Tokyo Blog

If you are on facebook, allow me to direct you to the group Nobody Sleeps Like the Japanese Do. For foreigners in Tokyo, it’s common knowledge the Japanese people can and do sleep anywhere and everywhere. Here is photographic proof of just how awesome the Japanese ability to kip actually is. I was amazed when I first arrived here. I came to the conclusion that they don’t get enough sleep during the night due to work or staying up late after work, and so they supplement their sleep with power-naps throughout the day. It should be noted that in some cases, the people in these photos are just drunk.

Here you can see the jewel-encrusted items on sale at Shibuya 109, a large department store consisting of several floors of fashion and accessories aimed at ‘Shibuya boys’ and ‘Shibuya girls’. I can’t remember how much the bike cost, but it was A LOT. Ker-ching.

Here we have a shot of a sign taken in Tokyo, incouraging commuters to take part in the Japanese tradition of bumping into each other. There are many examples of the bad use of English in warning signs and public information blurbs in Japan, all of which seem hilarious to English speakers! I feel a series coming on!

Picture taken by my good friend Trent McBride. Thanks Trent!

It wasn’t so long ago now that I went against my own morals in the pursuit of expanding my horizons. I ate horse. Raw.

I feel bad about it, because I thought humans and horses had come to some sort of an arrangement, “I’ll let you ride me, and I’ll pull stuff around for you, providing you don’t eat me”. In Japan, they call a dish consisting of raw horsemeat, ‘Basashii’. Actually, I’d already eaten canned horse when I was in Kusatsu in Gunma prefecture, but eating it raw turned my stomach a bit. The flavour was OK, a little bit gamey with a taste of iron, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was I was eating. The thing that made me eat it was the prospect of being able to say I’d eaten raw horse to my friends and family back home. I don’t think it’s widely known that the Japanese eat horses. Next time someone offers it to me, I’m going to have to say “nay”.

Finally, I’ve uploaded the videos of the Asakusa Hanabi Matsuri (Fireworks Festival). I had forgotten about them and left them languishing in iPhoto. These should give folks a good idea of what it’s like at the Summer festivals in Tokyo. Really enjoyable. You can still check out the photoset at flickr too, if you haven’t already.

I’ll embed the vids here too, so it’s easier for everyone.

Asakusa Hanabi Matsuri from Stephen Smith on Vimeo.

Asakusa Hanabi Matsuri from Stephen Smith on Vimeo.

One thing I didn’t know about before coming to Japan, was just how many appliances, cars etc. are Japan only. The coolest of the bunch has to be the elongated bikes the bosouzoku wannabes and cool couples roll around on. I’ve managed to get a few pictures of bikes like these over the last few weeks.

You often see tiny girls in Shibuya tearing down side streets on bikes like this. It’s pretty amazing the way they handle them.

They’re definitely much larger than anything of this kind in the UK, and they’re often very loud, and sound maybe like some of them are extremely powerful, with a deep, slow-revving engine noise. Of course, people supe them up to no end, attching neons, mirrors and additional speakers, etc.

Actually, I really want one. I don’t have a Japanese driving license at the moment, but once I’ve been here a little longer, I’ve got to make it happen!

I mean, how cool is this red one, with someone’s tag scrawled on the front wing? Slightly reminiscent of Akira I would say. The whole fashion surrounding these bikes relates to the impression I get that somehow, Tokyo and motorbikes are inextricably linked.

This is horrible, but just check out Nigo’s pink Bugatti Veyron (Nigo is the head-honcho at Japanese clothing label, Bape). Worst custom paint job ever! (Actually, or should we say thankfully, the car has not been repainted, but just covered in a vinyl wrap - phew.)

Finally they’re up. Head over to my flickr for a look at what the annual Hanabi in Asakusa was like this year. High points for me were the beautiful Kimonos and cool traditional outfits being sported by the locals, the choatic atmosphere, and the hugely spectacular hour-and-a-half long firework display.

A Japanese guy I know has a leopard skin handbag. Except in the west we don’t call them handbags (although that’s what they are), we call them ‘manbags’. The amazing thing is, he pulls it off. The other amazing thing is that, in Tokyo, it’s common to see a guy carrying this kind of bag, usually with both straps slung around the one shoulder.

