Hello what’s up It’s Shinoda here this time for Gourmet Tokyo.

This column was written on April 16th. 

I failed to present a Tokyo restaurant last time, so with a head so swollen that it was ready to pop I had said “I’ll do it right this time~ Ho~ Where should we go~”. Yet when I was once shamelessly keeping my head down, as I walked down Urine Road(*an old nickname for Shinjuku’s Memory Lane), my eyes rolled back in disgust, when the sidewalk was so covered in mud from the rain that I suddenly got caught up in the illusion that I was being swallowed by the sidewalk, to the top of my head was I being swallowed into the stomach of the endless road, I was unable to even breathe. Like a tube amp fizzling out when the light is turned off, I lost my consciousness so fast, and when I woke up I was above the sky, inside of an airplane. 

What the hell is going on, I panicked to ask someone, but I didn’t want to bother them so I held it in, when I was asked beef or chicken I said beef, I watched a movie with Aragaki Yui and Eita recovering their lost lives through table tennis, and tried to calm the lion in my heart but, right at the “turn” part of the introduction-development-turn-conclusion structure, when “Trendy Angel” Saitou-san gave Eita a mysterious envelope saying “If I don’t give this to you I’m never going to feel right”, right then was when the plane landed. roOAAAARRRR the lion in my heart was going crazy as I crawled off the plane, but when I got off the scenery that spread out before me, was, Taipei. 

So everyone, my Gourmet Tokyo this time is from Taipei.

The capital of Taiwan, Taipei.

We Hitorie were to perform a one-man live in Taipei.

The weather in Taipei is normally stupidly humid, and especially on the day of the live, it was such intense emo weather that we were having sudden showers every two hours. By the start of the live the stage had already been morphed into a gigantic sauna. Yet once I stood up there, it was like my Marshall amp was at the full 10, across us was a bunch of people with boundless effort screaming for us so explosively loud, that we were able to thrash our sweat around, and perform our twang twangg. It was amazing. 

I’m happy that the first overseas show of my life turned out so amazing.

And from the night of that past amazingness, I bring you a hot-pot restaurant. A place where the old chap shopkeeper said “I LOVE YOU” (in katakana to convey that the old man was speaking broken Japanese), at every chance he could.