Travel Ladybugs: The Robot Restaurant in Shinjuku
by Tiffany Ho
This article is part of a new Her Culture column series called "Travel Ladybugs," which gives insider tips about locations around the world, including little-known restaurants, historical sites, beautiful landscapes, and more.
So to start off, ever since we’ve been in Japan, there’s a few common things that I’ve noticed happening everywhere we go:
Every Japanese person is in love with some kind of pickled vegetable.
Japanese people really like their grapefruit.
There’s soy sauce with/in almost anything they munch on.
Almost every Japanese bidet toilet has the smarts to know when you’re on the toilet and will play a rushing sound of what sounds like a waterfall. My guess here? To help you pee sooner rather than later. Or maybe just to hide the sound that you’re doing your thang.
Okay, now that that’s out…we started our adventures today after breakfast by wandering through Hibiya Park, the first public park in Japan with a Western-style design (think something along the lines of Central Park, but located in the midst of government and ministry buildings). There we were, delighted by these beauties:
We then cruised on a small boat on the Sumida River, which is the longest river in Tokyo, and passed by the Tsukiji market and the Akihabara district (aka where kids go to get their share of anime, games and manga).
We then got off the water and walked over to Asakusa District, making a stop to the Asakusa temple, Tokyo’s oldest temple. There were loads of locals and tourists and the pathways were very packed with small shops and people everywhere.
We drove through Ginza (basically a Japanese version of Rodeo drive) and didn’t really walk around because we were so pooped and had to get on the Metro station to go from Tokyo back to Shinjuku to get to the Robot Restaurant. One of the couples on our tour had a daughter who went to the Robot Restaurant and described it as “Vegas on crack.” Yeah, a great description for a great time. So we rode the subway for about 30 minutes to our destination and walked up to this:
