Painting The Town Red

27th April 2006 – 11:00

I had my first night out on the town yesterday as there was a leaving party for Hyunjoo, one of the girls who works in the Campaign Management team here. She has been here for 6 months from Korea and returns there this weekend. Straight from work we headed towards Shimbashi (15 minutes walk) to a Japanese restaurant Golden Lion. As is the custom here, we had to take our shoes off at the door and once into our hired room we arranged ourselves around two tables and sat on the floor! The menu consisted of a number of dishes starting with fish, had fish in the middle course and there was fish after this as well!

So this was my first chance to enjoy some sushi (salmon, tuna, shrimp), tempura and different noodles. Having only had sushi once (I think from Marks & Spencers some time ago and it wasn’t that good!) I was really surprised at how good it was, especially (and I’m surprised at myself for this) the tuna! Tempura is a selection of battered vegetables and fish and ours included mushrooms, peppers and some type of fish. Next up was zaru soba – cold noodles. Topped with shredded spinach and served with wasabi and soy sauce. Other courses throughout the night included sukiyaki and tonkatsu.

There were a couple of speeches to be made, unfortunately, one of them being made by me (don’t you just hate it when things are sprung on you?) in which I thanked everyone in the company for the welcome I received when I arrived and looked forward to working with them all and learning more about their city and culture. Luckily they didn’t make me say this in Japanese!!

After dinner a number of us continued the evening by going to karaoke. This is not like in England where it is held in a pub and people get up and watch strangers sing. Here it is more private. There are buildings with many rooms inside and you hire out a room for a period of time so you get a whole machine and millions of songs to yourself. No need to listen to people you don’t know murdering Madonna songs! Everyone joins in the singing although only one or two people have microphones and people dance and shake tambourines as well. It is a real party atmosphere.

Most of the songs were Japanese pop songs although there were some western pop and rock tunes there as well. Obviously I had to sing, being the new boy, but I wasn’t sure what to sing. It had to be something that I hoped that they would know (no Meat Loaf or Deep Blue Something, then!) so in the end I chose a Green Day song as I knew that some people in the office had heard of them.

I had to leave here before midnight to be able to catch the metro home as the last trains are at around 00.30, so I left everyone singing along to some Japanese pop song that I didn’t understand!