What isn’t quite so common to see on the streets of the metropolis, is a man IN a bag being carried by another man, but when I was in Kichijouji the other Friday night, I actually saw this happen.

We came around past the entrance to the station, and there was a girl crouched over a guy who seemed to be injured or maybe even dead. There were 4 policemen stood around scouring the far side of the street in anticipation of something. More people gathered and the girl seemed like she was sobbing. Then, from behind us came another policeman carrying something made of rubber or plastic. When he arrived at the scene, the policemen tried lifting the guy off the floor by his arms, but he started freaking out, and screaming at the top of his voice. We guessed he was another casualty of over-drinking. The police were all around him and a few of the people from the crowd had started to close in to get a better view. I could only see from the shoulders up on the guy on the floor, but I saw the bag go over, get pulled up and then zipped up, so that just his head protruded from the end. Everyone stepped back, and the four policemen, followed by the fifth, carried the guy (still screaming) from the front of the station, to their police car, place him on the back seat, then drive away, sirens blaring.

The Japanese: Lords of invention.

When I arrived in Tokyo, not so long ago, one of the things I noticed were whole shops dedicated to the sale of small bottles, the contents of which I wasn’t sure about. Whilst watching TV, I noticed the ads that were showing this stuff, and realised that they’re somewhere between a herbal remedy and an energy drink. The bottles they come in are often made of brown glass, which gives them the appearance of a bottle of medicine (which I’m sure is intentional). They are targeted mainly at the salaryman, banking on the fact that these guys will be burned out, stressed out and in need of something to give them a ‘boost’, or just keep them alive for one more working day. They normally contain a mix of vitamins and traditional chinese herbal supplements, but also sometimes contain such things as viper tincture or other exotic extracts believed to increase virility. You can get one variety that’s a massive hit of garlic, and another which is supposed to enable you to consume more alcohol. I can’t read everything written on the bottles, but I fully intend to buy some for experimentation. I’ve never tried having 4000 times the RDA of a vitamin before, and really want to see what happens.

This is possibly akin to the local police department’s tendency to have cute manga-styled creatures as their mascots, but I absolutely love any country where this is possible. In a nutshell, a cat named Tama that hung around the station a lot was appointed stationmaster of Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture. After a period of loyal service the railway rewarded the cat with a new office, complete with a ventilation fan and a toilet, and promoted the cat to division chief-level. In a statement, the railway said it recognised the efforts (their words) of the 8-year-old feline and promptly moved the cat up the ranks.

I’m starting to believe that I too can get a job over here now. After all, mine and Tama’s Japanese comprehension are probably on a similar level.

Via Metropolis Mag

I didn’t realise! Tokyo has it’s own statue of liberty! It doesn’t seem to be part of any ‘world in miniature’ kind of installation, which makes it’s existence on a raised platform in Odaiba especially weird. Talking about Odaiba, did you know the manmade island of Odaiba is built on a mountain of Tokyo household rubbish?

Before I entered the corrugated iron construction in the sinister bric-a-brac section of an old shopping mall in Odaiba, I didn’t know about the legend of Kuchisake Onna (Slit-Mouth Woman). The legend is of a woman a long time ago, who was the wife or lover of a Samurai. She was very beautiful, but also very vain. Her Samurai husband suspected her of cheating, so slit the corners of her mouth from ear to ear, screaming “Who will think you are beautiful now?!”

Urban legend has it that a woman roams around at night, especially on foggy evenings (Odaiba was fogged-out today), with her face covered by a surgical mask, her weapon of choice: a pair of blunt scissors. If she comes across somebody, she will ask them “Am I beautiful?”, before stabbing them to death.

So the man handed me a torch with a red gel over the lens and an amber coloured children’s lollipop, and I opened the sliding door into a pitch black corridor. Mutilated bodies and human hair hung from ropes and children’s toys could be found slumped in the corners of the passageways through which I was cautiously moving. I had already been warned “If you see the woman with the scissors - run”, and yet the sign on the outside had clearly said “Don’t run”! I had also been told to place the candy on a table where a pair of scissors could be found.

