Japan: Day Two

Okay so today we toured around Tokyo pretty hard. In brief chronological order:

-Had breakfast in a little cafe thing. They had pancakes and such, but we went for like a sandwich type combo thing with the sort of salad I've gotten at sushi restaurants and coffee/tea. The sandwich was pretty tasty, the bread had a nice crispiness to it that I haven't really seen anywhere else.

-Went to Majinju Park, possible (sic) there. Absolutely beautiful. Had a "solid canopy" over top of the path, if you know what I mean. There's like a traditional Shinto temple there, which was cool to see. They have various fortune rituals etc, e.g. tossing a coin in and clapping and bowing, little good luck things like that. Seemed a bit surreal to see the wideness of the spectrum of people doing it, and seemingly taking it pretty seriously, but I figured there's probably a similar range of demographics doing like, tossing coins in the fountain routines and what have you, it's just that you don't notice it so much, it's more of a discreet action. Anyways yeah there's like, businessmen, high school-aged kids, young families, everybody does this. Very cool. There was a wedding going on in another area of the park, just to give you a sense of how beautiful it was. What was really crazy is that the only equivalent places I can think of in North America, like, Royal Botanical Gardens and such I guess, are always pretty well removed from major urban areas. I figured this was so there wasn't the distraction of buildings, traffic, the sort of urban drone, but here, there's still none of that, like, absolutely no indication that you're in one of the largest metropolitan areas on earth, and yet within a five minute walk you're right back in the thick of the city. The mind just reels. Also really crazy are their crows and/or ravens. They're absolutely gigantic and they seem to have driven all the smaller songbirds and such away. Plus, when they squawk, and they squawk pretty much constantly, it seems a good octave or so lower than ours. It's down in what I'd consider a normal human speaking range. It sounded like a drunk doing an imitation of a crow.

-Went to Shibuya, "overwhelming". The sheer volume of people going around makes your head spin. Didn't go into many/any stores here, they're mostly like big chains and such, nothing too too interesting. Mainly you go here just to stare up at the skyscrapers and look at the sea of people around them and just stagger around, I think. And it was excellent. Even the subway going in was crazy crowded, just as it should be.

-Then to Harajuku. My cousins are somewhat "fashion minded", not even just relative to me but in general, so we checked out a few clothing stores. Usually this sort of stuff just intimidates me to the point of total rejection, why this is I have some theories about but that's another story. Anyways I liked looking at the stuff here. Everything in Japanese fashion seems to have both an extra level of novelty and abstraction just due to the whole western culture mashup and yet seems to have much more basic levels of impression and such, like, I sense no "irony" in Japanese fashion, everything seems to be about the actual novelty of the thing, not the perceived double ironic retro throwback novelty? I could be wrong. Also all the clothes stores played really swag music. New Beastie Boys album in one store, Uffie in another, heard Soulja Boy's contemporary masterpiece "Speakers Going Hammer" blaring out of one place on the street, oh geez yeah prolly tons more. A couple random electronica stuff I think I recognized from Warp albums I think. Swag.

-My one cousin knew somehow about a Harvey Darger exhibit in a big vertical mall/museum place. This surprised me because I didn't know that Darger exhibits actually existed in the first place, let alone one in Japan. I guess though this whole idea of hermit-style art production is actually sort of a Japanese sort of thing, if I think of some Japanoise artists and a lot of like, anyone involved in anything Touhou, so I guess it fits. His painting style also reminds me of Japanese watercolours in a vague way, even though what's really more likely is that he was inspired by the same western children's books that Japanese artists were. So yeah they had a lot of his paintings up, what with their mysterious little captions explaining what part in the book they were illustrating. Amazing stuff. I dunno I had known about Darger before but I didn't really realize there's still a lot of active discussion and interpretation of just what the heck is going on with the poor man's mind. I think he just had an overactive imagination that he decided to pour directly onto the page at the exclusion of all other activities. Anyways yeah really mindblowing, disturbing stuff. Makes Yume Nikki look like a kid's school project. Tempted to buy a little guidebook etc they had but now that I know there's actually some stuff like this I'll probably just look for something in English.

-After this we went for food at a sushi restaurant with the conveyor belt. I had the best fish I have ever tasted. Yes I can't rule out bias for a sense that could be biased so easily and yes if I would ever be biased towards saying something was the best I've had it would be at a time like now. But geez I don't know it just seemed so fresh, like, the texture was just different than anything else I'd had before, the tuna was so "tangible" and the salmon was so "fatty" and soft and sweet, the eel's sauce was so much more flavorful than I'd had before, uh, what else, oh man had takoyaki for the first time, that was amazing. And a parfait for dessert!

-And then we decided to go to AKIHABARA. Akiba is like, it. The best way I could describe it is that it's where I hang out on the internet, but in real life. Crowds swarming everywhere. Girls in maid outfits leaning out of windows and advertising their cafes by shouting, I kid you not, "moe moe kyun", they actually said it. Huge billboard ads for Madoka, Steins;Gate, K-On still, Dog Days - Gamers had a whole floor devoted to Dog Days, which made me wish I had seen Dog Days and liked it instead of assumed that I wouldn't like it and not watched it - Ore no Imouto, Index... The OPs for Madoka and Nichijou were always in earshot. A-Channel was just starting to explode onto the scene, which was cool. There's a lot of video game stores, too, saw a sealed copy of Mother 3, lots of Cave shooters, oh man and the arcades yeah, amazing rhythm game selections: Jubeat, Taiko, Bemani, Guitar Freaks, Pop'n... not a whole lot of fighting games, I think they have their own areas based on franchises because we found the Virtua Fighter one but uh yeah not a huge fan of VF. My cousin told me that an area of Osaka is pretty much equivalent to this so I was more than satisfied by just breezing through quick and getting a sense of it. I'm gearing up for a good time exploring DenDen Town in Osaka in the next few weeks, though. Swaaaaaaaaaaaaag.

-Went to Koenji after that. Kind of a bohemian sort of place. Checked out a few record stores. The thing that is really impressing me is how my two interests seem to be nicely like, sub-niche and super-niche. That is, in North America, buying anime crap is hard and expensive because it's an established niche, but a captive market. In Japan, buying anime crap is easy and relatively cheap, the selection is good, etc, because it's a much larger market. Music is the other way: in North America, there's a fairly established "community" of people who buy records and such, and since it's sorta a hip thing to do or whatever, it's quite expensive. Here, it's like, so few people buy these, that everything is sort of reasonably priced. Sure, it's priced for collectors, but there's no like, "base hipster price"?? I dunno. All I know is I got two Number Girl CDs, my favorite two t'boot, for like $20. The Western selection was about as good as I'd ever seen in North America too, but I couldn't really justify buying music I could buy at home. Ditto the books, which again, they had a nice reasonably priced selection of old western lit. Oh man and manga, where to start, oh man my importing days are over or at least delayed. Not even minding the huge floors full of stuff in Akiba, random book stores  near the train station would have like, Punpun. Like, volume 4 of Punpun that I had never been able to get even online. Or stuff like the Madoka manga which has been sold out of every import online store I've seen. Swag to the quadrillion. Also saw a endearingly corny but pretty well put together street show. Busking is completely different in general. So is homelessness. In general it's like, everything that happens here happens there but in a more optimized, professional and less desperate? I dunno I'll expand on this later.

Anyways going to eat food, that's basically what we did today.