Harajuku

There's an urban legend that if everyone in Tokyo came down from their apartment or office at the same time, there wouldn't be enough room on the streets for everyone to fit. I believe it. The only experience I've had that even comes close to approximating Saturday afternoon Tokyo pedestrian traffic is walking back from the Mall after the 4th of July fireworks in DC. At the train stations on the Tokyu line and along pedestrian throughfares, there are posters that show how a lit cigarette in an arm extended down is at just the right height to burn a child's face. I was a bit skeptical of the likelihood of this event, but am starting to wonder if there out to be signs demonstrating that a studded belt is at just the right height to take a child's eye out.

I spent last Saturday afternoon exploring Harajuku, a Tokyo neighborhood about twenty minutes from Shibuya. It had a lot of fun pedestrian side streets, with well-edited second hand clothing stores, vendors selling international treats like kebabs and hot dogs, and a lot of orange-haired people with facial piercings. Some of the pedestrian streets were striped down the middle by fenced-in playgrounds that stretched on for several blocks. I saw a couple of girls sporting the Gothic Lolita style. I continue to be surprised by the youthfulness of Japanese mainstreet fashion, so I think the girls-dressed-like-dolls were less surprising than the woman-dressed-as-schoolgirls.

The main street through Harajuku is called Omote-sando and is comparable to Paris' Champs Elysee (Nell, if you're reading this, you know which song to cue up). It had the regular major designers, but the buildings they were in were more note worthy than the window displays themselves. (I'm much more prone to noticing clothes than architecture at this point in my life, so these buildings were really special.) One store offered a modern twist on a Japanese castle, with a large rock base and then narrower upper-stories made entirely out of reflective glass. Another had an almost blinding window display with what looked like eight foot neon glow sticks in an array of colors dangling down from the ceiling. Another clear-glass building had glass turrets and a tall, slender, tapered tower ending in a point. It looked like an ice castle. Along the sidewalk, there was a shallow stream with a concrete bed about six inches below the sidewalk. The sidewalk extended over it at the entryways to shops and restaurants. I can't tell if it was modern art, or a pretty drainage system, or both.

Some of the shops themselves were intriguing. At one, I was handed a "how to shop" guide, written in both English and Japanese with detailed pictures, at the door. The store was minimalist, with a row of t-shirts hanging on a rack straight down the middle, and a lot of LED displays above what appeared to be shelves of tennis balls on all the walls. My "how to shop" guide told me (least I be an embarrassment to myself) that customers were to browse through the t-shirts in the middle and when they found one they liked, take note of its id number. The LED displays I'd seen were the t-shirt ID numbers around the wall. Customers found the t-shirt they wanted, went to its section, and bought the canned t-shirt labeled with the right size and color. I didn't like the shirts much, but I was impressed by the concept.

Most benches in Tokyo aren't like American benches at all. They are like a double-decker railing angled slightly on its side. I wouldn't have known it was a bench if people weren't sitting on it, but it was surprisingly comfortable. (I had to try.)