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 🙂

First I must say I am impressed with a few things in Tokyo. We, (I consider myself a citizen of a western culture) have much to learn from Tokyo. A will state a few things that struck my mind today.

The subway system including the fact that you buy a ticket from a vending machine, travel somewhere and then there go back to another vending machine and adjust the price if you paid to little or too much. If you know you’ve paid the correct price just walk smoothly by the gates. The price for traveling around is almost half compared to Gothenburg. I might add that the smallest station have at least 6 different exits and are usually the size of Gothenburg Central Station.

The amount of garbage, junk, beggars and screaming children. Zero. I’m not sure I want to find out how they’ve accomplished this but it’s quite soothing to follow the stream of people.

Japanese views upon adult entertainment. Or entertainment at all. It is completely normal that in a music/movies store one out of three floors are dedicated to ‘visuals’. Visuals I thought would be a fancier word for movies, anime and so on. Little did I know about the Japanese mind and soul. Visuals is some genre of soft porn, girls that are ‘acting cute’ while showing off their bodies. And of this floor, say perhaps 25% is the more classic porn including intercourse, bondage and you name it. As long as a few pixels make impossible to tell exactly the look of a persons genitalia. You might argue that it’s quite possible to catch the drift of what that humping piece of pixels is doing bouncing between those female legs but due for some unknown reason this is censored.

In addition to this a few things has to be said as well here, if you visit a ‘love shop’ it has 4-5 floors of vibrators, movies, clothing (I will add a devoted entry about this some day because this needs to be said). I have to admit although I thought I knew some things about sexual ‘appliances’ I now know far more and will perhaps never be that innocent boy I was when I left.

Finally, it makes perfectly sense to have a fashionable Gucci store about 15m from a quite vividly announced strip-club. I wonder if it’s me or them who is the most normal.

Signs. They are, in short, both wonderful and completely insane.