Traveling to Japan: Buying puroresu tickets outside Japan

I purposefully spent the previous few blog entries covering (mostly) non-wrestling aspects of Japan so that I could focus on the wrestling aspects going forward.

New Japan
NJPW does not make it at all easy to buy tickets overseas. There are several ways to do this, and there is roughly a direct relationship between effort required and chances of getting a ticket, and an inverse relationship between those two and realistic prospects of trying the method in question. Note that this outlines my thoughts and experiences for buying Fantasticamania tickets for Korakuen Hall, which seemed like a near-worst-case scenario in terms of selling out fast. Other events (like Wrestle Kingdom, which runs in the much more spacious Tokyo Dome) may have different ticket dynamics.

In roughly increasing order of convenience for gaijin:

Fan club
If you have a friend in Japan who is willing to lend you a Japan mailing address to receive stuff on your behalf, and you're willing to invest some cash for the membership fee, it's possible to sign up for the NJPW fan club, which often gets first crack at tickets (but even then, sometimes there is a lottery system). I wasn't willing to burden someone (or my company's Tokyo office) this much for a better chance at tickets, so I passed.

Buying online
New Japan has a few different ticket partners. Ticket Pia is the general one, I believe, but sometimes a different one will be used for the presale. To register for Ticket Pia, you need a Japan phone number that you can dial out of on short notice; this is how they verify that you have a working Japan phone. You can get a Japan SIM card in advance of your trip, but you won't have international roaming access, so that doesn't help for this purpose. It's possible to get a DID (direct inward dial) number through virtual phone number providers (I used FlyNumber, but there are others), and set up a phone dialing app to call out of that number. Due to telephone regulations in Japan, you will need to scan IDs and provide certain other information in order to get a phone number, but this wasn't too onerous. I didn't end up buying tickets through here, but I am registered.

For Fantasticamania 2018, NJPW ended up using Lawson's for the public presale. You need to give a Japan phone number and mailing address, but as far as I can tell, neither is verified. Buying tickets seems restricted by IP address (the error message is a bit confusing, to boot), so you may need to VPN into a Japanese IP to get this to work. When you buy the tickets, you will have the option to settle now with a credit card, or to settle when you pick up the tickets. You must pay in advance with a credit card, or else the reservation will be canceled for nonpayment within a few days.

When you get to Japan, you can claim the tickets at a Loppi machine at any Lawson's. Basic knowledge of Japanese helps here, although you can also print out comprehensible Google-translated instructions in English on Lawson's website in advance. You will need the reservation number and the phone number that you registered with. Once you print the claim slip, you have 30 minutes to check out at the register to have the actual tickets printed.

As far as availability goes, the second night sold out during the presale, but I was able to get decent seats for the other two nights online by getting up early when they went on sale. It definitely wasn't a "PWG BOLA sellout in 90 seconds" situation, but I wouldn't push my luck.

Ticket-buying service
There are third-party services that will, for a fee, attempt to buy tickets for you, bypassing all of the crazy things like registering for a phone number. I surmised that I'd have a better chance if I went the DIY route with the presale since I'd be in control over what time I bought tickets. However, I do know of people who have used these services with success, so it's an option.

Walk-up
If all else fails, there will be standing room tickets available the day of the show, at least for Korakuen Hall. Note that fans will reserve spots in line for themselves early by taping newspaper to the ground and writing the current date and something along the lines of "新日立見" (New Japan standing room), and this is deemed acceptable and is honored. Barring this, you'll want to show up to the ticket booth line (which for Korakuen Hall starts along the side of the building) at least a couple of hours early. Once you get the tickets, you'll need to line up in the standing room entrance line (in Korakuen Hall, this is the stairwell leading up to the fifth floor of the building). Again, this is first-come, first-served, and people are smart enough to tape line placeholder signs to the wall.

For what it's worth, I didn't do the placeholder signs, but showed up just less than two hours before the ticket booth opened at 4pm for the second Fantasticamania show, and got tickets.

