Day 2: Ginza
Today, I arrived at Mecca. Aka the Muji Hotel in Ginza, Tokyo. If you’ve ever been tempted to live inside a Muji store, this is the ideal spot for you—the rooms are quite literally at the top of the six flights of escalators moving through the Muji flagship store.
I flew from Incheon this morning, and didn’t arrive at the hotel until just before 3 p.m. Somehow, after checking in, I wound up in the same elevator as two women who I recognized from my boarding gate back in Korea. There is, I realized yet again, no such thing as originality. But I did surprise myself by speaking to them.
After dropping my things, I left again, en route to Roppongi Hills. I’ve been before to visit the Mori Museum, and have a vivid memory of slurping down curry udon in a snug restaurant nearby. This time, I went in search of sushi—Sushi Yuu, a spot recommended by Foursquare friends and Eater’s Essential 38 Restaurants in Tokyo. Google lied about it opening at five, so I killed time by wandering in circles. First, I climbed a small hill to the National Museum of Art, a gleaming glass building much more modern than the paintings on loan from the Louvre that were on display (the not-famous works, it seemed). Next, I stumbled upon a street lined with cherry blossoms, and fulfilled my dream of seeing the pale pink petals drift down like flakes of snow.
I had waited an awkwardly long amount of time to get into the restaurant—two men chatting in English down the street were commenting on my standing there for so long. Eventually, a Japanese family of four hopped out of a taxi and approached the door with confidence—something I’m notoriously incapable of doing—and in they got, with me in tow. Beyond the slatted wooden door lay a cozy 10-seat wooden sushi bar. I had no reservation, hence my coming early. My plan was to beg, but it turns out they had an opening, and a seat I was given.
Fish after fish sometimes molded around rice, other times on its own, appeared before me. Both chefs spoke English, and were kindly explaining the dishes as they lay them down. Like me, none of the other guests minus the family of four spoke Japanese. I won’t go into all the details, but I definitely ate teeny tiny purple squids, sea urchin, salmon roe, sea eel, tuna at every level of fattiness, and something I think the chef called “horse mackerel.”
There were couples on either side of me—a younger pair of American (?) gay men to my right, and an older Eastern European (?) man and woman on my left. The gay men and the older woman were obsessed with capturing photographic evidence of every dish, every moment. It was bizarre enough how the woman kept holding her phone right up to the chef’s face and hands to film his process, but then, she brought out a fuzzy gray hand puppet that was either a koala or a mouse, and began filming it speaking in a crazy voice. She did this for a full minute and when she stopped, she zipped the puppet back into her bag without giving any sort of explanation. Then the next course arrived, and we carried on.
