Harajuku Style

12Sep08

Harajuku (原宿) is the epicentre of youth fashion in Japan. I don’t know whether I read that somewhere or whether it’s a fresh new quote. Somehow, in a part of the world with so much seismic activity already, I doubt it’s an original line. Nevertheless, it’s a happening place to say the least.

The sort of fashion that comes out of here is extreme in the extreme. Here is one shop I walked by earlier:

And here is another one, which is quite well known here, called Takenoko. If you want to dress like Edward Scissorhands, or a prostitute from the Moulin Rouge, it’s the place to go:

Here is the result of all that fashion. There weren’t all that many cool teenagers hanging out this morning – presumably because they were all at school – but there were a few others, who I presume were college students, floating around the place. I trawled through the photos I took today and was able to come up with this little selection:

I can see lads booking their Tokyo plane tickets as we speak… anyway, that was my morning. I hope to get over there (and also back to Akihabara) if I can on Sunday, because those were the two areas that seemed to be the most interesting looking. Harajuku in particular is the domain of cosplayers. Look up “cosplay” on Wikipedia if you don’t know what it is, but I suspect any of you gentlemen who are into Star Wars, role-playing games or any other nerdy stuff will certainly know what I’m talking about.

Just a word about how to keep hydrated if you ever visit Tokyo (all that cosplay-watching is thirsty work). Vending machines are everywhere, and it costs 150 yen (a shade under a euro) for one of these:

That’s basically tea in a bottle. It’s huge here. All sorts of teas are bottled and chilled in vending machines, and they’re very refreshing amid all the heat and humidity of the city. It’s a bit like the very refreshing ice tea that you can sometimes get in Lidl. Very few brands are sweetened or contain other flavours like lemon for example, so they’re extremely virtuous. All this non calorie consumption is probably why the Japanese are so skinny.

School was great fun again today. We were studying the characters for “cow” and “meat”. Put the two together of course and you get “beef”! Of course then the discussion went off into what animals people in different countries eat, and with Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans in the class, you can imagine the sort of fun that ensued. Much to the Daily Mirror’s horror I imagine, the Koreans have tasted dog. A Tibetan girl in the class had, surprise surprise, once eaten yak. But pride of place must go to the Chinese, whose initial reaction on meeting something unfamiliar is apparently to try and eat it. Cho, who sits next to me, has eaten cat and snake. The other Chinese people in the class have not stopped there; they’ve had dog too, and one guy has eaten monkey!

When he said he’d eaten saru (monkey), there were confused expressions all around, because a lot of the class didn’t know the word. The sensei helpfully drew a little picture of the animal on the board, and when she moved out of the way to reveal her art, well all I can say is that the expressions were priceless! I joked to Cho that the Chinese also eat tiger penis, but he started to get a little thick with me at that stage so I laid off…

Some interesting things though: in Japan, apart from the many sea creatures they eat, the only land animal they eat and which we don’t, happens to be the horse. Also, I don’t think a single person in my class has tasted lamb! They were also surprised that I had had ostrich on Dave’s stag night. I had to do an impression of the ostrich so as to convince the sensei that the big flightless bird I was talking about wasn’t in fact just the humble turkey!

After all the fun and games, I headed with Justin and Hohepa up to the top of the Mori Tower for the Tokyo city view. Here are a couple of pictures. In the first one you can see the Tokyo Tower. Our school is too small to see, but it’s at the foot of the tower, just at the left:

This is the view looking in towards Akasaka and the financial districts of Hibiya and Marunouchi where I was the other day:

There was quite a lot of smog today, so there was no hope of seeing Mt Fuji, which apparently you can do on a clear day. We stayed around through sunset though, and into the transition to night-time. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. The batteries ran out on my camera so there were no night photos. You’ll just have to imagine for yourself.

One thing about going up and looking out like that over Tokyo is that you just see how enormous this city is. According to Wikipedia, it’s the largest metropolitan area in the world, with 32 million people. It’s about as big as London and New York combined. Having looked out in all directions and seen nothing but buildings dissolving into the smog on all sides, I’d be inclined to believe it.

MF

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