establishments that leave nothing to the imagination: ‘Badd Girls’ and ‘Seventh Heaven’, for instance.

          At night the streets branching off the Roppongi crossing are jammed with foreigners and Japanese heading to Turkish restaurants, faux British pubs, ‘snack’ bars and smoky, 1970s style nightclubs throbbing with god-awful house music. Asian women of uncertain origin hang around on the sidewalk selling massages, the really persistent ones grabbing you by the arm or following you down the street. There are also a staggering number of black African men, who ‘know what you’re looking for’ and promise to ‘hook you up’. The slightest display of interest leads to offers of inexpensive bathroom time with ‘clean’ Japanese girls.

          These approaches are, not surprisingly, illegal. Lampposts and railings feature messages from the police, complete with childish cartoons, advising revellers to beware of these nuisances and warning you that you might end up losing a whole lot of cash should you do business with them. Still, you get the feeling that the police don’t take the matter overly seriously, for the officers standing outside the local police station merely look bored. 

            As dawn arrives the station attracts the exhausted and the utterly inebriated. People are sprawled on the platforms, and there’s an immobile man who’s adopted a variant of the brace position, his head and knees planted firmly against the floor. There are barriers protecting the subway lines at Roppongi Station, with good reason. You get the feeling that without them appalling accidents would be commonplace.