Harajuku girls, neon lights, plastic food displays, thousands of commuters. The old cliches come and hit you hard and fast here in Tokyo.

I am here doing a few reports for More4 News on judicial reform, cyber homelessness, and the next big thing in mobile phones.

By day the high-rise streets and grey sky make this a hard place to capture. But at night the place becomes a camera-man's wet dream.

It is not often that you find yourself running down a street to get a passing shot of a young girl dressed in lime green kimono, yellow tights and red shoes - but what a shot. And as for the woman dressed as a 1950s housewife, with bee-hive hair and a Chihuahua poking from her handbag: better not leave the lenscap on for that one.

Filming here is great fun. It's the getting yourself understood that's a hard.

We had ditched our fixer to get some general city shots, and had been left stranded without the comfort blanket of a translator. So when the filming had ended for the day and we realised that, at 10pm, we hadn't eaten for 10 hours, eating became a priority.

So - a nice restaurant with lots of plastic food to display its menu in the window looked enticing enough. In we entered. All the staff shouted a greeting. We smiled back. Then the menu was brought. It was in Japanese.

Our Time Out guide food translation section didn't help reveal its secrets. So the old-trusted ruse of pointing and ordering was the only option. I had the bowl of noodles being munched on by the girl to my right. My reporter had the steaming bowl of meat being enjoyed by the salaryman to the left.

Then the etiquette of eating got us all in a dither. My noodles arrived with a bowl of (what I thought was) soup. I grabbed the chopsticks and got stuck in. The noodles were cold and bland. I thought: bugger. My reporter's meal was so hot she couldn't eat it. She thought: bugger.

We sat there looking sorry for ourselves. The Burger King up the road looked an option.

In the end it worked out. The soup was a dipping bowl that was designed to transform the cold noodles from shoelace texture to something quite tasty. The meat stew cooled down and was a delight. But for a second there we felt the cold hand of cliche on our shoulders: two westerners making arses out of themselves when armed with chopsticks, an unintelligble menu and a hunger.

At least we didn't drink the finger-washing bowls.

And then the one thing that wasn't a cliche. The whole meal cost - in what was supposed to be most expsneive city you could imagine - less than seven pounds. Arigato!