If real Japan includes the real red-light district, screw the guide. Just wander around kabuki-cho. Oh, being loaded helps with this plan also. If on a budget, a guide might indeed be helpful to avoid the over-priced quasi-scams.
Strip clubs in Canada where the use Loonie and Twonie coins, strippers carry little velvet baggies that they stash their coins in. Tipping them at the stage in coins isn’t really that big of a deal. They take them, set them on the stage and round them up at the end of their set.
We must have the same “mate”, at one club they sold $1US for $2AUD.
Just remembered the “mermadium” that Lollipop Bar in the Nana Plaza red-light area installed about 15 years ago. It was a giant glass-walled water tank, and naked bargirls would frolic inside it. You could toss 10-baht coins, at that time worth 40 US cents, into the tank, and they’d go diving for them. After a while, the police decided this was too degrading even for a Bangkok bar and ordered them not to use the mermadium anymore.
But there’s a new schtick now becoming increasingly popular in the go-go bars: You buy five ping-pong balls for 100 baht (about $3.25 today) and bounce them onto the stage where the girls are dancing. The balls cost you 20 baht apiece, and for each one a girl turns in, she gets 10 baht, so they all go chasing after them. This is extremely annoying, and if the police thought the mermadium was degrading, I don’t know why they’re ignoring this. The girls go crazy. Have you ever fed fish in a pond and seen the way they all swarm all over one another to get at the food? It’s a lot like that.
I’m puzzled by the folks mentioning using magnets to pick up the coins. Any coins made of actual nickel will be magnetic, but those are rare, and iron or steel is even rarer. Are all of the high-denomination English and Canadian coins magnetic?
Huh? The only Canadian coins that you can’t pick up with a magnet are the penny and the nickel (or at least some nickels).
No, that’s the coin slot.
Older ones. After 2002, the Mint made all coins of value below a dollar out of plated steel. The loonie is made of nickel with bronze plating; the toonie is nickel on the outside and copper/aluminum/nickel in the middle. Link.