After work, Michiko took me to a restaurant bar called The Lockup in Shinjuku. I didn't know what to expect at all, but it turns out it had the theme of "a haunted jail" and that was exactly what it was. When you take the elevator up, you have to stand in this dark waiting room with scary music and screaming sounds. Then you enter a dark room alone (only your group) and you have to find a secret button to open the door.
Once you open the door, a lady dressed like Oktoberfest / some medieval prison warden puts actual handcuffs on you and leads you by a chain to your "cell" where you sit at the table inside. Then comes the weird part. A lady dressed like a prisoner comes to give you your "ration" which is your choice of two complimentary vitamins. Strange, huh? I chose calcium and vitamin C. The drinks are also really interesting. I got some strawberry lychee juice that was served in a syringe! And Michiko got this mango drink with jelly served in a petri dish like an experiment. Here's Michiko's yummy petri dish jelly. And here she is with the syringe drink. The drinks were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experimental/doctor themed, or themed after women who died gruesomely, like Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette. Michiko is trapped in our cell! Everything was blacklight so our teeth were glowing and my hair looked white.The pictures make it look pretty goth here, but it wasn't goth in that irritating way. It was more like a really well-done haunted house. They had actors dressed like mad scientists and ghosts and sometimes the lights just went off and there were sirens and sometimes really scary people would rattle the bars to your cell and try to get in. I screamed a lot and it was super fun. I got to use the word Kowai. That means scary! Then we took a walk through Kabuki-Cho because we were right in the neighborhood and I wanted to see Japanese love hotels. They looked really upscale and classy in an overdone, Las Vegas kind of way. Back home, anything like that would probably be really seedy and run-down and have an awful stigma. Things are different here, but very interesting. Does anyone have any love hotel stories? I've never been inside one, but I saw the pictures of the rooms displayed outside.