Day 24 in Japan: Wandering in Tokyo



On 7 September, the second Sunday we'd spent in Tokyo, we decided we'd have another go at visiting the cosplay gang at Harajuku. Once again we went to where the guidebooks seemed to be telling us to go, and once again there were no goths or other costumed young folk on display. We did, however, have a good time getting there and afterwards, following a carefully planned itinerary most of the time and once or twice stumbling on unexpected delights.


We stopped at the Watari-um to browse some cosmopolitan modern art: Andy Warhol, the guy who does the cartoon dogs (the US guy, not Mambo), a Chinese man who seems to have spent hours on the museum's roof with bright orange ropes stretching from him to the building opposite, a postmodernist video of a man destructively dragging a violin through the streets of (was it?) New York, a couple of banana chairs in which we were invited to sit (so, as the illegal photo below demonstrates, I once again became part of an art exhibit), and quite a number of charming paintings by Niki de St Phalle (most famous -- to me -- for her bright, big-boobed fountain outside the Pompidou Centre). I think my favourite piece was 'Emergency Ladder' by Huang Yong Ping, a very tall ladder leaning against a wall, its rungs made of frighteningly sharp, rust-streaked metal blades.





In Harajuku, by carefully counting off the streets and comparing them to unlabelled lines on a map we'd torn from a tourist pamphlet, we found the flamboyant Design Festa Gallery. Parts of it were closed, but what we saw was marvellous. Among other things, it has a number of small exhibition rooms which can be hired by the day. In one or two of these rooms the walls are divided into sections -- perhaps half a square metre each -- and a young artist can hire one of these sections for roughly 500 yen a day, to have a mini-exhibition at very little cost. We did walk through one or two tiny rooms and only later realise that the shy person sitting in the corner who thanked us on our way out was actually the artist. The spaces between exhibition rooms were painted in dazzling black and white doodles, which made going to the toilet an oddly disorientating experience('Is it really OK to p*ss here, in what feels like a painting?'). Out the back there was a pleasantly casual restaurant. After a few moments of our usual struggle with the menu, helped in this case by the excellent English of the waiters, we opted for what two young women on a nearby table were having -- which turned out to be all-you-can-eat okonomakiya, which in turn turned out to be pancakes which we cooked ourselves (with help). One each was more than enough for us, but we noticed the increasing number of young people at the other tables coming back for more, and then more again. Penny predicts that Japan will be having an obesity epidemic to match Australia's before much longer.




Next on our agenda was the failed attempt to see the cos-players. Our disappointment didn't last long, though, because down a nearby street was an extraordinary spectacle. First there were several groups of elaborately coiffed and costumed rockers dancing energetically to boomboxes and generally making themselves available to the cameras:





And then a long stretch of footpath with a band -- rock, jazz, folk, tin drum -- every ten yards. They weren't busking. I didn't see a single open guitar case or hat placed strategically on the ground to accept coins. On the contrary, several of the performers were giving away CDs. And the standard of performance was very high. As in the Design Festa Gallery, these young people were taking their art out of their garages (or the Tokyo equivalents) for the sheer joy of having an audience.





And in the middle of all the noise, in her own cocoon of stillness, this woman was putting fine hatchings on paper:



We walked down the hill to Shibuya and tried once again to find the foreign-language cinema. It was now three weeks since we'd seen a movie, and withdrawal pangs were making themselves felt. But, though we were sure we stared at the exact spot where the map said we'd find it, the cinema -- if it was there -- remained invisible to us. Actually, it was probably showing What Happens in Vegas or Sex and the City, which we weren't desperate enough for, or The Dark Knight, which I'd seen, so we may have been spared the need to make a decision.

Posted: Wed - October 8, 2008 at 11:03 PM           |

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