Dragon Gate
Send email (in English) to the email address listed in @DragonGateEN's Twitter account to reserve tickets. You can pick them up and pay for them in cash at the venue just before the show starts (for Korakuen Hall, the pickup location was the 5th floor entrance).

For what it's worth, when I went to the show, there were still reserved seats available when the ticket booth opened for walk-up sales, but you'll obviously be able to get better seats by reserving in advance.

From what I saw, other puroresu promotions running Korakuen Hall had walk-up tickets still available, so I'd assume that NJPW is the only puroresu case that you'd really have to worry about for Korakuen. Unfortunately, it's a pretty significant case.

TL;DR: Start planning early if you want to buy NJPW tickets before you get to Japan and don't know anyone already there. You will probably need a Japanese phone number, a way to VPN into Japan, and quite a bit of patience with the ticket website registration processes.

Traveling to Japan: Tokyo Dome City

So, aside from seeing events in the Tokyo Dome and Korakuen Hall, there's actually a lot of stuff to do in the complex that is Tokyo Dome City, and in fact, if your interests are sufficiently broad, you could spend a whole week entirely within the "city walls" without getting bored. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.

Food
There are probably no fewer than 60 places to eat within Tokyo Dome City, and the variety is actually pretty broad. Most of it will be some subspecialty of Japanese food, but there are also steakhouses, Italian pizza places, a sports bar, a bakery, among others. Specific recommendations:

• Generally, avoid eating in the restaurants in the Tokyo Dome Hotel, except for the Sizzler steakhouse, which is about as expensive as you would expect for a steakhouse. I ate at the third-floor buffet for dinner the first night and didn't like very much there, and at 4,000 yen per person, there are better ways to spend your money. People that I talked to were equally unimpressed with the breakfast buffet. I can't imagine dining at the even pricier restaurants on the higher floors. Take a walk outside and eat for less than 1,000 yen.
• The Smart Sushi restaurant on the lower level of the LaQua part of the complex is an all-too-convenient conveyor  belt sushi place, and it's delicious. I ate there three times in 10 days.
• Denny's has good breakfast. Be aware that 納豆 means "natto" (fungus-fermented soybeans) and is served with certain breakfast sets. I liked it, but it's not for everyone.
• There's a ramen place right in front of Korakuen Hall. Good as a default place to eat before a show.

Other than the hotel buffet, I didn't really encounter any bad places to eat in the Tokyo Dome City complex, and most traditional Japanese places were relatively inexpensive.

Entertainment

Did you know that there's an arcade inside this complex? Not kidding. I didn't spend too much time here, but if this is your thing, this could be a time sink. However, if you're looking for this sort of entertainment, you may want to take a short train ride to Akihabara to find even bigger arcades.

There are a couple amusement park rides near LaQua, and yes, weather permitting, they do run in January. The Thunder Dolphin roller coaster was sufficiently fun for just north of 1,000 yen. It doesn't go upside down, but the first drop is quite long, and the roller coaster is fairly tightly constructed, such that certain underpasses don't have a terribly huge amount of headroom and give the sense that you might be decapitated by some parts of the construction. (Yes, it's safe, but when you're going pretty fast, judging vertical clearance is not super-easy, at least for me.) On a brisk 50-degree Fahrenheit day, I chose to forego the water ride, but that looked fun in warmer weather.

Closer to Korakuen Hall, there's a multi-story complex with batting cages, a few more arcade-style games (my brother, who used to do weightlifting, may have nearly broken the grip strength tester), a bowling alley, and, strangely enough, a space museum on the top floor. The initial presentation is in Japanese only, but all of the other exhibits have both English and Japanese text accompaniment. 

Shopping

There's a wide variety of shops, if that's your thing. There's a bookstore near Korakuen Hall, and clothing stores near LaQua. Be aware that finding anything larger than a United States L size may be difficult. If you buy something relatively expensive at a duty-free shop, they may give you some paperwork to show to immigration when you leave Japan; this happened to my brother when he bought some sneakers.

