Tokyo Weeks 5, 6, 7: Reflections and Recommendations
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2/22/2026—3/15/2026
As soon as I let go of my ego and accepted that I’d look like a stupid tourist here, the better my time got, and I think the better I integrated, too.
But the thing is that I don’t want to be a stupid tourist here. I want a routine, I want to feel integrated, and I want to feel like this belongs to me.
I have a handful of haunts I keep returning to now. I like Onibus and Chiyaba, a short walk from each other in Nakameguro. Sometimes I’ll nightcap at the Tsutaya beneath the station if I don’t feel done writing yet, grab a ramen at the AFURI next door somewhere in between. If I’m feeling a change of pace I’ll head to Matcha Passport in Shimokita instead. The baristas recognize me, we chat, I write, I drift to another place, I read, I head home. I even like my apartment. I chose well. I do like it here, no doubt about it. It’s a privilege to spend my days like this in the biggest city in the world. But I don’t think I love it here…
This is not the Tokyo that electrified Bourdain in 1999. It is the “influencers racing towards the center of Shibuya Scramble like it’s the Hunger Games cornucopia for a tiktok” Tokyo, and no amount of preparation is going to absolve you from the crime of occasionally being a minor inconvenience or derision. People everywhere, but the Japanese especially, value humility. So having it will take you a very long way here.
And what I mean by that is literally throwing myself at the mercy of anyone I inconvenience. Ticket purveyors, gate agents, etc. I will literally throw myself on the ground and beg mercy for my ineptitude and general stupidity until the minor issue resolves itself. Chris Zhou’s advice works like a charm!
But that’s also what travel is, isn’t it? Submitting yourself to the kindness of others and the world around you. Being somewhere this long where I don’t speak the language has also made me so much more empathetic to the people in my own country who don’t speak English, and even then I know I’m dealing with a fraction of a fraction of what they face. It’s so vulnerable, to live somewhere you can’t communicate yourself to the full capacity of the intellect you know you possess.
Since I mentioned Bourdain, I want to share something interesting that I came across recently. On my usual Google Maps exploration of Tokyo, a French restaurant called Les Halles in Gotanda caught my attention.
One of the earlier turning points in Bourdain’s career came when he was still head chef at Les Halles in New York. The owner of the restaurant sent him over to Japan to help open their Tokyo branch. It was his first time traveling that far alone, to a place as far away as Tokyo. It enchanted him, stupefied him, captivated him immediately. He would later describe it as a life-changing trip — one that fundamentally reshaped how he saw the world.
So was this the same Les Halles? The NYC and DC locations closed ages ago, but what about Tokyo? I had to ask.
Hello, I am a visitor from America during our century of humiliation and have a question. Is this Les Halles affiliated with the now-defunct original location in New York? The owner had opened a branch in Tokyo a long time ago.
…Thank you for contacting us. We apologize. We have no connection to the Les Halles you mentioned.
Bummer! But also a relief, because that meant I wouldn’t have to eat French food while in Japan, which would have been a travesty.
I didn’t know a thing about Bourdain other than a passing recognition of his name (and the fact he killed himself) until 2024, when I came across World Travel: An Irreverent Guide while browsing a bookstore in Denver’s Union Station. I picked it up, wanting to finally see for myself what had made this guy so beloved.
I didn’t like it. Dropped it after skimming a few sections — it was outdated, a snapshot of a time that didn’t exist anymore. Despite being listed as the author, it was published posthumously, and most of the writing wasn’t actually his. And while I suppose it functioned as a nice anthology of the places he loved, I didn’t think he’d want people following his footsteps like a bible. So I abandoned him another year.
Bored and lonely on a long drive towards the Valley of Fire in February of 2025, I saw the Kitchen Confidential audiobook suggested on Spotify and hit play. I remember being surprised by the sound of his voice, because he sounded way — I don’t know, younger? spunkier? — than I had expected him to. Which makes sense in retrospect — I had only ever gotten glimpses of the guy near the end of his life.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to like KC either. Going into the sordid and gritty details of the restaurant industry didn’t exactly sound like gripping literature to me…But wait, this is so different from World Travel, and oh my god, he’s an amazing storyteller.
I devoured the book – finished it within two days. Another book and a season of TV later (A Cook’s Tour for both), I suppose I can call myself a fan now, and I think it’s in large part because I recognize a lot of the emptiness I feel within him too.
There’s an episode in the first season of A Cook’s Tour where he takes his brother back to their childhood summer town in France. There’s a certain hollowness to their visit, a wide berth between the feeling he was trying to recapture and what was physically there in front of him. It could never be recaptured, of course.
I watched that and thought: Oh, I see. We are the same type of animal.
