Hi Tokyo. I’m in your city for the next week or so and I’m having a blast so far. Normally I’m in Los Angeles, USA but decided I’d wanted to come to Tokyo for too long and not come so so now I’m here. I’m going to try and make a few posts here while I’m in town that don’t sound like a total tourist but I might not be able to pull that off. We’ll see. If you are into the total tourist perspective feel free to read this post from my own personal blog about the trip so far. I’m also posting tons of photos to this flickr set but fair warning there are tons of street scenes and probably things that folks who live here have seen plenty of times and aren’t impressed by any more.

I can say that the trains are not nearly as scary or confusing as I was led to believe before getting here. Everyone I talked to made them out to be completely impossible to navigate and tried to convince me to stay away from them unless I had a well versed guild. Totally not the case, and very easy to use if you know where you are going. Anyway… Nice work with this whole city of yours, I’m enjoying my visit very much!

BLUE SEAL Icecream is famous Okinawan icecream company. It was started to serve icecream for Americans in Okinawa. (Okinawa used to be occupied by US and there are many military bases in there) It is one of the place you have to go if you visit Okinawa.

but you dont need to fly to Okinawa, you just take a train to come here for icecream :) we have a new store in Fussa, where is west part of Tokyo, near US military base.
it’s always crowded but it worth to wait. they serve good stuff and cheaper than Baskin Robbins!

Wednesday of this week marked the beginning of the twelve-day long
Canadian
Style (TAB
page and 日本語)
event that design maven Jean Snow

is producing at Cafe Pause in
Ikebukuro. There’s an opening party this Saturday night, February
4, starting at 7pm. I plan to be there for it to find out just
what the hell this thing is all about – so hope to meet some other
curious and interesting people there too.

To get to Cafe Pause for the event, just make your way to the
Ikebukuro JR station, take the Seibu East exit and follow the
directions in the map below. (It’s only a 5-minute walk.) Or see the
Tokyo Art Beat page for Cafe
Pause, where you’ll find other maps and a QR code you can use to
access and store directions on your mobile phone.

And since Cafe Pause is after all a cafe, in addition to the normal items on its menu — light meals, snacks, sweets, and a full drink menu ranging from lemonade, “lemon cola”, “triple berry soda” and a variety of tea and coffee drinks, to beer, wine, and cocktails (including some of their own original cocktails, with names like “May”, “Lily”, “Jun”, “Teany”, and “Florent”) — a few special Canadian-themed specialities will be available, including a special meat pie and a bunch of maple stuff, even a maple-flavored cocktail.

As far as what else to expect, here are a handful of details from Jean:

… various installations (the main participants include
designer Sonia Chow
and photographer/DJ Marc Xavier LeBlanc)… video projections,
compiled themed mixes of Canadian (most independent) artists, and an
interactive installation, “Red + White/Read + Write,”

But to find out more, well, you’ll just have to head
there on Saturday night and/or before the event concludes on February
12 and see it for yourself.

Note that Jean has also created a Flickr
photo set for the event and is posting
up-to-date details at his site as it proceeds.

It has a bit of the feel of a college coffee house, except that instead of having a view out to some “quad” or whatever, it has a 5th floor view out to a neon-lit busy Tokyo intersection.

Other particulars: a full drink menu, including liquor, sake and shouchu, beer, wine, juice, tea, and coffee. Nice lighting, nice staff, usually good music. Seating for about 30 people and not usually crowded (so a good choice for impromptu gatherings). A selection of decent light food. And reasonable prices. A variety of interesting books and magazines you can borrow and enjoy along with your food and drink.

Also, a real rarity in Tokyo: outlets into which you are free to plug in your laptop’s AC adaptor and/or keitai charger.

And to top it all off: it’s open until 3am every night, including Sunday and Monday.

To find it, just ride the Ginza line to Gaienmae station, take exit 3, and you’re there. Well, almost. What you’ll see at the street level when you come up and out from the exit is a place called “Sign”. Office is in the same building, just on the 5th floor. So just go around the corner, left from the entrance to Sign, and climb the stairs (no elevator) up to Office, and enjoy.

