What is it?!

In the middle of a huge mall in Ikebukuro is Namjatown, a sort of indoor theme park based around food. Namja apparently means "What is it?", which pretty much sums up the three floors of food-related insanity. The park is split into several different areas comprising Ice Cream City, Gyoza Stadium and Tokyo Dessert Republic. Each area includes a number of shops, food stalls, carnival-style rides and general strangeness.

Namjatown's atmosphere is chaotic, noisy and frequently bizarre. Entering Ice Cream City, we encountered banks and banks of freezers containing small pottles of ice cream with flavours spanning the range of animal (beef), vegetable (wasabi) and mineral (charcoal).  I got a pumpkin flavoured one while Hannah had buttered potato. They genuinely did taste like sweet pumpkin and potato, and were delicious!

Next door, we sampled gyozas (dumplings) from different regions of Japan, and lined up for what was described on the map as the 'Pig Riding Shooting Game'. This involved riding along in a giant insect-repelling pig and shooting mosquitoes with lasers. I'm not sure how this related to gyozas, but it was specially marked as one of the few rides that is suitable for non-Japanese speakers. We ignored this at our peril when we tried to use the 'Cat Subway', which turned out to require high levels of Japanese-as-spoken-by-a-cat comprehension, and from which we escaped out the back door after several minutes of utter bafflement.

Namjatown is run by a video games company, so I felt obliged to play at least one of the ever-present machines. The best by far turned out to be the taiko drumming game, which was a bit like Guitar Hero but more violent.

Harvesting creme puffs from Namjatown's remnant creme puff forest.

Drawn by the photos of cat-shaped curry rice, we stopped at the Miracle Fruits Cafe. After some study of the menu and walls, Hannah surmised that the Miracle Fruit was an actual item on the menu that when chewed, made sour flavours taste sweet. This went a long way towards explaining the glass of what appeared to be straight lemon juice she had just been served. We ordered two of the small freeze-dried berries and ate them in the prescribed way. And amazingly, the previously undrinkable beverage became sweet and tasty! The effect was slightly unnerving, but wore off after a few minutes and did not affect my enjoyment of my cat-shaped curry rice.

The fourth area was the Healing Forest, a retreat for stressed parents and overstimulated children. Various sorts of massages and calming treatments were on offer, including an array of coin-operated machines. Inserting my feet into two cosy boots and a coin into the slot, I received a 'reflexology treatment' via several rows of blunt rods rhythmically poking into my feet. Slightly more alarming was the 'shiatsu chair', which appeared to have some sort of invisible knobbly roller incorporated into the back rest. I emerged grateful for the break from the constant noise, if not so much the mechanised relaxation experience.

Once we had found our way out of Namjatown, there was a bit of time to look around the surrounding mall, Sunshine City. One of the best shops was FrancFranc, a homeware/design store selling all sorts of pretty, funny and useful things. I purchased an assortment of treasures, including a tiny squishy pudding that, when squished, says 'pudding!' in a gleeful manner. Outside the mall we ducked into Tokyu Hands. Like all Japan's department stores, it would have been easy to spend half a day in there, but it was near closing time and we barely made it past the 'hilarious gadgets' aisle before being politely encouraged to leave.