Tokyo
see more photos please
Okay I have to admit Tokyo is amazing. If you don’t know me I am a natural ‘realist’, which means I am a cynic. I am the kind of cynic that looks snobbishly at cities and thinks that no cultural enlightenment can be found in such monstrous capitalist havens. “They are all the same” has been somehow, obviously unjustly, drilled into a brain or two of mine on the subject of ‘The City’.
Pablo, Amelia and I arrived at Tokyo completely unprepared, in fact if you went back about six hours from our arrival you would find three very sweaty people sitting on a bus laughing hysterically because we got on the bus with no minutes to spare – due to a couple of utterly avoidable, idiot errors on the subway.
Luckily we are quite fortuitous in terms of our social network over here, and we met a Japanese friend of a Ghanaian friend at Tokyo station who showed us the ropes on the Subway and helped us find our way to a capsule hotel that excepted both women and men – a hard task indeed. This would be an incredibly long post if I were to try and break down the ‘oddities’ of Tokyo into rhyme and reason, so I won’t (Although I think with the capsule hotels it is simple: It makes ‘good business sense’ to only cater for men). Yeah, I have seen coffins plusher than the ‘rooms’, but it was really cheap, quite clean although smelly, and I could fit in it (pushing the word ‘just’ to the very edge of the ‘j’ and the ‘t’). The public baths were also very interesting: you sit down on a stool in front of a really long mirror so you can get a really good look at yourself and anyone else, shower, fiddling with whatever bits deemed necessary, and then rest in the bath if so desired, and then have another shower. Bizarre, but very cleansing. It feels really, exquisitely nice to put a clean yukata – a cotton kimono – on afterward.
Our first real experience of Japan was entering Shinjuku, and yes it is crowded and yes it is insane. You have to think more like a flying creature than one that so firmly obeys the law of gravity; thinking in three dimensions is a necessity if you wish to find what you are looking for – there is a different completely unrelated store/restaurant/thing on nearly every floor of nearly every building. No more than ten seconds of leaving the station then we see some ‘doll girls’. In Tokyo there are department stores catering to every ‘style’ of stylised Japanese person. Doll girls, Garus (pronounce ‘girls’ in a Japanese way), b. girls & b. boys, girly boys, school girls and boys, and the ‘older sister’ look. There are of course all the ‘norms’ like punks, rockers, mods, grungys etc. I will talk more about the ‘b. girl’ and ‘ b. boy’ phenomenon in about fifty seconds. The only problem we were really experiencing is that we were all broken. The reason why Harry, my other flatmate, didn’t even come to Tokyo is because he sprained his ankle so badly that he is in a cast and wields he a crutch. I was suffering from an insanely bad back, partly due to smashing the sweet spot at the bottom of the spine on exiting my capsule. Pablo had been wearing painkiller patches on his back for a week due to a mysterious and stupid injury. And Amelia had a terrible stomach ache and an irritating headache. We simply wondered around absorbing as much atmosphere as our senses would let us, getting lost to find our bearings, and all the while eating and drinking convenience store food (it seems the one constant throughout Japan is that when you want food or drink, a store or vending machine materialises into your peripheral vision).
The next morning a really crap thing happened: Amelia had to leave because her stomach ache was intolerable. In commiseration Pablo and I went to the Sony building and dribbled over unneeded gadgets and played on the Playstations for quite a period of time. ‘Sad’ is probably a good choice of phrase.
We then went to Shibuya, a ‘hipper’, more dirty, downtown area than Shinjuku. Again we were blown away by the people, the lights, the shops etc. There are huge, and huger roads that have simply been closed off and chairs placed in the middle of them, there are also an absolutely inescapable amount of shoe shops. Pablo bought the shoes – the shoes that I have been wanting ever since I arrived here – fluorescent Converse that cost only £15, but alas they never have my shoe size. I could not help but feel ambivalent towards his action because I was both envious and amused at the couldn’t-be-any-more-pink footwear. Now equipped with the necessary social arsenal we initiated our master plan: to (a) find a person/s to talk to about ‘things’, get drunk with, and then them show us the Tokyo nightlife, and (b) to find me some fluorescent socks to go with my standard sandals. We went to Yoyogi Park, another amazing area. Okay I am having to surmise a lot to get to an interesting bit so bear with the adjective ‘amazing’ for just a short while longer. It was a park alive with music – hippy, fusion bands, and even a band where a tap dancer on some wood was centre stage. We then met Yoko a crazy, but altogether enchanting person. She started talking to us, or rather Pablo because she liked his SHOES. She started commenting on music and Americans and Japanese in a unique mix of Japanese and English. She then decided we were going to go to a record store where we met her friends. We ate Japanese burgers, and I happened to find the socks that I had been wanting for a good couple of months. I bought three pairs. Life was going well.
