While surrounding areas have been developed and look like any other part of Tokyo, Shinjuku’s Golden Gai retains that now rare post-war charm.
Once again, not much research from me and we came here on more of a whim. I didn't realise this was realistically a place one visited at night
Bars in Golden Gai tend to open from about 8pm, so don’t head over too early! Although we had fun and weren't going to have time to return.
Just as we arrived it started raining, not too heavy at that stage and we had found a couple of umbrellas
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Behave yourself!
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We decided to just wander around the 6 tightly packed alleys and see what happened.
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It certainly is a unique place and has some cracking names on some of the Bars.
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This joint "BOOTH" had only just opened so we took the opportunity to go in and suss the place out.
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It appears that these bars traditionally only have room for around half a dozen punters. This place could potentially squeeze in eight people
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At this stage we had the place to ourselves.
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The barman offered me a free crack at Shōchū a Japanese distilled beverage. One I'd never heard of to be honest.
Some guff from the net -
It is typically distilled from rice, barley, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, or brown sugar, though it is sometimes produced from other ingredients such as chestnut, sesame seeds, potatoes, or even carrots. Typically, shōchū contains 25% alcohol by volume.
Now, I'm not sure which one I ended up trying, but it was far from terrible. I was expecting something that burned but it was really quite decent.
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The thing that surprised me was that they had a really clean and modern toilet with all the typical Japanese engineering tucked in the back left hand corner of this tiny bar. I was expecting to be sent to somewhere like this place below
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The heavens opened up while we were here, and it poured for a good 45 minutes which helped me sneak a couple of extras in
The young fella in the bar had limited English and likewise with my Japanese but as always, you make it work and he bought the Google translate out at times if needed. Good fun was had by all. We haven't been to Shinjuku for 15 years so off we went for a walk to see if we could remember any of the places, we had been prior.