Japandra: Quiet Kabukicho

Neon lights on, but video screen off. People are calling for companies to turn off unnecessary signage to save power.

You can only stay inside tweeting for so long, right? Eventually you have to go outside... and tweet from there. Kidding. (Kind of. Apologies to my friends who have seen way too much of me staring into my phone.) It was sunny and warm on Saturday. We headed out in the afternoon to meet our friend Miki in Shinjuku. She wanted to eat fresh vegetables and so suggested Sizzler. I had no idea we even had Sizzlers. And I have no association of it with fresh vegetables - more like vats of mashed potatoes, and croutons and Bacon-bits with French dressing. But it turned out to be a good call. Quite a nice salad bar (though no Bacon-bits), decent little steak, and something comforting about canned peaches. There were a few Japanese families with small kids there and one other non-Japanese family. It was only about a quarter full. It was painful to see that big salad bar sitting there, untouched for minutes at a time, knowing it's not that far away that people are huddled in emergency shelters with only, at best, cold rice balls.

After dinner, we had a wander through Kabukicho, Shinjuku's bar and red-light district, just to see how it was. It was quiet. Granted, it was a little early. But almost all the people in the street were touts, just standing and waiting for customers to take to their bars. Quite a few hosts, in loose clusters with their meticulous mops of cartoon hair, and a few African guys. One walked along side us for a minute - "Hey, you want to--" and then gave up. His heart wasn't in it.

We stopped for a little karaoke on the way back to our bikes. When I was trying to sing Kiss' "I was made for loving you," I realized two things: I knew none of the lyrics besides the refrain, and I hadn't taken a really deep breath since the shaking had started. We had fun. I'm not the biggest karaoke fan - my brother got all those genes. But I definitely recommend it if you're needing a break from constant vigilance. I checked Twitter later, and there had been lots of aftershock reports. We hadn't felt a thing inside.

We couldn't believe how quiet the area right around Shinjuku station was. Aside from one semi-boisterous group of a dozen or so guys with the kind of matching shopping bags you get at weddings, there was almost nobody there, even though trains were running. Shinjuku is usually cited as the busiest train station in the world. I walked back to where I'd left my bike, near a Starbucks that had been closed in the afternoon. There was an escalator near there, rolling silently up and down. A group of cops passed me and I gestured to the escalator and said in Japanese, "Why not turn that off?" One of them said, "Hai, O.K. Down." "No," I tried again. "Nobody's using this. Wouldn't it be good to turn it off to save electricity?"

"Ah," he said. "Yes, saving electricity. Ah."

Oh, well. I tried. Eastern Japan is looking at rolling blackouts starting tomorrow, Monday morning, for the next week or weeks to save power. They say demand will exceed capacity by 25 or 30 percent. I'm always torn over whether or not, in these things, every little bit really helps. Does it matter if I leave my cellphone charger plugged in when all of Kabukicho is bathed in neon? Usually, I think it doesn't. Given the sudden dramatic reduction of Japan's power generating capability, for now, I'm going to try to believe it does.