Harajuku: Home of Snoopy Town!
Trip Start
Jun 09, 2009
1
5
17
Trip End
Jul 05, 2009
Where I stayed
Shibuya, Kanto, Japan
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
So, later in the day we headed to Harajuku. This area is pretty close to Shibuya (see last entry) and also has a similar culture regarding youth, and fashion and such. I'm really getting the hang of riding the train/subway systems here which helps me be a little less afraid of losing Kat in the city and not knowing how to get back. I'm also getting a lot better regarding the layouts of the city, I instinctively think of cities as largely unsafe, so It's taken some getting used to regarding exploring a back alley that looks interesting and realizing that I'm completely safe in doing so. I'm becoming a lot better at orienting myself, which really helps in our ability to find ourselves around the city and not waste a lot of time.
The big thing I wanted to do while in Harajuku was visit the store called "Kiddy Land" which is a huge expansive toy store, at least five floors high each one with a distinctive theme. I would say we spent over an hour in the toy store, and I think we really got a huge kick out of the whole experience. I found all the little gadgets and sometimes bizarre toys to be extremely amusing, while Kat really enjoyed all the "cute" different toys, comprising mostly of tiny versions of food products. We both thoroughly enjoyed one floor in paticular, which was devoted entirely to Snoopy from "Peanuts". The floor was accompanied by very charlie brown sounding piano "music" and nearly every single thing you could think of regarding the Snoopy character, one plushy had all the different versions of Snoopy there have been in the years since his inception. Half of a floor was souly devoted to "Hello Kitty" items, and the top floor was in honor of all things anime. I got a kick out of the whacky anime videos playing, and very creepy plushy dolls. One thing I found especially bizarre, is that the doll created for the movie "Chucky" which was basically a ripoff of "My Buddy" was being sold as if it were a real doll. With the "nice guys" label attatched to it and everything, nothing signifying it was a joke, or that it was affiliated to Chucky. The lines seemed inherently creepy though with english words saying "he wants to play with you". It made me laugh. Stitch from the disney film "Lilo and Stitch" is extremely popular here among kids, and there was a large display in honor of him. One little girl ran over to a large stuffed Stitch doll and yelled "Stitch-cha" which I thought was cute. Japan has a special affinity for all things robotic, and the toy store was no exception with a good amount of the toys being animatronic. Kat played a game of rock paper scissors with a gum machine, lost, and then preceded to get free gum anyway. Which we later found out was NOT gum, bus some bizarre gum textured candy with little bubble things in them... but ate anyway while walking down the street later. There was some fun little animals that acted like there real life counterparts including a monkey climbing the air, which triggered Kat to want to attatch to one of the other animals in hopes of some preverse beastial peep show. But trying to be a good representative of the US she refrained. There were lots of different fun products, hopefully some of the vids and pics give credit to how expansive the store was. We hope to return on a later date.
With our trip to the toy store over we set off to try and find an alley of shops that Kat knew about (called Takeshita Street) but was on no paticular map or in our guide book, resulting in blindly wandering around the district in hopes of finding said street. In our travels we found a house of a paticular artistic nature that seemed to have lots of different work in paintings on the walls, and a corner shop near it that Kat enjoyed. The love affair with Obama continued, as there was some bizarre candles in that shop shaped as his head. We couldn't figure out why anybody would want a candle of the American president, but were amused none the less.
After taking a great trip a mile or two away from the station, Kat got a little depressed in our inablity to find the street, and we started heading back. After heading back, the street could be seen within eyesight of the station, but not a lot of time had been wasted and we still had the opportunity to travel the streets.
One thing that's fun about Japan is that the small business owner is anything but dead. There is lots and lots of small businesses, each one attempting to keep up with the latest fashion trends of the youth of Tokyo. The little stores are such that you have to be careful not to run into the cashier while walking around it. We went into a store that was wholly "Hippy" themed, which had a lot of Hindu related items, fun different instruments and just lots of 60's type stuff. Our fascination with shirts with poor english continued, and Kat bought a shirt with an indifferent looking panda with the words "It's not Satisfactory, Laughing got tired" and the back reading "My smile will become mysterious: Chuckle"
In Japan stores often yell "Irrashaimase" which basically means "come in" or "welcome" but, for whatever reason they hang onto their syllables for what feels like an eternity. Resulting in hundreds of girls standing in front of stores yelling "irraaashaiiimaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." They seem to also unintentionally sound off of one another, when one hears the phrase they say it too, creating a constant ripple effect of that phrase being elongated to the point of comical.
Kat and I ate "Lotteria" which is a Korean McDonalds of sorts, and while we were inside we heard Maseeeee phrase being repeated over, and over, AND OVER again. I wanted to get a video of these girls repeating this phrase, and was certain this could be accomplished upon exiting the restaurant. But, they seemed to know I wanted to do it, and the second we left the store they stopped entirely. I was not pleased with their uncanny ability to know when I wish to film them do their everyday jobs. It was raining while we were out and It becomes difficult to walk around because everybody (including us) has an umbrella, resulting in me holding my umbrella extremely high in the air to avoid bumping into anybody else.
We eventually got tired and head back to the hotel. It was a good thing to, because as soon as we entered the room we heard the first clap of lightning. The storm went on most of the night, and we tried a time lapse vid in my poor attempt at capturing lightning, but still resulting in a cool looking video. The storm was apparentely news worthy the next morning and resulted in some flooding.
Sorry this Entry was late, but we got up and left early the next day which made it impossible to do the nessecary writing and uploading in time.