So here’s an interesting part: Yoko took us to Parco, a huge department store where each section did indeed cater for the previously mentioned ‘styles’ of people. Now she called herself a b.girl which I now found out meant Black Japanese girl. It turns out that there are a lot of boys and girls who practice to be ‘black’, or at least what they see as black. They wear the clothes, say expletives a lot, dance like a person on a rap or R&B song, and darken their skin. The first thing Yoko told an American that we met in a club later that night is that she wishes she was black and American, he was quite speechless. Is this so different from saying ‘I wish I was cool/stronger/more intelligent?’ Or perhaps the same someone saying they wish they were, and end up emulating someone else? Isn’t that what we all do? Hmmm I will definitely come back to that one. Going back to the department store, Yoko told us that with Japanese people the look is ‘fashion only’. So the punks aren’t really rebels they just want to look good? There could well be a dissertation in this. (If you are my lecturer, please replace last full stop with a question mark)
All you ‘need’ to know is that now I have actually said something of some kind of merit, is that we somehow ended up playing football on the street with a some Israeli and Chinese street vendors, then went to a really expensive club. We witnessed a DJ Legend (DJ Krush or something). Yoko told the American what she had to tell him. Half the people in the Club were not Japanese, but it was a very interesting and harmonious mix of origins. We exited the club at five and then Yoko showed us the way to the park we took pictures said our goodbyes then slept like the homeless people we were. We woke up to the sound of Taiko drums and had a conversation about the meaning of everything. Pablo drank some more and the standard of the conversation logarithmically degraded with the hours of the day. By the end of the day every other word was about food, and then the other word was about sleep. I think the word ‘porn’ may have slipped in there a couple of times.
…Blahblahblah…
I was very close to seeing Fuji-san on the bus on the way home. As my maths teacher used to say, “close, but no biscuit”.
Okay I have to admit Tokyo is amazing. If you don’t know me I am a natural ‘realist’, which means I am a cynic. I am the kind of cynic that looks snobbishly at cities and thinks that no cultural enlightenment can be found in such monstrous capitalist havens. “They are all the same” has been somehow, obviously unjustly, drilled into a brain or two of mine on the subject of ‘The City’.
Pablo, Amelia and I arrived at Tokyo completely unprepared, in fact if you went back about six hours from our arrival you would find three very sweaty people sitting on a bus laughing hysterically because we got on the bus with no minutes to spare – due to a couple of utterly avoidable, idiot errors on the subway.
Luckily we are quite fortuitous in terms of our social network over here, and we met a Japanese friend of a Ghanaian friend at Tokyo station who showed us the ropes on the Subway and helped us find our way to a capsule hotel that excepted both women and men – a hard task indeed. This would be an incredibly long post if I were to try and break down the ‘oddities’ of Tokyo into rhyme and reason, so I won’t (Although I think with the capsule hotels it is simple: It makes ‘good business sense’ to only cater for men). Yeah, I have seen coffins plusher than the ‘rooms’, but it was really cheap, quite clean although smelly, and I could fit in it (pushing the word ‘just’ to the very edge of the ‘j’ and the ‘t’). The public baths were also very interesting: you sit down on a stool in front of a really long mirror so you can get a really good look at yourself and anyone else, shower, fiddling with whatever bits deemed necessary, and then rest in the bath if so desired, and then have another shower. Bizarre, but very cleansing. It feels really, exquisitely nice to put a clean yukata – a cotton kimono – on afterward.
