After breakfast at our current favorite place (rice and some kind of meat for 320 yen) we headed off to Tokyo station. We had no goal in particular so we strolled the station for awhile and then going out heading for some imperial palace. Outside we realized these parts of Tokyo differed from what we have seen before. The signs in neon and other signs had greatly diminished and were replaced by skyscrapers reaching for the sky. Names such as Rolex, Bloomberg and other financial corporations where printed on these buildings, we entered one that was some kind of conference center with restaurants on top floor and took the elevator up. The elevator was smooth like a criminal and the view was very impressive from the windows. It was nice although didn’t look particularly japanese, but could have been any major city. Afterwards we had lost track of the imperial palace directions but using our knowledge from medieval strategy games we headed towards some canals which could serve as a moat and found out that we were correct indeed. We haven’t seen the palace yet, it might be that this is only a park, but with only I say that we have spent an hour or two here now just sitting and enjoying the sounds, views and tranquility of this place. It’s almost bizarre with the soft breeze, trees and relaxed tempo and in the skyline less than 200 meters the skyscrapers starts to complement the view. I guess that these parks are necessary for the people working in these districts to stay sane.

Update: We found the palace or garden and strolled around reading signs and checking out some fountain park that was a part of the park. We realized that this park area was quite big and it actually matched the green big thing on all Tokyo maps.

Me and Ulf decided to check out Harajuku today, when we reached the station we immediately noticed the steady flow of goth/punk/lolita girls from the station and smaller streams from other places. We then saw a nice park and I remembered that Anna Å (good girl!) told me to check out this Meiji Park or something in Harajuku. Which we did, it was quite a view, nice and calm. This park was supposedly planted by some emperor when his wife died. We realized that this area is probably worth quite much since all buildings have 5-10 floors around it. There was a boring museum which showed Kanji Calligraphy from emperors, we were happy that we claimed to be students and got in for half the price. When we felt we had enough of culture we got out and that never ending flow seemed to even increased by now. After standing and watching this scene for a few minutes we decided to see where everyone was going. This showed to be a wise decision since it took us to another of our ‘things-to-see’, Takeshita Street. In short that was teh shit.

Have you listened to Gwen Stefani’s song ‘Harajuku Girls’? If not do so, I thought I’d have the song running in the background for this entry but I decided that I’m running out of web space fast as it is.

If you’ve been to Arvika Festival, or any other open air festival with focus on Goth/Synth/EBM you know what the those girls can look like; stockings, nurse dresses, The Nightmare Before Christmas clothing, skulls, crosses, neon lights, Hello Kitty mixed upon that with a torn Ramones T-shirt. You have all seen them somewhere, but they usually dress more intense when acting in groups.

These are mere boring replicas of the creations that inhibit the quarters of Harajuku around Takeshita street. I suggest you google images and Harajuku for some samples. It should be noted that the percentage of obese and fat are impressive low overall in Japan, and so even her. There was perhaps one or two sights of what could have been stranded whales but nothing that required calling Green peace by any means.

In summary, the girls looked really good. As most girls in those clothes would. Hell, even the guys looked like good-looking girls, if this is a good or a bad thing I won’t be the judge.

After covering the more interesting parts of Harajuku we went strolling in Shibuya which more is classic/fashionable shopping. The goth girls wasn’t in majority any longer but still showed a strong presence. It might been that the memories of beautiful swedish people are fading but the crowds look, in general, much better today. In Shibuya it was more common with miniskirts and nice printed t-shirts or tops. After some empirical studies me and Ulf concluded that Japanese people have way more skillz when it comes to printing on t-shirts. Usually prints on any clothing suck but Ulf and me couldn’t resist some awesome prints. I might add a photo to this later but I’m trying to save bandwidth for now.

A few more things that we have found out during this day.

Japanese people use clamshell cell phones. We haven’t seen one single other cell phone and we have now probably seen enough to make this a statistical truth.

Japanese people don’t seem that skilled wearing high heels as compared to e.g. Russians. We will conduct further studies on this before we present any valid material though.

Open WiFi networks are very common but we found a place where no networks were open.

Todays shopping included the following: A really nice pair of jeans, a pair of blue googles, two ties, an awesome t-shirt and a belt. Nothing that was really cheap but looked nice enough. I’m now quite certain that if any item exists to be purchased, that item can be found in Tokyo. I could live here. Next time I’ll probably skip all luggage except Visa-card and gadgets…

I really don’t get this. This room we were asked to take instead of sleeping in two separate dorms. We said it would be ok for now but told the manager that this could not be repeated. This rooms pwns. We have our own AC, toilet and tv. And of course, we have Internet access since someone is kind enough to leave their network open.

Update: We were called and asked if we could squeeze in another guest. We said that we could manage this if we cut the costs. I guess we won’t see any lower cost and the beautiful japanese girl we wished for turned out to be a guy from Holland, which seems nice though. He kindly told us that all nearby hostels were booked until the 11th. Which means that we are lacking somewhere to sleep tomorrow. We will solve that problem tomorrow I guess 🙂