Hotel

The Tokyo Dome Hotel is nominally a pretty pricey place, but by sharing a room with my brother and staying for an extended time, we were able to bring the per-night rate down to something reasonable (around 20,000 yen a night for a triple room). I'm sure that you can find cheaper places to stay reasonably nearby, but for the first time in Japan, we opted for convenience rather than price. There are relatively few rooms with double beds, so book early if that's important to you; we ended up being able to get only a room with three separate beds.

Room service is extremely overpriced, as it is in many hotels. You can opt for a room rate that includes breakfast when you book the room, but it's still pretty expensive, and I recommend eating elsewhere. As I mentioned above, most of the restaurants within the hotel are extremely expensive. One exception to the hotel food sticker shock is that the minibar in the room surprisingly had a decent selection of food and drink at prices comparable to those at the convenience store, so we took advantage of that throughout our stay.

If you stay here, you'll want to familiarize yourself with the myriad ways of entering and exiting the hotel: the first three floors all have useful exits that lead in different directions. The main entrance on the first floor is not the one that you'll want to use to explore the rest of Tokyo Dome City. If you're heading to Korakuen Hall, it's most efficient to take the second-floor side exit, and if you want to get to the Tokyo Dome itself, exiting via the third floor is fastest.

Our room had a programmable safe in it, but it was rather small (maximum mask capacity from experimental experience: three).

The hotel staff does generally speak English competently, so you should be able to check in and out and ask for help without problem. One thing to note is that they will ask you to "settle" (i.e., Japan-speak for "pay") the bill if the total charges incurred (including the room rate itself) reach 115,000 yen, so if you're staying for a while, you'll have to go down to the front desk every few days to take care of this.

I don't think that you need to stay here, but you're going to Korakuen Hall a few days in a row, it does make your life more convenient.

Traveling to Japan: Transportation in Tokyo

Continuing my thoughts on Japan, I'll talk about getting around in Tokyo.

From and to Narita Airport

I don't know about Tokyo's Haneda Airport, so I don't have any specific advice if you're flying into or out of there, but if you're flying into Narita (and a lot of international flights do), be aware that it's not actually in Tokyo, but in nearby Chiba. You'll have a bit of a ride one way or another to get to Tokyo proper. Probably the most efficient way is to take the Keisei Skyliner train running between Narita and Ueno Station, and then from Ueno, take the subway or hail a taxi to complete the trip. Note that the Skyliner is different from the regular Keisei line and requires a different ticket, which you can buy either at a self-serve machine or at a ticket counter. If you go to the counter, you can pay for the ticket with a credit card, but if you use the machine, it'll ask you for some PIN that you probably won't have set up. As of this writing, a one-way ticket costs 2,470 yen, or about US$23. Not bad considering the distance.

Tokyo public transportation

Tokyo has an extensive subway and rail (JR) system. Be aware that many stations are huge and efficient travel requires you to know not only which stations to use but where to exit them.

Unlike the New York City and Mexico City subway systems, for example, the Tokyo subway fares vary depending on your initial station and destination; a typical trip might cost 200 or so yen each way. There are a few ways to pay for subway fares:

1. You can buy subway tickets individually, but you have to know this exact fare when you buy the ticket. I don't recommend this.
2. You can buy a monthly metro pass (17,300 yen) if you're going to be around for a while and using the subway enough to make it worth the cost, but most people probably won't fit these criteria.
3. Recommended: For a 500-yen deposit, get a reloadable PASMO card. You can also use this card to pay for Keisei tickets, JR tickets, and at certain drink vending machines (of which there are many in Tokyo) and other miscellaneous places, so there's not really a risk of leaving too much balance on the card. The card is good for 10 years, so you can save it for future trips.

In order for the subway to calculate your fare properly, you have to insert your ticket or scan your PASMO card both on entering and leaving the station. This can be a little confusing at first.