Because I did the same, with Tokyo. The Tokyo that electrified me, the Tokyo that was the farthest I’d ever gone alone, the Tokyo that fundamentally reshaped the way I saw the world — that was the Tokyo I wanted to return to. Is there some disappointment here? A little bit, yeah. But to be clear, I’m glad I closed this loop. I needed to close this loop. But I did come here searching for something, I think some kind of external measure of satisfaction, when it was something I needed to cultivate within myself instead.
There’s this Baldwin quote I return to again and again, that says…
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
I think that Tony embodied this very well. He was so, so good at being relatable, at connecting people and places — and now I see that’s exactly why so many people say they miss a man they never met. I have a hard time believing in fate, but sometimes things enter your life at just the right time, and I think he is one of them for me.
So I don’t want to skip ahead on this journey – I already had the ending spoiled for me, why speed through the eighteen years I have left to discover? I’ve had a few people recommend I watch Parts Unknown while I’m traveling. I don’t know what that is. Stop rushing me. I’m pulling every episode of A Cook’s Tour from seedy dailymotion pages in 240p with German titles and LOVING IT!!!
So I still only recognize this forty year-old version of him, the one writing a love letter to the world he came from, who’s just getting started in the career that would launch him into the stratosphere. I’d like to keep this version to myself a little while longer. I know that I am at the beginning of a story with a sad ending. It reaches back into the past and scrambles everything. But I think I would have recognized that shadow even without knowing the ending.
In a way it feels like a cautionary tale for my own life. Not because I’m anticipating a sudden rise to superstardom that ultimately leads to my untimely suicide, but because, well…I’m running on empty too, my brain’s a little broken too, and that broken brain I’m living in is always creating a world far better than the one that exists around me, and I am constantly, incandescently disappointed by the dissonance between the two.
Maybe I’m projecting onto him. I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I’m excited to know his work.
And not to speak ill of the dead, but I also want to give myself a little more grace than him. Being in a transitional phase right now, I can chalk my own emptiness up to having existed in places I hated my whole life. Life will naturally color as this changes, and I have absolutely zero interest in maintaining this sordid sense of kinship with a ghost. Suffering isn’t deep or sexy, it’s just suffering. And I’m honestly a little afraid of keeping a record of broken promises to myself in saying this out loud, but I suppose that’s the function of this public diary. In addition to forcing myself to be honest I am also holding myself accountable.
I am editing this from my hotel room in Fukuoka while battling a cold. I am undergoing a collaborative project with myself, reaching into my past and holding it from my future. I have no idea what kind of person I will be when I’m presumably editing Fukuoka’s entries from a place hundreds of hours and miles away. It’s a mix of scary and exhilarating to think about. April will be a fast-paced month. I’m changing cities or countries every week or less. I have no idea when I’ll find the time to write – I plan on spending a longer stint in Thailand, so I’ll finally breathe then. Maybe.
But let’s return to March. Unfortunately, my predilection to go on a months-long travel bender before we fell further into World War 3 was proven right when Trump declared war on and bombed Iran. Double-tapped a girls’ school, at that, but as we’ve spent the past three years normalizing the slaughter of children I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
The next day, I rushed onto the train to grab a seat before the car got too packed. Relieved that I had secured a spot for my forty-minute commute across the city, I looked up and locked eyes with the person I’d beaten to the punch – a little girl no older than six, black eyes wide as moons, hair in pigtails that were cushioned by a baby blue bucket hat. She had a matching blue backpack on, with a rubber ducky pin on one of the straps. Her mother hovered over her with one hand on her shoulder and the other on the handrail.
I quickly got up and ushered her into my seat, and the man beside me gave his up for her mother. That whole ride she kept stealing shy glances up at me. Eventually we locked eyes again, and she smiled — a sweet, wide, gap-toothed smile — and it tore my heart in half. All I could see in her face were the dozens of little girls we killed in Iran days before. Why us, here, and them, there?
This is exactly why I have a hard time believing in fate. If little girls no older than six can’t get their prayers answered, what the fuck entitles mine to be?
Days later, Israel invaded Lebanon.
How can I enjoy myself in a world where others are being denied their basic right to exist in dignity—hell, to exist at all—at such massive scales? Especially others who look like me. That’s my homeland they’re destroying — my ancestry, my history, my blood. How can I go about my life as normal facing this reality? I cannot.
I’m not saying this in a tribalistic way. I mean to highlight how much dignity I have had to sacrifice, my entire life, in acquiescing and apologizing to people who did not give a shit about my humanity. I have always felt so amazed seeing how comfortably people would tell me that they served in Iraq. You really can’t see why that makes me want to spit in your face?
