Click here to see all of the photos I took on this day.
On this morning we intended to get up very early and visit a flea market in Yoyogi Park, then listen to musicians play on the street. However, due to a slightly late start and accidentally taking the subway instead of the JR line (which would have gotten us there about a half an hour earlier), we didn’t arrive until nearly 10 AM. I was a bit frustrated about wasting the time, but we arrived at Meiji Jingumae station and walked out to see what we’d find.
Some street vendors and musicians were beginning to set up their equipment. There was a rabbit foraging. It looked like a few people were beginning to set up some flea market wares. There was no crowd at all. We walked through a rose garden and saw a bandana-wearing worker carefully pruning the bushes. We guessed that we hadn’t missed anything after all and decided to visit Meiji Jingu (right next to Yoyogi Park) and then check back later.
Meiji Jingu is one of the major shrines of the Shinto religion. Its enormous wooden tori gates are quite famous, and I was looking forward to walking through them. To my disappointment, the front tori was completely covered in scaffolding and drop cloths, being restored, and an alternate route had to be taken to enter the shrine grounds. Thankfully, however, the second tori gate -- which is identical to the first -- was not being worked on at all. So you could still visit the shrine on that day, but only got half-way purified on your way there.
The shrine itself is not gaudily embellished in any way, and is designed to blend into the surrounding forest as seamlessly as possible. As we approached, we heard the pounding of a lot of hammers on wood, and saw a sign apologizing that they were building a stage and seats for a Noh play that evening, and that all seats were already taken. To the side we had the privilege of seeing a Shinto wedding taking place, and also several children dressed in kimonos. Inside, a businessman was chanting a prayer with his hands clasped, his forefingers outstretched.
Leaving through the Western gate, we decided to sit a minute on the temple steps (the walk up to the shrine was a long one through beautiful forest in the heart of Tokyo, but there were no benches), and were informed by a patrolling security guard that we had to stand.
Walking back to the entrance via a different route, we decided to check on Yoyogi park again. Now more musicians were setting up and testing their equipment, and some people had set up tarps on the ground and were carefully setting out their wares (electronic equipment, video games, trinkets, shoes, etc.). The street vendors were cleaning their grills and prepping their ingredients.
Across the street (next to the 1964 Olympic gymnasium) a larger pavilion had been set up. We never did quite figure out what it was about, but it seemed to be some sort of travel fair. At any rate, there were lots of great booths full of food and desserts, but it was still to early for that. We decided to go visit Harajuku and come back again closer to lunch. Walking back down the sidewalk we stopped to listen to several bands practicing and took a free CD from one of them. Also, a homeless-looking flea market worker ran up to me laughing, pointed to my Nikon D90, then pointed back to an ancient digital camera he had for sale, indicating that I really needed to upgrade to his model.
I saw a street vendor selling a type of Japanese omelette called okonomiyaki, which consists of eggs and cabbage, plus other things of your choosing. I had him put some pickled…well, pickled something that was purplish-red…on it (EDIT: I've since learned it was pickled ginger), a fried egg, some bacon, bonito (dried fish flakes), and sauce. I tried to decline another topping, and he sort of laughed…it was the rubber band he was going to close the plastic container with.
The omelette was good, and the strange pickles worked surprisingly well with all the other ingredients. However, the thing was huge and I wasn’t able to eat even half of it. Besides, I wanted to buy some takoyaki later.
Harajuku is the center of the teen fashion world in Japan. Erin had been wanting to visit the shops there to see for herself. A Japanese looking guy who spoke perfect English and said he was from Canada approached us and asked for a donation to a supposed charity that helped orphans. It was probably a cult or a scam, but I gave him a 500 Yen coin anyway and he left.
We visited several shops, including a used clothing store called Kinji. Most of the clothes in there were the sort of stuff Americans had given to Goodwill years ago. It was fun to look at, but nothing we were going to buy, so we left and visited other stores, including one that specialized in American comics and toys.
Being Sunday morning, Harajuku was incredibly crowded. Everywhere you looked you saw nothing but a sea of people moving. We visited a toy store and bought a lot of gifts, then headed back up to Yoyogi to see if things had gotten started. They had. We heard loud 1950s style music playing, then saw several middle-aged Japanese men in leather clothes and huge pompadours dancing near a group of sock-hoppers. They all appeared to have been doing this same thing every Sunday since the 1980s when this sort of thing was popular in Japan, and have just become a fixture here.
Erin bought some steak on a stick, which the vendor very simply salted and grilled. She said it was great. We then listened to the bands play. One, called Prime Addict, seemed to have a pretty large following of teenage girls who knew all their lyrics and had specific dances they were doing for different parts of their songs. Moving on down the path, the bands began to blend together, although they were generally being courteous enough to wait until each other had finished playing a set before starting theirs. We heard several bands we liked, and I bought albums from two of them and Erin bought one from a swing band we heard.
When we had heard the bands on the outer sidewalk, we decided to walk through the park and see what was happening there. You know how sometimes in movies and television shows they’ll show a scene of a place, and everyone is doing something different all at once and you think, “That doesn’t happen in the real world?” That was happening in the real world here. The park was packed with people all doing their own things. Bicyclists and skateboarders doing stunts, pre-teen girls dancing in unison, a man juggling bottles, a dog riding a skateboard, girls and families playing badminton, etc. I can’t say whether this happens every Sunday or not, as this was a three day weekend (Monday was National Health and Sports Day).
The strangest thing we saw -- and I was prepared for this -- were teenagers dressed in outlandish but perfectly applied makeup, high, brightly colored hair like an anime character, and clothing straight out of manga comics. These people were just standing around in groups and posing for strangers’ photographs. To me it all just seemed so incredibly and unashamedly needy. I know I’m not qualified to really make this determination, but I suppose that a culture that values such a high level of conformity in daily life is likely to produce a microcosm of people starved for this kind of attention.
We headed over to the strange travel (or whatever) bazaar and get some more food. Erin got a cup of “purin”, which was a sort of pudding that tasted like a mix between custard and soft serve vanilla ice cream. I bought some takoyaki -- the little fried balls of octopus mixed with batter that I had at the zoo -- but this was the real stuff. No sooner had I nodded at the man running the booth than he flipped four takoyaki out of the cooker and into the box, dumped mayonaise, bonito, and some sort of green herb all over them, wrapped it in a rubber band with a pair of chopsticks and handed it to me. They -- like most things that you buy like this -- cost 500 Yen. They were quite good.
Something else I’d like to mention here: There were dogs everywhere! Tiny dogs, great danes, people walking three identical dogs at once or carrying them in baskets on the front of their bikes. Even on every other day of this trip we saw lots of dogs, but on this day it was overwhelming.
We headed back to the hotel and rested a bit before going out to explore a bit more around our neighborhood. We saw pachinko parlors, arcades and restaurants everywhere. We shopped in a huge store called “Yodobashi Camera”, which is actually a group of multi-storied shops spread around a four block radius. We bought some used videogames there and a bunch of gashapons, then found another used videogame store where I found several old games I have wanted for years. Erin bought a Japanese DVD that looked too weird to pass up, then we went back to the hotel and went to sleep, because the next day we had to get up early for our trip to Mt. Fuji.
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