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Published: September 15th 2005
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Shibuya
Here is the typical shot of Shibuya which a lot of people begin to associate with "Tokyo." Even on a Wednesday there were hundreds of people moving about. Hi everyone,
Today feels very lonely for some reason. Traveling abroad is kind of a bipolar experience. Most of the time I am on this high of being amazed with the circumstances and the experiences... it is almost unbelievable that I am LIVING in Tokyo. I have always wanted to live in a big city (Ithaca is a tiny little city) and Tokyo happens to be the biggest developed city in the world! There is just so much to do, so much to eat and see and think and be. But sometimes I get on this low where everything feels very lonely. It is isolating to not understand the language and the social differences make interaction with the Japanese very confusing and difficult. For example, when I walk down the street or when I am on the train, the Japanese rarely make eye contact and when they do it is uncommon for them to smile. In fact, when I smile I think I might scare them. And I keep thinking that it would be so much more fun to share all of these experiences with someone who I know well already!!!! ANNIE is coming at the end of December (she bought
Shibuya 109
A kind of crappy photograph of the inside of the department store. her ticket!! whoo hoo) and my parents are planning to come sometime this year. I love doing all of the things here, but I keep thinking how much better it would be with someone else!
Anyway, yesterday (Wednesday) we did not have classes so I spent the day in Shibuya with Charissa (who also goes to Cornell, she is in the TXA deparment), Zvi (who is from Israel), and Brendan (who lives in Berkley). They are a really cool group of kids and they were really fun and relaxing to travel with.
Charissa and I first went into Shibuya 109, a famous department store. It is 8 floors of insane fashion boutiques. If you look up "Shibuya Girls" on google, you can see what the average person in this department store looks like. It is a very distinct look; extremely tanned, dyed blonde or light-brown hair, lots of make-up, very skinny, wild style... It is a
drastic contrast to "traditional" Japanese fashion and personal presentation. I think that I want to buy a jacket here, or maybe some crazy shoes. Oh, a note about shoes:
Every girl wears heals here... we IES girls cannot figure out how they endure this
Zvi's hair
The wind-blown-model look. footwear for so long, but without fail every single Japanese female wears heals. Maybe I already wrote about that. Anyway, Shibuya 109 was quite an experience (Annie, I think you will love it, Shuang, I think you would fit in). All of the sales clerks have a very nasal voice that they call out to you in (they say a formal "welcome, please come in") and they are all dressed EXACTLY like the manequines in the store. The photographs that I took from this department store are not very good because I was scared that I might get in trouble if I got caught. Also, the music coming from each of the stores is insanely loud and it sometimes clashes with the surrounding stores. However, it was all house or hip-hop music and Charissa and I were getting in the mood for dancing!
We also went into a department store called LOFT which had a lot of homewear and stationary! After the bakeries, the stationary stores are my next favorite kind of Japanese retail. They had so much cool stuff... all kinds of post cards with strangely translated english, design-savy schedule books, notebooks, pens, etc. etc. I think that all
Salt Trivia
Zvi and Charissa playing the salt game. of my money is going to be invested in paper products and pasteries.
After the department stores, we met up with Zvi and went to this little restaurant in the basement of a building. We had tempura and udon noodles (really thick noodles) and it was all very cheap. We put lemon juice on the tempura and it was sooooooo good (so all of you guys, when you go to Plumb Tree, try it!!). Slowly and surely everyone is teaching me little bits of Japanese. We then went into the Salt and Tobacco museum and it was such a cool exhibit and museum. We saw how salt is mined and used, we saw all kinds of tobacco paraphenalia from over the centuries, and one of the coolest things we saw were hundreds of cigarette boxes from pre- and post-war. They had really beautiful designs on the boxes. It was really interesting, all of the cigarettes manufactured right after WWII had brand names like "Peace" and "Hope." Zvi and Charissa played a computer game with trivia questions about salt. They did pretty well considering it was entirely in Japanese. When we went outside it was really windy and Zvi has a
Post-war Cigarettes
Here are some boxes of post-war cigarettes... lots of peace and hope. kind of special hair which blew all over the place.
We then met up with Brendan around the Shibuya station. We went to a Beard Pa Pa stand which sells amazing cream puffs. They are so good. We bought a box to share and went into the Miyashita Park which borders the JR line and is a small piece of greenspace amidst lots of busy streets and tall buildings. There was a very long and steep staircase at the entrance to the park and the sun was shining in such a way that it was hard to see what was at the top of the stairs. When we got to the top, there were just hundreds of tents... it was the first squatter settlement that I have seen here. It was just so amazing. Even the homeless people in Japan are extremely neat. The huts were all very neatly arranged around the periphery of the park and a lot of the settlements had little gardens. The park was one of the coolest places I have seen so far... there were lots of little playground structures that looked like they had been built in the 1970s, there was graffiti on a
Squatters
Here is a photograph that shows a little bit of the squatter settlement. lot of the benches and garbage cans, and then the squatters were everywhere. We ate our cream puffs and just hung out there for awhile on some swings. I will definitely go back and take photographs and draw. I think it would be a cool site for a studio project.
We then went into Tower Records and listened to some of the Japanese music. There is a lot of good stuff... there was some acid jazz that was pretty cool, and then there was some pretty goofy J-pop and J-indie music. Brendan is a music guru (is that the word?) and so he knew a bunch of the stuff. The rest of us just kind of tinkered around and listened to random headsets scattered among the shelves. We saw a bunch of people walking around in orange jump-suits with TVs on their heads, I think it was a kind of promotional thing because they would approach a group of kids and make them dance and scream and watch the TV. Very strange, especially since I wasn't able to understand what was being said.
We then took the train to Naka-Meguro to look for a little cafe that Charissa had read
Cream Puffs
Eating cream puffs on the swing set. about. We ended up finding this little alley with a lot of coffee shops and little bohemian restaurants. It was such a cool find... there are just so many little secret pockets in this city, it is awesome to keep uncovering them. The place was called "Combine Foods and Books" and it was a little bar that served drinks and kind of fancy food. The interior of the cafe was really urban, but comfortable. And entire wall of books, little sofas everywhere, chess tables, etc. It has the same atmosphere as Stellas (Charissa and I were talking about how much we missed it!!! I hope all you Cornellians are going there lots... Jenny I know you are!). I will definitely take whoever comes to this place. The menu was entirely in Japanese and there were no photographs, so it was kind of hard for me to figure out what to get, but Brendan (who is pretty profficient) ended up ordering for me. We all split this kind of onekiri with spam on it. It was actually really good! We just hung out and talked for awhile and it was very relaxing and comfortable. Brendan talked a bunch with the owner.
View from Park
View looking across the JR train tracks from the park. So that was my day in Shibuya.... Shibuya is actually known for its nightlife and it's insane amount of popular culture. I feel like we kind of skirted around it, but I think we may go back some night and try to blend in and maybe dress like those crazy girls.
That's all for now... I have to go study my Japanese and do my homework!
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