From Wired:
Outside, the city is bracing for the most violent typhoon of the past
decade, a storm with winds topping 75 mph that’s already dumping
endless sheets of rain from the night sky. Yet it all seems mild
compared to what’s happening inside a bunker of a theater two floors
below the wind and the rain.
You sit in the back row, stuffed into something a lot like a
grade-school writing desk, a Bento box and green tea untouched on the
tray in front of you. The food is almost inedible — cold rice and fish
one step below what you’d find in a Japanese convenience store — but
even if it were the finest sushi on Earth, you wouldn’t be eating. It’s
hard to eat when watching bikini-clad go-go dancers do mock battle with
pseudo-metallic automations from some alternate future universe — not to
mention the blaring electronica, flashing lights, giant Fembots,
robotic dinosaurs, stuffed panda ninjas, roving Segways, rainbow afro
wigs, virtual fireworks, kabuki-style play acting, a Captain America
shield, medieval iconography, and a sea of waving glow sticks.
This is Robot Restaurant,
a 10 billion yen creation in the Kabukicho section of Tokyo’s Shinjuku
neighborhood. Kabukicho is the city’s red light district, where the
narrow, car-less streets are flanked by a seemingly endless number of
towering, multi-colored, brightly backlit signs. It’s famous for its
nightclubs, host and hostess clubs, short-stay hotels, and late-night
eateries, but Robot Restaurant is a step beyond the usual fare (see
photos above).
It combines pole dancing with oversized Transformers. It gives you spinning Tron-like
cycle chairs alongside a phalanx of white-wigged women banging Taiko
drums strapped with lights too garish for your Christmas tree. And
though you’re two floors underground in a theater about the size of a
racquetball court, the burlesque is punctuated with the sort of
combustion-powered vehicles you’d see on a dirt track in rural America.
In the West, Japan is known for its uniquely bizarre pop culture, and
for some, Robot Restaurant feels like a shameless attempt to cash in on
this Western view of what actually is a small part of Japan’s culture —
a stage show so overtly bizarre it couldn’t possibly be authentic.
At the same time, there’s something very Japanese about it. It may
very well be a tourist trap, but underneath the lights and the noise and
the costumes, it’s more than that. It’s a tourist trap that says
something about Japan....MORE
So it may not be representative of Nippon but it is a $100 million bet that I can't see being made in many other locales.