When I see others tiptoe around being “too political”, all I can think is that if I was there, and you were here, you wouldn’t give two shits about me. And that makes me…think very lowly of you. In my first corporate job I felt so much shock and rage and disgust at the people who moved through the world like everything was normal while I lost my mind. So many nights I cried myself to sleep over Gaza, and those tears did not bring dead children back, but they did invite your mockery.
The only thing that separates me from them is that I was lucky enough to be born in America, and the only reason I was lucky enough to have been born in my country that strangled my country is because my family had been wealthy in Iraq.
I’ve had several Americans ask me at this point whether I ever disclose that I am American, as they are embarrassed and ashamed to do so. It’s usually posed a little off-the-cuff, a little jokingly. But I’m gonna engage with it seriously for a minute.
I get why they don’t, but somewhat stubbornly, I always do. If we don’t face that derision and those conversations, we lose out on truly understanding the impact our country has had on the world around us. We must communicate with each other because that is how we save each other.
I’m speaking even to people in the same ideological camp as me. American leftists can be quite insufferable because oftentimes we loudly assume that we already know everything. Talking to people from outside the US humbles that arrogance extremely quickly, and I think that, in general, we all need to do a better job of listening to each other.
Our country’s military and economic overreach is a tumor that is metastasizing at home and abroad. We can’t shy away from this reality just because we’re not personally responsible for it. That’s exactly why I can’t – I do feel personally responsible for it. And I’m always, always thinking about how if each of us did a little, nobody would be burdened with having to do a lot.
Then my fellow Americans tell me that it’s not the people, it’s the government. That would be a workable excuse if this was a sickness at its early stage. But what about Hawaii? Vietnam? Cambodia? Cuba? Chile? Guatemala? Palestine? Iraq? Afghanistan? When, exactly, did it stop being us?
We are a very naive people, unaware of our own power — resembling children. But we are not children. We are human beings with dignity, and our country has been denying other human beings their dignity at scales and for timelines so long that it makes me want to scream. We need to face this reality head-on so that we can act in solidarity with all, or the world will abandon us. Deservedly so, a million times over.
Maybe people were exhausted or uneducated, too focused on their own lives to bother realizing what was happening. This is more forgivable over the people who were too comfortable looking the other way. A lot of us were too slow, too soft, too stupid, too fattened by our own comfort to speak when something needed to be spoken. Because implicitly, we enjoyed the benefits sown from global subjugation more than the admission of our basic humanity.
My 28th birthday came and went on the 9th of March without much fanfare. Originally a day trip to Hakone that I had to cancel, I couldn’t think of what I could possibly do on my birthday to indulge myself any further. I spent it alone, as I usually do on birthdays, and just went about my day as normal. Don’t feel bad for me, because, for one, I certainly didn’t—I felt so grateful to be alive and breathing and free, grateful to myself for bringing me here and grateful to the world for being kind to me. Sure, I wished I wasn’t alone, but I know that’s a temporary condition. And I did find a way to outdo myself, as I always do.
One thing that continues to astonish me about Tokyo is the utter lack of tourists outside of the places everyone knows. You don’t even have to go far…I’ll walk a block off Takeshita street and it’ll be empty — it’s eerie. Or I’ll head into a restaurant smack in the middle of central Shinjuku, but because it isn’t famous on the tourist social media circuit, it’ll only have locals or be half-empty.
The steak bowl spot my classmate Désirée introduced me to is one of those spots. A few nights after my birthday, I returned to it and sat next to a lost-looking American man. He was from a small town in Idaho and this was his first international trip. I asked him when he had arrived.
“Just now,” he said. “How long have you been here?”
“About a month and a half. I love this city a lot.”
“It must be pretty different from what you’re used to in Chicago.”
“Yes, they’re very different, but I love Chicago too.”
“Not as much crime here.”
I laughed a little nervously at this. “I definitely don’t need to worry about my bags as much.”
“Way cleaner, safer…Looks like their immigration policy is working for them.”
I was stupefied. The guy was obviously a racist pig, but I couldn’t tell if he was a malicious racist or a stupid racist to say that in front of me. Racist white people usually don’t go mask off around me, because I’m usually the demographic they’re talking about. If he was comfortable saying that around me, what is he comfortable saying around other white people?
And are they okay with letting him say it around them, as long as they privately scoff about it later? What are you comfortable tolerating when I’m not there? Because I think that’s a big part of how we got here.
Recommendations
Tokyo hotdogs…?
The Tokyo hot dog scene is so…interesting to me, as a Chicagoan. It’s, um, blasphemous, and terrifying, and an affront to God, but like…they seem to be happy with it? I had more hot dogs in baguettes here than I’d like to admit, always curious to see if maybe they’ll get it right this time, but it’s been intriguingly mediocre every time. I want Vietnam to get their hands on this and see what they can do with it, after the divine creation that was banh mi.