Jean Snow (the hardest working blogger in Tokyo) has written quite a bit about Cafe Pause in Ikebukuro. (see his postings at MoCo Tokyo, at Gridskipper, and at his site), and I’ve been wanting for some time now to visit it. So today I stopped by to check it for myself.

Ikebukuro (where Cafe Pause is located) is not known as one of the hipper places in Tokyo, and isn’t a place that most people find themselves having a lot of reasons to visit (unless they happen to live close by). In fact, for me personally — despite the fact that I live not too far away from Ikebukuro (in Shinjuku, only 4 stops from Ikebukuro on the Yamanote loop line) — the only reason I can remember for wanting to go to Ikebukuro any time recently was just to visit Cafe Pause.

Anyway, I’m glad I made the trip out here today. The walk to Cafe Pause from the Ikebukuro JR station takes less than 10 minutes. And it’s not too hard to find because once you get nearby, you can pretty easily spot the big lighted “Cafe” sign outside (see the photo). Inside it’s basically one big room that seats maybe 25 or 30 people (to get a better idea of what it’s like, see Jean’s photos at Gridskipper and at at his own site). It has windows on two sides that run the whole length of the walls, so that you can watch the foot traffic outside as you sip your tea/beer/wine. The spot where I was sitting has a view that was kind of nice, looking down a sidestreet towards what looks like it might be part of a temple or shrine.

Internet friendly

As a Net vagabond, one of the things that makes Cafe Pause comfortable to me is its Internet friendliness. It’s not just that they have WiFi access (which, kudos to them, they even note prominently on their home page), but they also have electrical outlets. Ones that they’re happy to let you use. So if want to hook into the Net from there, you’re not limited just to staying only as long as your laptop or notebook battery might hold out. Bring an AC adapter and hang out as long as you like. Or bring your keitai charger and charge up your keitai while you’re there. At most supposedly Net-hip cafes in Shibuya, if you have the gall to ask the staff if you can plug your laptop or notebook into their AC, you get at best a “We’re very sorry but…” mock apology, or at worst a reaction of genuine suprise that you would even think to ask such a thing.

As far as the Wifi, if found two open and unencrypted WiFi access points there when I checked — one with a “YBBUser” (Yahoo BB) ESSID (which I think may be the official one that Cafe Pause provides), and one with a “livedoor-free” ESSID. Though the Yahoo BB one is slower (11Mbps) than the Livedoor one (54Mbps), the Livedoor one appears to require that you have a Livedoor account to use it. Which I don’t, and don’t want, so I didn’t bother. And really, 11Mbps is fine for remote use at a cafe (or for most other uses, for that matter). I had no problems at all logging into or using the Yahoo BB access point.

Staff, food, drink, atmosphere

Cafe Pause has a full drink menu — ranging from lemonade, “lemon cola”, “triple berry soda” and a variety of tea and coffee drinks, to beer, wine, and cocktails (including some of their own original cocktails, with names like “May”, “Lily”, “Jun”, “Teany”, and “Florent”). The food menu is more limited, but they did have a couple of “light meal of the day” choices (today, a soup one and a sandwich one) and three kinds of toast sets, as well as an assortment of side dishes (otsumami), snacks, and cakes and sweets.

The menu I ordered from was Japanese-only and I’m not sure whether much of the staff speaks English or not (we spoke in Japanese). But they were friendly and accommodating, so I reckon that even if you don’t speak or read Japanese well, they’ll do what they can to help you with food and drink ordering and making you feel comfortable.

As far as the atmosphere: The music while I was there was listenable, cafe-style down-tempo stuff — nothing too unusual or attention-getting, but then again, nothing annoying either. The lighting in the daytime is really nice — mostly just natural light coming in through the big windows. In the evening, they keep the lights down pretty low, so it’s also real nice then.

In a nutshell, I found Cafe Pause to be a comfortable, friendly place and plan to head back again soon. If you live around Ikebukuro, you really ought to stop by and check it out. If you do, I reckon you might like it enough to make it one of your regular hangouts. (By the way, there’s also an interesting stationary stored nearby, called Voxx, which Jean has also written up.) And even if you don’t normally come by Ikebukuro, perhaps you ought to make a special trip (as I did) just to check out Cafe Pause. Especially if you find yourself looking for a place free from the kind of uptight attitude you sometimes run into in cafes in Shibuya and its surrounding evirons.