susukino
today i explored susukino, the largest entertainment district north of tokyo. this area is full of restaurants, bars, and… other establishments you might expect to find in an “entertainment” district.
i forgot to do a song for the last few posts.
rooftop photography
i started the day with some more photography from the incredible balcony.
i also got another time lapse video. this is probably the best one yet, because there were clouds this time!
i think its funny that you can see the birds appear on the video for one frame a few times. birds have been really all over this balcony. i think they like the second highest floor better because there is cover when it rains. so there are pretty much always birds hanging out around this balcony.
side quest: nd filter
i mentioned this in yesterday’s blog post, but my big goal today was to find a store that sells camera accessories. i wanted an nd filter so i can take long exposure photos in bright light. its kinda like sunglasses for the camera, i guess. i’ve never used one before.
this proved to be quite challenging. for a bit of a history lesson, much of the camera industry in today’s world is based in japan. sony, canon, nikon, fujifilm, om-system (formerly olympus) and more are japanese companies. off the top of my head, the only big camera manufacturer that is not japanese is leica. i’m sure there are more, but google tells me that over 80% of the global digital camera industry is japanese companies.
so, lets go back to the 1960s and 1970s. japanese camera companies were blowing up, and several big camera stores were founded around this time. for the purposes of this blog post, i am talking about 2 companies - bic camera and yodobashi camera. these stores are both enormous in japan today as well. but they aren’t just camera stores anymore. they are closer to like a best buy or a fry’s electronics now. over the last 7 decades, they have evolved into more general purpose electronics and other stuff. but they still have the word camera in the name.
so, with my limited japanese, i had to find a camera store. and that is difficult to do when there are many stores that have the word camera in the name that aren’t really about cameras. and also i had to learn this information in real time by making the mistake of walking into a bic camera and being confused about the store having approximately 5 cheap cameras in a corner of one aisle.
after striking out at bic camera, i searched google maps again for a camera store, and found one about 20 minutes away on foot. after getting there, i walked around for a bit looking for filters, and then realized this was a used camera store. they don’t sell filters. i tracked down an employee and had a broken conversation with him. he told me that not all yodobashi camera stores will have what i need, but the one by sapporo station is gigantic and has a very large camera section that will have nd filters. thank the lord the japanese word for nd filter is apparently “n d firuta”.
so i walk about 35 minutes to sapporo station and start looking for this yodobashi camera. it took me an embarrassingly long time to find it, because there is a giant parking garage attached to it that was obscuring the view of it. and the google maps navigation just points to the parking garage. i eventually found it, and made my way to the camera section. mission accomplished - they had nd filters.
no one reading this cares about this so i am going to keep it brief, but nd filters come in a variety of strengths and sizes. thankfully, both the lenses i have for my camera take the same size filter - 67mm. this is a complete coincidence and is very lucky.
as for the strength of the filter, i don’t know very much about these filters or how to use them. but you can buy a dedicated one that is only a specific strength if you know what you are doing / what you need, or you can buy whats called a “variable” nd filter. the variable filter is like two discs that are very close together, i think they are polarized. so rotating the front ring can change the intensity of the filter. i think the variable ones are lower quality than the dedicated ones, and having now used one, i can say they are kinda finicky. but the variable was the way to go, since i don’t really know what i need. the variable is better for experimenting with using the thing. anyways, here’s a photo of it
this side quest took over 5 hours to complete, mostly because i got distracted walking around sapporo checking random stuff out.
susukino
side quest complete, i headed back towards my airbnb’s general area and explored it some more.
around this point i started to notice, but i think the women in hokkaido have super powers. i am freezing cold, walking around in an ultra thick jacket, a scarf, gloves, and a beanie. so are many of the other people here. but in this area there are tons of ladies walking around in skirts. its insane to me.
my airbnb is right by nakajima park, which i will be exploring for quite a while tomorrow. but just north of that is susukino, sapporo’s famous “downtown” area. its often referred to as an “entertainment district”, in large part because it has just an absolutely astounding number of… red light establishments. like literally hundreds of them. they are everywhere. i’ve seen a lot of these places in many of the japanese cities i have been in, and it seems to me like it is always sort of clustered together in one part of a given city. in osaka, its largely near near dotonbori / amerikamura. in tokyo, i saw it a lot in shinjuku in the kabukicho area. wherever we ended up in hiroshima with the snack bar was the spot for it there. sapporo’s seems to be susukino. but it is way different than i have seen it in all the other cities, just by the sheer volume of these establishments present here. it feels like over 50% of the businesses here are soaplands or girls bars or things of that nature.
and these places aren’t at all vague about whats going on. you can even see the plain english advertising on one of the photos above. its kinda wild.
this place is also full of these “tourist information centers” that you see in a lot of downtown areas in japan. i think its really funny that they call them by this name, because what they really are is more like a “help people who don’t speak japanese go to these establishments” centers. from far away you see the sign and might think “oh they might have info for tourists about nearby tourist attractions to check out.” but then you actually get close to one and notice the guy in the leather jacket standing ominously outside looking tough. and you look through the front window and its just wall to wall pictures of women in lingerie. its the funniest thing to me. i think its cool that this kind of thing is out in the open and accessible rather than shady and illegal. probably a better experience for all parties that way.
i took very few photos of this area, which is kinda funny because it might seem like i laser targeted for like “this building with the sex massage places”. this entire area, like a 10 blocks or so area, is completely packed with bars, girls bars, host bars, snack bars, restaurants, izakayas, a couple malls, a don quijote, soaplands, “massage parlors”, konbinis, etc. its all mixed together. the izakaya i went to is on the same floor as two girls bars. its all just crammed together with no organization whatsoever.
i walked around this area for a bit looking for an izakaya my airbnb host recommended to me. i eventually found it in a building i repeatedly told myself it couldn’t possibly be in, and headed in.
it was quite small, but they had a spot open at the bar.
i guess this izakaya’s specialty is something called “zangi”. its a type of fried chicken famous in hokkaido. it is marinated in soy sauce, ginger, and garlic before it is fried. it was pretty good honestly. 10/10 would recommend. i also drank a bunch of sapporo, because you gotta drink sapporo when you are in sapporo. i think am slowly becoming a sapporo guy instead of an asahi guy. i have always preferred asahi, but i could probably be convinced otherwise. i do think sapporo in america is better than asahi in america.
