Tokyo heart

Ten days in Tokyo; ten days to go back to my favorite haunts, to drink in Nichome and eat in Shin-Okubo; to uncover hidden little corners I regretted missing the first time; to party at Disneysea and take cruises and ride ferris wheels; and to do all of this with my man ….

Daisuke is leaving too, for Switzerland. Tokyo has always been our city – the city where we met and got to know each other- but soon neither of us will be left there.

So I came to say hello to Daisuke, and so we could say goodbye to Tokyo together.

Love u babe

Mmmm…

Niijima: Cancelled

One of the few disappointments of the trip was our abandoned trip to Niijima, a subtropical island lying off the coast of Tokyo far into the Pacific. You leave by boat from Ginza, sailing out of Tokyo’s bright-lit harbor as the sun goes down and wake up at the tiny, mountainous island, lined with sandy beaches and cliffs and washed with (apparently)  aquamarine seas. One one cliff is a fake-Grecian hot spring where you can bathe overlooking the sea – calm on one side of the island, and with thundering surf on the other, attracting Japanese surfer boys and ravers during the Summer months when the island hosts surf competitions and an outdoor dance music festival.

Sadly though, given the weather – it was overcast and grey every day I was there due to a late and extended rainy season – we decided against the trip. Luckily, as it turns out,  because on the day we would’ve arrived it rained nonstop. Next time!

Nakano – Tokyo’s Most Underrated

Nakano is perhaps Tokyo’s most underrated tourist hangout. Sure, everybody goes to Shinjuku and Shibuya yet Nakano is only 5 minutes away on the Chuo line, with a funky vibe. It is  slightly under-the-radar and residential with a charming mix of people – a big gay contingent, students and young hipsters living in tiny onebedroom apartments who want to be near where the action is, plus quite a lot of elderly. As a result it is cute and very traditional in places, and grungily hip in others. A great place to walk around in.

I’ve blogged before about the attractions of Nakano before ; here about an interesting local park and here about a beetle shop, but of course the great, unmissable attraction is the SunMall and Broadway arcade. The long arcade starts opposite the station’s North exit and bustles with funky little local shops selling socks, or rice crackers, or really cheap clothes, before ending in the SunMall. This  weird, dan, four-storey complex is stuffed to the brim with shops selling cosplay outfits and rubber monsters,  hugely expensive dolls with shaved heads (creepy!!!) and used comic books and games machines and guns and alien replicas.  On the top floor are a shop selling great souvenir Tshirts, an avant-garde bookshop and a fossils store. Two of my favorite places – the shop that only sold things people left on the subway, and the gay comic book shop – seem to have closed down, but who knows what could have replaced them? I think this is truly one of the few places that every visitor to Tokyo should experience. And in the streets around the Sunmall I also discovered a pyramid:

This herbalist shop patronised by Taiwanese-Japanese movie star Takeshi Kaneshiro (there are pictures of him everywhere in it) which seems to use ingredients from endangered animals like the pangolin:

A street of bars like these ones:

The world’s smallest rock climbing salon;

And finally Tokyo’s (and perhaps the world’s) only Ainu restaurant, serving food from Japanese indigenous Ainu people. Dasiuke and I met uop with friends Tomomi and Asako to try it out.  The food was so-so to be honest; I had  what was described as venison on the menu but turned out to be a few small pieces of meat ina  mound of moyashi, and the cramped dining room wasn’t hugely comfortable.  But the gregarious Ainu owner  performed traditional Ainu music and dancing for us  (and in fact, he made us do an Ainu ” thank you dance” before we could leave the establishment) which made it a fun night.

Tokyo New School : Future starts now

Tokyo has long been synonymous with the future in the global imagination; the manga metropolis, a pulsating megacity of droids and high tech and flying cars. city of high-tech. And now, this city brought up on Akira and Sailor Moon dreams is embracing its comic-book image with a new infatuation with robots and futuristic oddities. Take this just-unveiled 20 metre statue of Gundam – the robot comic character – which has been built in Odaiba for one month only (I was so lucky to see it!) to celebrate the character’s 25th birthday. The robot moves it head and arms.

And check this out: an amazing, gargantuan robot spider currently on display at the Y150 Exposition to celebrate Yokohama’s century and a half of foreign trade. The spider – by French engineering/art collective “La Machine” – ushered in the event by marching through the city streets, shooting water out of its creepy head at passers-by. It is now on display until September as the clear centrepiece of the (otherwise lacklustre) Y150 event.

