Regardless, you should indeed at least walk through the famous and mostly safe red light districts in places like Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Tokyo. Kabuki-cho or Kabukicho is often described as a red-light district and I guess it is, but it resembles famous ones like Amsterdam almost not at all. Kabuki-cho is better described as an entertainment district, with the options often skewing towards, but not always reaching, the base instincts.
Shinjuku is where I stay when in Tokyo. The airport express train stops at the massive Shinjuku station, and business hotels surround it. I crashed at the Hotel Sunroute Shinjuku, and all that can be said for it is that you get a very small, generic room with only the stuff you need, but the location rocks. Walk along until you see a lit, red archway, and go through. This is one image of Tokyo everyone images, not the grimy Blade Runner type, but more like Ginza, a crowded street with massive amounts of lit signs, running high up the buildings and stretching on and on.
Check it:. I passed dozens of hostess or host bars, lounges where you just drink and pay dearly for the company of a cute drinking companion, male or female. They just sit with you and be your temporary date for a bit. The girls always looked like beauty queens dressed up for a cocktail party; the guys looked like Rod Steward back in the 70s, or like some bad 90s boy-band.
The guys always had long hair with many of them dyed, were tall and thin, and dressed like David Cassidy in his prime. They were all in their low to mid-twenties, and always seemed to be pouting. I saw many of the hosts, the guys, the boy-band types, walking through the streets, going to or from work.
She put me in a tiny elevator for the second floor and them ran up the steps so as to meet me when the elevator arrived, almost making me think she was a different girl. Inside, I found three or four girls behind the bar and four or five Japanese men sitting in front of the bar on stools.
