Sunday, February 21, 2010
How to Shibuya - Pt. 2
11:54 PM | 
Posted by
Keith Colton
This Shibuya adventure is a bit more wild than the last one was. I went to Club WOMB, which is one of Tokyo's best known clubs, from about midnight until they closed at 6am.
A bit about WOMB - it is a 4 story night club located about 10 minutes from Shibuya Station. It is really easy to miss unless you know where the hell you are going. It is basically situated in the middle of about 100 love hotels (this is ingenious planning on the clubs part), and the only marking is a big steel wall that says "WOMB" on it. The front door is an industrial door situated behind the steel wall. This really sets the tone for the entire club, in my opinion. When you go in, you are greeted by a dude at a counter who checks your I.D. (need to be 20+ to enter; this isn't seedy Roppongi where they don't check), then you proceed to pay the cover charge. The cover ranges between $25-$50 depending on the event/DJ, so it is a bit pricey. Once you pay the cover, they have a guy check you for drugs, weapons, alcohol, food, and cameras. You aren't supposed to take pictures inside the club - I brought my camera with me, but I was really upfront with the guy and just said (in Japanese) "sorry, I brought my camera with me, is it cool if I just leave it in a locker?" They said "sure, no problem" and let me through.
Once you get past this initial "check point" it opens up to an area with a couple hundred small lockers (the kind of lockers you see at train stations, or amusement parks). Past the lockers, there is a door leading down to a bar/lounge area. I was only down here for about 5 minutes, but there were booths lining the back wall, and some high-top tables scattered about. There was also a fairly decent sized bar, and small dance floor.
There is then a big set of concrete spiral stairs leading up to the main dance floor. You could hear the music from the bottom - they definitely did not skimp on the sound system. The entrance to this floor has an area kind of sectioned off where people were just standing around, talking, smoking, and drinking. In one corner, there was a set of "stairs" built into the wall were people could sit down. On the opposite side of this area was the bar (fully stocked for those of you who care). Then, there is the main dance floor - it is relatively large, and could fit probably 800 people comfortably.
Above the dance floor is "Tokyo's largest disco ball," and a really impressive array of lasers, lights, fog machines, and speakers. It was really intense seeing all the lasers shooting about, lights flashing, and fog machines puffing out white smoke all night. At one point, they unleashed such a huge amount of smoke, that you could barely see the person right next to you (which is crazy, since you were literally 2" away).
There are also two more floors overlooking the dance floor, however these are where all the VIP tables are, so I didn't go up there. I'm trying to figure out what VIP actually means, since you don't have to be "very important" to be up there; you just need to pay $20, per person, per hour, and buy at least 1 ($100+) bottle of alcohol. I guess by spending a ton of money, you are "very important" to the club though -- who knows.
I met a few cool Japanese while there though. This one particular couple was really freaking funny, since the girl was a high ranking judo player, so she and I ended up showing each other different throws. (Incoming, boring martial arts stuff - skip down if you don't care). She did a really fantastic job by utilizing all different directions when taking my balance. I could tell she was quite skilled - it was funny seeing how similar some of the bujinkan throws were -- even funnier since we were doing this in the middle of a club. Her boyfriend was also a baseball player, so he and I talked about baseball a bit. He was hilarious, since he started naming off like all of the 1995 Cleveland Indians World Series roster to me at one point. I also met this DJ who is going to be spinning at some other clubs around Tokyo this month, and next month. There was practically no English used in any of these conversations, so this turned out to be some wicked awesome Japanese practice. I seriously don't get when to use casual vs. formal vs. super formal speech anymore though. Everyone at the club used casual speech with me, even though we had just met - and this isn't the first time.
As mentioned before, you couldn't take pictures inside the club, so I don't have anything worthwhile showing from the night in that respect - sorry.
The walk back to Shibuya Station was kind of interesting as well. The sheer amount of people walking back from clubbing was insane. There were also tons of ramen places open (at 6ish am) to feed the hungry clubbers. These guys must make a freaking killing.
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Shibuya
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1 comments:
Sounds like you had a great time at WOMB ! What an odd name for a nightclub though :) Did you go by yourself ? WIsh you would have been able to take pictures. I thought it was so funny that that girls boyfriend could name off so many of those Cleveland Indians players.
It was really good talking to you last week and I am glad you are having such an awesome time in Japan !!! Keep the blogs coming.
Even if I don't always have time to comment right away, I always read them :)
Love,
mom
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