Roger me with a ralgexed rhino, Tokyo is bonkers. All the usual superlatives apply: like someone drove a pitchfork into your spine and then started pouring tabasco onto your sight nerve endings, while taking a moulinex blender to your sound nerve endings. And its not all flashy lights and high pitched pleading voices like the end of some Manga-inspired video game (“Continue? 9,8,7,6,5,4”). Its the surroundingness of it all: things come at you from all directions. I like to walk around a place and soak things in. But you can`t do that here, as everything is so god damned vertical. You could spend more time in elevators checking out bars than plodding the street.

Having had a relatively easy time of things, getting around and getting into scrapes in Mongolia, Siberia etc, the decision to try to see Tokyo without resorting to using any guidebook seemed natural. The thing about guidebooks for me is that they seem to put you onto a circuit of hostels and such, where you meet other people on the same book and circuit. So Japan was to be done as a cold calling affair. I lasted about 36 hours before I broke down and had to get a book. Tokyo is immense and overpowering at first. I might as well have had `sucker` tattooed on my forehead when I got off the plane. I don`t remember a place which has assaulted me so much; my jaw hanging open, and my eyes wide open scanning left and right, then up and down. It only took a short while for someone to approach me and politely offer me a special massage, the selling point of which was that it would be “very expensive”. No thanks, 70 quid a night for a hotel is expensive enough.

Which brings me to value for money (VFM), of which I used to be almost religious in my pursuit. Now it may be that my posterior has instigated a revolt in my body. It may be that it has become physically addicted to the “posterior cleanse” button of my hotel loo, and it has poisoned the rest of my organs into forcing me to stay in the hotel. But I reckon that my subconscious has decided that if I can spend more hours passed out in the room, then I get better VFM. In terms of spare floor space in my room, I`m getting pretty good VFM – I have it covered with my rucksack, and two pieces of paper. Or it could be that I`m lurking in my hotel because I`m genuinely ill, but I doubt that, as I was invincible just a few days ago in that bar at 3am.

And it could be my posterior`s addiction to Tokyo toilets, or it could be the VFM factor: I cant seem to avoid eating curry in the buffet breakfast, in addition to all the other cack. Aaaarrgh