Bar/fly: Tokyo's best bars

'Tokyo might be one the planet's biggest and busiest cities, but it's also infused with a remarkably polite and laid-back vibe.' Illustration / Rod Emmerson

In a big blaze of neon lights, Brett Atkinson discovers Tokyo's best watering holes.

When Friday night drinks in Tokyo segue into early-morning karaoke spins on Johnny Cash, Tom Waits and The Pogues, you know you've had a good night.

The dazzling neon canyons of the city's Shinjuku entertainment precinct seem just as impenetrable as earlier in the evening. Occasionally, a familiar global logo peeks out from behind a flashing 10-storey-high rendering of Japanese Kanji characters. Otherwise it's a visual assault of unfamiliar shapes, billboard-sized Manga animation characters, and the incongruous theatre of towering Nigerian guys shilling the dubious attractions of underground hostess bars.

Meet us at Vector Beer under the Shinjuku Hotel Park Inn, I'm told, and the bar where I'm to meet expat friends of a friend is revealed down a quiet street on the edge of Tokyo's Golden Gai nightlife district.

With bearded hipsters and decor casually morphing industrial chic and distressed timber, the place echoes craft beer bars from Portland to Wellington, but I'm soon back on unfamiliar ground as the chalkboard taplist of beers is revealed.

Luckily, three lonely Western characters stand out from the Kanji-prescribed selection of 10 brews, and the international language of the letters I, P and A rustle up a pint of hoppy pale ale from Nagano's Yo-Ho Brewing.

Within minutes, my drinking buddies, complete with Scottish, Canadian and Australian accents, arrive and the more delicate operation of ordering grilled beef tongue and heaving plates of steamed shellfish is thankfully left to those who know better than we do.

Different local flavours feature at our next stop in Omoide Yokocho ("Memory Lane"), a riddle of compact yakitori bars huddled under gritty train tracks leading to Shinjuku, the world's busiest railway station.

A patina of decades-old charcoal smoke shrouds the tiny bars, which are packed with Tokyo salarymen washing away the working week with the city's cheapest draught beer and more potent shots of shochu (Japanese vodka).

Delicate skewers of grilled squid, beef heart and chicken livers combine with a fiery combo of wasabi and raw octopus, and a few places in the lane, colourfully dubbed "Piss Alley", make an effort at attracting Western visitors. Anyone for "chopped up cow with wire through it"?

Tonight though, we're the only Gaijin drinkers around, and squeeze into a bar seating around 10 people. Improbably low ceilings amplify the shouted welcome of "Irrasshaimase!" (Come in!), from the bar owner. Other punters are also friendly towards our wandering crew gatecrashing their regular Friday night session.

Tokyo might be one the planet's biggest and busiest cities, but it's also infused with a remarkably polite and laid-back vibe.

Leaving our new drinking buddies to catch the last train home or crash for the night in a capsule hotel, our own big night out in Tokyo leads inevitably to the Lost in Translation pleasures of karaoke.

Overriding my curiosity in the adjacent Calico Cat Cafe - "More than 40 cats! No waiting!" - we adjourn to a private seventh-floor room with a confusingly Arabian Nights ambience. Bill Murray is nowhere to seen, but with 10,000 songs able to be conjured up through an iPad, there's plenty of opportunity to pay homage to other cultural heroes.

Reinforcing the fundamental rule of karaoke, I wisely stick to songs made famous by renowned booze hounds, and after decent stabs at Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line, and The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, exit in dire need of coffee, sunglasses and ramen noodles, but happy to be bathed in the thrilling and shimmering neon of the future.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Air New Zealand flies daily to Tokyo from Auckland.