tbt | tokyo, japan

the only photo from the whole night

i was looking through my old pictures that i took in japan and decided to share one of my funny experiences. while i was in japan, one of my friends asked me to get dinner with her and one of her guy friends. later on, he asked her how many girls she was inviting and she replied, "3." on our way to dinner, one of our friends said she thought we were going on a “gokon”! according to wikipedia, “in japan, a gokon is a group blind date, typically used to form at least some friendships between two groups that are each of a single sex. generally, a single man and woman who know each other organize the gokon in advance, each agreeing to bring 3 or 4 eligible friends. the venue is usually a restaurant, izakaya, or anywhere people can eat, drink, and make a bit of of noise.” after our friend explained to us the gist of a what a gokon was, my friend and i started freaking out, but also hysterically laughing because the idea of it just seemed so weird. so we meet the guy and there he was.. with his three friends.. waiting to take us out... at an izakaya.. sound familiar? the guys sat on one side, girls sat on the other. and after looking up gokon on wikipedia, it was like i going through a checklist. the dinner itself was fun, but these boys probably also thought we knew what we were getting ourselves into. when dinner was over, two of the girls decided to head back to waseda and my friend and i still wanted to go out, but this meant it would be two girls and four guys (ruining the gokon). as we were heading to the club "gas panic" (great name, huh?) somehow two of the guys disappeared... literally... to this day, i still don't know what happened to them. i of course was the wing woman to my friend who was having the best time with one of the guys, while i was trying to avoid dancing with the other guy the entire time. we all departed way before the last train. although i didn’t come out finding love (lol), my friend and i got a good laugh and experienced real modern day japanese culture!