Our first real experience of Japan was entering Shinjuku, and yes it is crowded and yes it is insane. You have to think more like a flying creature than one that so firmly obeys the law of gravity; thinking in three dimensions is a necessity if you wish to find what you are looking for – there is a different completely unrelated store/restaurant/thing on nearly every floor of nearly every building. No more than ten seconds of leaving the station then we see some ‘doll girls’. In Tokyo there are department stores catering to every ‘style’ of stylised Japanese person. Doll girls, Garus (pronounce ‘girls’ in a Japanese way), b. girls & b. boys, girly boys, school girls and boys, and the ‘older sister’ look. There are of course all the ‘norms’ like punks, rockers, mods, grungys etc. I will talk more about the ‘b. girl’ and ‘ b. boy’ phenomenon in about fifty seconds. The only problem we were really experiencing is that we were all broken. The reason why Harry, my other flatmate, didn’t even come to Tokyo is because he sprained his ankle so badly that he is in a cast and wields he a crutch. I was suffering from an insanely bad back, partly due to smashing the sweet spot at the bottom of the spine on exiting my capsule. Pablo had been wearing painkiller patches on his back for a week due to a mysterious and stupid injury. And Amelia had a terrible stomach ache and an irritating headache. We simply wondered around absorbing as much atmosphere as our senses would let us, getting lost to find our bearings, and all the while eating and drinking convenience store food (it seems the one constant throughout Japan is that when you want food or drink, a store or vending machine materialises into your peripheral vision).
The next morning a really crap thing happened: Amelia had to leave because her stomach ache was intolerable. In commiseration Pablo and I went to the Sony building and dribbled over unneeded gadgets and played on the Playstations for quite a period of time. ‘Sad’ is probably a good choice of phrase.
We then went to Shibuya, a ‘hipper’, more dirty, downtown area than Shinjuku. Again we were blown away by the people, the lights, the shops etc. There are huge, and huger roads that have simply been closed off and chairs placed in the middle of them, there are also an absolutely inescapable amount of shoe shops. Pablo bought the shoes – the shoes that I have been wanting ever since I arrived here – fluorescent Converse that cost only £15, but alas they never have my shoe size. I could not help but feel ambivalent towards his action because I was both envious and amused at the couldn’t-be-any-more-pink footwear. Now equipped with the necessary social arsenal we initiated our master plan: to (a) find a person/s to talk to about ‘things’, get drunk with, and then them show us the Tokyo nightlife, and (b) to find me some fluorescent socks to go with my standard sandals. We went to Yoyogi Park, another amazing area. Okay I am having to surmise a lot to get to an interesting bit so bear with the adjective ‘amazing’ for just a short while longer. It was a park alive with music – hippy, fusion bands, and even a band where a tap dancer on some wood was centre stage. We then met Yoko a crazy, but altogether enchanting person. She started talking to us, or rather Pablo because she liked his SHOES. She started commenting on music and Americans and Japanese in a unique mix of Japanese and English. She then decided we were going to go to a record store where we met her friends. We ate Japanese burgers, and I happened to find the socks that I had been wanting for a good couple of months. I bought three pairs. Life was going well.
So here’s an interesting part: Yoko took us to Parco, a huge department store where each section did indeed cater for the previously mentioned ‘styles’ of people. Now she called herself a b.girl which I now found out meant Black Japanese girl. It turns out that there are a lot of boys and girls who practice to be ‘black’, or at least what they see as black. They wear the clothes, say expletives a lot, dance like a person on a rap or R&B song, and darken their skin. The first thing Yoko told an American that we met in a club later that night is that she wishes she was black and American, he was quite speechless. Is this so different from saying ‘I wish I was cool/stronger/more intelligent?’ Or perhaps the same someone saying they wish they were, and end up emulating someone else? Isn’t that what we all do? Hmmm I will definitely come back to that one. Going back to the department store, Yoko told us that with Japanese people the look is ‘fashion only’. So the punks aren’t really rebels they just want to look good? There could well be a dissertation in this. (If you are my lecturer, please replace last full stop with a question mark)
All you ‘need’ to know is that now I have actually said something of some kind of merit, is that we somehow ended up playing football on the street with a some Israeli and Chinese street vendors, then went to a really expensive club. We witnessed a DJ Legend (DJ Krush or something). Yoko told the American what she had to tell him. Half the people in the Club were not Japanese, but it was a very interesting and harmonious mix of origins. We exited the club at five and then Yoko showed us the way to the park we took pictures said our goodbyes then slept like the homeless people we were. We woke up to the sound of Taiko drums and had a conversation about the meaning of everything. Pablo drank some more and the standard of the conversation logarithmically degraded with the hours of the day. By the end of the day every other word was about food, and then the other word was about sleep. I think the word ‘porn’ may have slipped in there a couple of times.
…Blahblahblah…
I was very close to seeing Fuji-san on the bus on the way home. As my maths teacher used to say, “close, but no biscuit”.
posted by Shaun at 07:48
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