If you're trying to get to the Tokyo Dome complex (including Korakuen Hall) by subway, you'll want to target one of the following stations: 水道橋 (Suidobashi), 後楽園 (Korakuen), or 春日 (Kasuga). 

Taxis

Uber really isn't a thing in Japan, I believe due to regulations there. It exists but its advantages in other countries are undermined by the disparity in available Uber drivers versus available taxis. The taxi rates, at least during the day, are reasonable for relatively short distances. You'll probably want to use public transportation for the lion's share of the travel, though, unless you have a lot of baggage with you.

Traveling to Japan: Japanese and Japanese food

Having traveled to Japan earlier this month, I thought that I'd begin to share some general Japan travel thoughts not specifically related to wrestling. There will probably be a few of these posts forthcoming.

Language

Unless you've got roughly a year or more (and a lot of free time) to prepare, there's really no way to go from zero to generally functional in Japanese before a trip. I had roughly three months to cram as much into my brain as I could. By the trip, I could recognize ~300 kanji and ~1,500 words, and could construct mildly interesting sentences (e.g., これを書いている人は日本語が下手です。"The person writing this is bad at Japanese."), but this wasn't nearly enough to be independently functional. 300 kanji may sound like a decent number, but it's roughly only 14% of the total kanji that literate Japanese adults are expected to know. So that's not a great hit rate. There is some good news, however: the preparation did help in a few areas (recognizing some food items on menus, being able to operate a Loppi machine to get NJPW tickets printed).

If you are making a trip (even on short notice) and do nothing else with the Japanese language, learn the katakana syllabary. There are only 46 symbols (minus diacritic marks) and plenty of opportunities to practice reading actual words. It's estimated that about 10% of modern Japanese consists of loanwords, the vast majority of which come from English (or are loanwords from other languages brought into English first). All of these loanwords are written in katakana. While there are some caveats with respect to divergence from original meaning, this generally doesn't happen with concrete objects like food and drink. Especially if you need your daily dose of caffeine like I do, it's useful to know that you can get a カプチーノ (cappuccino) with your breakfast at Denny's without waiting for an English menu (if they have one). Even if there's a native Japanese term for something, you'll often see the loanword instead in katakana because it's "cool" to use English terms.

If you have a little more time, it's useful to learn the hiragana and then basic food kanji and terms, like 肉 (にく, niku = meat), 豆 (bean, often in terms related to soybeans), 牛 (cow, such that 牛肉, gyuuniku = beef), 魚 (さかな, sakana = fish).

Don't rely on Google Translate to help much. It might work with straightforward words and phrases, but Japanese is a highly context-dependent language with grammatical structures very different from those of English, so it's probably a coin flip as to whether you'll end up more confused than you were before if you're trying to work with complete sentences.

Food

Speaking of food, I was surprised how inexpensive it was to eat in most places in Tokyo. You can eat out and eat well for less than 3,000 yen per day, and significantly less than that if you're willing to fill up on onigiri (rice "balls", really more like pyramids, wrapped in seaweed), which are usually around 110 yen each.

If sushi is your thing, conveyor belt sushi (回転寿司) restaurants are an efficient way of getting your fill. You'll break the 3,000￥/day budget here but not terribly so, especially if you like the cheaper plates of sushi. You can have a good sushi meal for 2,000-2,500 yen, which is far less than you'd pay for the equivalent amount of sushi in most places in the United States.

One of the few exceptions to "inexpensive food" would be pufferfish (fugu). I ate this at Genpinfugu, a short walk from the Ueno station in Tokyo. Beware that, if you go, everyone in your party should be willing to try pufferfish, because the restaurant specializes in it to the exclusion of nearly everything else. I have to imagine that, due to the trouble of retaining a licensed pufferfish chef, that would be the case elsewhere too.

Many restaurants do not accept credit cards, so carry enough cash on you. Also, some ATMs do not accept foreign debit cards, so don't wait until the last minute to try to find a place to get cash.