Iyoshi Cola
You need to try Japan’s take on a craft cola while you’re here. Having had several at this point across cities, I can say they do start tasting the same — a bit medicinal, heavy on the citrus and cardamom and allspice notes. Personally, I love it, but I also love rootbeer, so I like a spicy soda. If that isn’t you, maybe it’s a skip. I think it’s worth trying for anyone once. They also sell the syrup in bottles for taking home.
Flipper’s Shibuya
It’s noisy, it’s crowded, it’s dirty by Tokyo standards, and that earl grey pancake is still so goddamn good.
Torriden Hyaluronic masks
I don’t know why the Kininaru masks are so popular when this one exists and you can grab it from any konbini. I guess the former just has better marketing. But the Torridens were foolproof for giving me really, really good long-lasting bases for my makeup.
Paul & Joe Limited Edition Sakura Primer
One of the few primers I found at Cosme that didn’t create a white cast. Basically a dupe of Laniege’s glow serum, which is a dupe of the fabulous(ly expensive) YSL touch éclat.
Jubilee Coffee and Roaster
This place serves a great espresso tonic and has a cute vibe. To be honest, I didn’t find much to do in Minato besides walk around a bit, but if you’re in the area definitely stop by.
Katsudon ya Zuicho
Viral spot that isn’t worth a line but there wasn’t a wait when I went there. There are a billion amazing katsudon places in Tokyo - you don’t have to commit to visiting this one. But if there’s a short wait, it could be worth checking out. Small, cramped seating area, so don’t bring a huge group.
Hama-rikyu Gardens and Teahouse
A sweet idyllic day for me in Tokyo. It’s a bit out of the way, so I don’t know if it’s worth it if you have limited time, but the teahouse is situated in the middle of a pond and was absolutely lovely to sit in.
Ramen Oyster and Shell
Near Tsukiji Market and one of the best bowls of ramen I had on this trip. Adding lemon juice really does completely transform the soup — it’s wacky, and delicious both ways, so try it as-is before you add anything!
Turret Coffee
The best cup of coffee I had in Tokyo. The sakura latte was incredible, the carrot cake-basque cheesecake was incredible. The cafe is named after the turret machines they use to move produce around at Tsukiji and Toyosu.
Toyosu Market
I honestly…don’t think it’s worth getting up from the tuna auction. You’re so far removed from it, watching from a glass window above. Let me down there, I want to see what the vibe is like :-)
Tokyo Banana KitKats
These were fantastic and then I never saw them again. If you know where I can find them again…please, tell me. And don’t say going back to where I got them that part of town is soulless and life draining
SG Club
Has flowers that are very well-earned. I loved it here. It’s popular and busy, which can detract from the vibe if you care about that…was super fun one night and a little more harried the second — nothing to blame on the bar. Just know it’s a very popular spot. I loved everything I tried here.
pizza marumo
It was delicious despite my crust coming out a little messed up. The Kyoto-made yuzu soda was delicious.
Lamb chan
Very cute lamb-focused izakaya in Nakameguro. Try their Genghis Khan for me, because I didn’t get to.
Penguin Bakery
I saw Japanese people queueing, so I joined the queue, neglecting to account for the fact that the Japanese will queue for anything. To be honest, this was so mediocre. But what I WILL recommend is grabbing one of their little cheesecakes, a handful of Lindt milk chocolate truffles from the nearby Lindt location, and eating them together. THAT was divine.
Hikiniku to Come (Kichijoji)
I fear this is 100% worth the hype. These guys have locations all over Japan, so if you’re going anywhere other than central Tokyo, just…skip the war that happens over reservations for the Shibuya location and go somewhere else. This is one of them.
Inokashira Park (Kichijoji)
My favorite park in Tokyo. Beautiful, idyllic, not too crowded (in the mornings).
Heiwajima Anitques Fair
Now this is a hidden gem. Only runs five times a year.
Oedo Tokyo Antique Market
Also very much worth it, but it gets crowded quickly, so show early. Located right in between the Tokyo International Forum campuses.
Oi Racecourse Flea Market
So, so touristy…And also worth it. But I don’t think any vintage bags being sold in Tokyo are a bargain anymore.
New York Bar & Peak Lounge at Park Hyatt Tokyo
Fantastic drinks and views in both spots. There is a seating charge after 6:30pm at New York Bar, so getting in at 5 then moving to the Peak Lounge after a couple of drinks was perfect for me. The hotel was just recently renovated too, so it may be worth booking a room…