Regular readers of Tokyo Fox will be aware that I love football, Star Wars, and unique toilets and restaurants so imagine how excited I was when I discovered a place catering for all of those things. Not only that but it was located right under my nose!

Despite countless trips to go and watch Kashiwa Reysol over the years I have never been to this restaurant located within a stones throw of the stadium. To be fair, it is a very short distance off the track I usually take when going to see my adopted Japanese team in action so I wasn’t aware of it for many years.

After a ten minute wait I finally got a seat, and wasted no time in ordering the special Reysol-themed black curry ramen dish which had brought this restaurant to my attention six years ago. When I later checked out the place online I was in for a wonderful surprise. As a big Star Wars fan, I was delighted to see one of my favourite characters was a prominent part of the restaurant’s decor.

There is a life-size statue of Darth Maul, who first appeared 25 years ago in ‘The Phantom Menace‘ (1999), outside the toilets. Not only that but he is wearing a yellow Kashiwa Reysol shirt which I think is absolutely brilliant!

There is a sign pointing you in the direction of the toilets but when you get to this area there is no sign of them. All that’s visible is the aforementioned Sith Lord figure and a bookcase!!

The shelves are fairly sparse with some DVDs, footballs and a few pop culture figures relating to the likes of Michael Jackson, Terminator, Godzilla, Batman and Toy Story.

That’s all interesting but where the hell was that toilet I desperately needed whilst waiting for my dish to arrive at my counter seat?!! Well, this is like one of those movies where you push a certain book or part of the shelf and suddenly a mysterious secret room opens up before your eyes. It really must be one of Japan’s most secret toilets!

The restaurant itself is called Chinrai (1-2-55 Hitachidai, Kashiwa, Chiba-ken) and it has a log history dating back nearly 100 years. It’s been around since 1928, and is a great place for Reysol fans with signed shirts and pictures hanging on the walls of the restaurant.

There is an American-diner feel to the place but the likes of hamburgers and fries have been replaced by bowls of noodles.

Thankfully I hadn’t eaten that morning as when my dish did come it was bigger than expected. Three pieces of croquette in the dish and three more on a separate plate was probably a little excessive but I was confident I could eat it all.

I just happened to have a little Darth Maul figure on me for the purpose of the pre-meal shots. That was rather fortunate wasn’t it?!!

The noodles were chewy and delicious whilst the soup was a little spicier than I was expecting but nothing that would blow your socks off such is the way in Japan where spice levels are far milder than back home.

It’s not so common to drink all the ramen soup but I make occasional exceptions when the dish is less conventional.

Once I’d finished off that bowl I took the very short walk on to Hitachi-dai Stadium to see Kashiwa Reysol play their opening match of the 2024 J1 season which was their first competitive one since the Emperor’s Cup Final defeat on penalties in December.

It was a day of pretty much non-stop drizzly rain and it was fairly miserable to sit in it for three hours. Of course I have seen matches played in far heavier rain though so was grateful in a way that it wasn’t that ridiculous.

The football itself didn’t do too much to make up for the awful weather but when Savio opened the scoring with a wonder goal on 77 minutes I was over the moon. A penalty kick on 88 minutes should’ve wrapped the game up for my Reysol boys but Hosoya put it wide and then the inevitable happened in the fourth minute of additional time as Sanga equalised.

It wqs a sickening end to the day, and was just typical of the previous season where Reysol constantly failed to win matches after scoring first.

Despite the disappointingly predictable end to the football, the weather did help to making this match live longer than usual in my memory. Football combined with Star Wars, tasty and interesting-looking food, and a truly unique toilet is right up my street. Things don’t get much better than that for me!

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