Today I met up with Klaxman, one of my old roommates for lunch. He is a retired game programmer turned English teacher who moved to Japan in 2006 and has been there ever since.
We went for lunch at an Italian restaurant that had taken over what used to be Cats Cafe. They didn’t serve ridiculously oversized desserts like their predecessors, but they did have some pretty good octopus spaghetti. Klaxman caught me up on all of the changes that NOVA has made over the past 10 years since their bankruptcy, and told me about an open source portable game system called Arduboy that he was making a game for.
After lunch we played a few games at the nearby game center before joining some of Klaxman’s friends at Radio City karaoke. I was happy to see that “Suck My Kiss” by Red Hot Chili Peppers was available to sing, but the crowd in the room was a little more Beatles so I decided to hold off on songs with rampant use of the word “motherfucker”. Karaoke is not a rock concert – some times you need to adjust your song choice for the audience.
It was fun to catch up and break my long karaoke dry spell.
Drinking in Japan 