“Tokyo Vice” and its setting—Shinjuku’s Kabukicho entertainment district—brought back vivid memories of my last trip to Tokyo in 2017. On my to-do list was Robot Restaurant, made famous by Anthony Bourdain in a memorable 2013 episode of “Parts Unknown”. After taking in the floor show, with its scores of dancers, taiko drummers, animatronic dinosaurs, tanks, motorcycles and sword-wielding samurai, Bourdain rapturously exclaimed:
I’ve seen Jimi Hendrix. I’ve seen Janis Joplin. I’ve seen David Bowie [‘s] Diamond Dogs. I’ve seen Collen Dewhurst and Jason Robards in “A Moon for the Misbegotten”, directed by José Quintero on Broadway, considered one of the greatest productions ever. And this was the greatest show I’ve ever seen in my life.
Having left Tokyo at thirteen, I had no direct experience with Shinjuku’s colorful nightlife. All I knew was that every echelon of mizushobai, the “water trade”, was represented there: restaurants, hostess bars, discos, massage parlours, fetish clubs and brothels. As “Tokyo Vice” makes clear, most mizushobai establishments are yakuza-owned or funded, and Robot Restaurant is assumed to be the former. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable going there alone, so I was lucky that my childhood friend Hideko agreed to accompany me.
We knew Shinjuku in its daytime guise as a swarming commuter hub and business district, but by night it’s a different place entirely. Unsure we could find Robot Restaurant in the maze of neon that is Kabukicho, Hideko and I took a taxi from Shinjuku Station and arrived at its garish entrance in minutes. We presented our tickets to a couple of tough guys at the door who ordered us down a, dark narrow hallway. At its end, a small elevator took us up to the lounge where we were to wait until showtime.
The lounge’s atmosphere was part casino, part pinball machine. It was as if we’d fallen into a kaleidoscope while peering through its lens. A male-female duo belted out pop songs as we ordered from the bar. At the edges of the room, young male employees kept watch, presumably to ensure the fulfillment of Robot Restaurant’s two-drink minimum. It felt like a David Lynch movie: fanciful and strange, with a faintly menacing undertone. We couldn’t stop laughing.
After forty minutes an announcement came over the loudspeaker: the show would soon begin. Use of the elevator was discouraged, so we trooped downstairs to the basement theater via four flights of lighted, brightly colored plastic stairs with depth perception-bending motifs embedded in them. I prayed I wouldn’t slip or trip, and that no one behind me would either. The theater turned out to be a huge rectangular enclosure surrounded by bleachers, more bull ring than stage. Once we were seated steel ropes went up, presumably to protect us from machinery glitches. Gaijin tourists who had been hoodwinked into buying dinner—without which Robot Restaurant would have needed another name—were served cheap bento at jacked-up prices. Then the lights went down.
The show was spectacular and deafening. I stuck in my musician’s earplugs and encouraged Hideko to stuff tissues in her ears. Among other entertainments, we watched an origin-of-the-earth story with dinosaurs ridden by scantily-clad women, an animatronic daruma, an all-female marching band, a battle between Godzilla and some other monster, musicians dressed as robots playing electric guitars and drums, and performers riding motorcycles. There were enough strobes and lasers lights to induce epilepsy in people previously not known to have it. In case they were insuffiently colorful and bright, we were given light sticks to wave during the singing and dancing and marching, which we did. This went on for an unknowable amount of time—it might have been an hour, or six. When it finally stopped, we staggered out into the spring night.
Within minutes Hideko and I found our way to Robot Restaurant’s opposite: the hushed rooftop restaurant of a nearby hotel. We ordered a meal that was as far removed from cheap bento as possible and waited for our hearing to normalize. I’ll never have to do that again, I thought, but I was very glad I had.
Robot Restaurant cost millions, but it was a gold mine. As long as the tourists kept coming it thrived, and if not for the pandemic it would have continued to rake in the yen. It closed in 2020, supposedly temporarily, and though the website is still up the building’s facade has been stripped of signage. Which is a shame. I’m planning my long-delayed return to Tokyo, and would happily have gone back.