So I was trying to stay smug as I walked further into the maze of the building, having previously seen schoolgirls coming out of the exit of the structure screaming in terror, some crawling, some crying. I turned a corner and pointed my torch. There were sheets of black rubber hanging from the ceiling, partially blocking the way ahead. I could see there were more further down, staggered so that the gap between the wall and the sheet was on a different side of the corridor each time, creating large blind spots my feeble torchlight couldn’t penetrate. I prepared myself for something and nonchalantly swept aside the first sheet so I could pass, but recoiled involuntarily. I can’t properly remember what I saw but I think it was a large doll’s head, detached from the body, dirtied and with a missing eye, at my eye level. I was back a little from the sheet which was rippling from my initial attempt to pass, and had not controlled the aim of my torch, so bought it back down to point towards the corridor, and the sheet.

I was laughing to myself. I was trying my hardest not to get shaken at any point, reminding myself that it was like a fairground attraction. So I moved the black sheet again, but there was nothing this time, so I knew that there was at least one person who was inside with me, waiting for me up ahead. I pressed on through the ‘house’, sometimes entering small rooms, often getting hit in the face by objects that had been strung up but got missed by the torchlight as they were too high. Many more tricks were carried out, and noises were activated, whereby turning in the direction of the source would result in pointing your torch into the bloodstained faces of past ‘victims’, scissors protruding from eye sockets. I was looking for a table. A surface where there was a pair of scissors maybe. So I’d slowed down even more when the corridor opened out again. I’d seen what I thought to be a table, the only one so far that looked like it might be the right place to put the lollipop. I headed over and was almost at the table when I heard a movement to my right. I already knew what to expect, but still managed to forget to properly inspect the table before I turned my torch in the direction of the noise. I didn’t hit anything with the beam of my torch and was about to pan when a girl, tall by Japanese standards, wearing a surgical mask and brandishing a long pair of scissors lurched into the red light of the torch. I knew I was supposed to run, so I did! I slammed the lolly down on the table and pegged it!

I went around some piled up wood and course canvas material and tried to look where I was going assisted by the torch. For the first time there was another light source apart from mine in this room, on a table. Next to the naked bulb there was a pair of scissors plunged into the felting on top of the table with congealed blood heaped around the base. I stopped and thought about my lollipop, misplaced further back. I didn’t know what you got if you put it in the right place, and was feeling slightly embarrassed that I’d put it down on the wrong table, so I turned back to see if there was a way for me to go back without bumping into Kuchisake Onna again. I hadn’t even taken more than two steps when I found myself running towards a light at the end of a corridor pursued by two guys in leather masks and Kuchisake Onna dragging one foot behind her and pointing forward with the shears. One final eardrum-bursting hiss of air hit me in the face as I came out of the doorway and back into a shopping centre in Odaiba. I stopped as soon as I got outside and tried to appear more composed. And then thought that if I hadn’t watched Japanese horror films like ‘The Grudge’ and ‘ The Ring’ before, I might have got the lolly correctly placed and won a prize.

As I was leaving a guy handed me a flyer for the new movie coming out soon: Kuchisake Onna 2. Cool marketting ploy, I thought.

I’ve probably only ridden my bike about a dozen times, but I’ve been stopped by the police twice already in the space of about 2 weeks! They pull you over and talk politely before radioing in your bicycle’s registration number (most bikes have registration marks over here, just like cars do). Both times I was stopped by a policeman on foot, they carry their radio equipment around their necks. To begin with I thought this was due to a prejudice towards foreigners, stemming from an alledged culture of belief in Japan that they are responsible for much of the crime in the country, but having thought about it, the first time I was stopped I don’t think the policeman had had a very good look at me, because he addressed me very much like a native with a torrent of polite but colloquial Japanese. I suppose with my dark hair which has grown pretty long now, I can kind of blend in. From a distance. At night. If I’m kneeling down.

I was riding my bike to Asakusa the other day, when I passed the Japanese super-hero Ultraman and a large-scale Knocking Frog by Bandai on the side of the street. Needless to say, I pulled over and took a picture. I still don’t know what they were doing there.