I also like this; the “Natural Ellipse House”, an egg-shaped and apparently windowless dwelling on a small lot on Shibuya’s Love Hotel hill. I had found it in an architectural textbook in Australia and went with Daisuke to try and find it. We finally stumbled on it just down the street from “Womb” nightclub – and found out that its for rent! How great would it be to live in this?

Street scenes

Old school

For all its neon skyscrapers and giant robots, much of Tokyo’s charm comes from the ramshackle old neighborhoods. These are some of my favorite Tokyo scenes, the little winding streets of shophouses with paper lanterns and noren curtains, and pot plants galore.

The shitamachi or “lower town”  neighborhood of Iriya is typical of this  side of the city, with its local family businesses and little shrines and even canals.

Daisuke and I went to visit a local shrine, the temple of the King of Hell, where a 3 metre statue of the deity is placated by throwing coins into buckets, each one labelled with something the worshipper wishes for  eg luck in love, passing exams, good health etc.

Another unusual nearby temple is the Kappa-dera, or “kappa temple” (kappas are a kind of aquatic goblin in Japanese folklore). The temple was built in a riverside neighborhood formerly plagued by the creatures and is said to contain a dried and withered kappa’s arm – sadly not on display when we visited. But we did see the altar to the creatures stocked with their favorite treat, cucumbers, as well as statues of the beasts all around the neighborhood.

The thing that Iriya is most famous for, however, is its annual Morning Glory Market, held over three days in July when hundreds of thousands of morning glory plants are sold to visitors to celebrate the beginning of Summer. I was a little disappointed by the market itself – the shrubs weren’t yet in bloom so it wasn’t as colorful as I had expected, but the hokey Summer festival atmosphere more than made up for it, with old-time snacks and kiddie attractions like the goldfish scoop, or beetles in a cage.

(Caramelised fish spines, mmmmmm)

The surrounding neighborhood streets were coloufrully decorated with paper lanterns and streamers for Tanabata, sometimes called “the Star Festival” which is celebrated on July 7th to remember an ancient Chinese story about two lovers in the sky, who are separated by the Milky Way. Every year they can meet on July 7th as long as the sky is clear. Peopl pray for fine weather for the lovers and tie their own wishes on colorful slips of paper to bamboo trees.

Dystopia/Utopia

Odaiba is a hard neighborhood to love. Built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay just as the Japanese economic bubble burst in the early 90s, it is an impressive development in its scale, but oppressive in its sterility. Arrow-straight roads with neat, trimmed hedges sit silent and unused. Huge, boldly designed, almost-intentionally ugly office blocks are interspersed with weed-covered waste ground. A brightly lit monorail loops the island and a huge, glowing ferris wheel towers over it yet the streets are always empty. Its a weird place. And yet there are some fun things here – the Nagisa outdoor rave parties, the little urban beach (for strolling, not swimming) , Venus Fort ( a huge corrugated iron shack on the outside that houses a faux-medieval Italian village shopping mall on the inside), the impressive Miraikan Museum of emerging Sciences, the new Gundam robot (above)  and little did I know ….the city’s most stunning swimming pool.

Daisuke had booked us into the Odaiba Hotel Nikko for our first night, in a room with a beautiful harbourside view from the balcony . But its when we decided on a whim to go for a swim that it really took our breath away. It cost 3,000 yen – but it was well worth it. The pool is located on a rooftop terrace, in a glass walled room.

On one side, a brightly-lit monorail whizzed by , through the billion dollar futurescape of Odaiba’s skyscrapers.  On the other side sat the illuiminated spire of Tokyo tower across the Bay, perfectely centred in the middle of the illuminated rainbow bridge. We did laps between them for a while, before heading outside to soak in a warm jacuzzi, feeling the gently summer breeze, and gazing down at this:

The harbour below us, complete with one-third size Statue of Liberty replica and the blinking neon of the Chinese restaurant barges.

It blew my mind. Who knew Tokyo could be like this?

Tokyo Nights

I had some fun nights in Tokyo; my second night Daisuke had booked an Arabian theme restaurant for dinner with friends, but when we turned up the restaurant had “disappeared” and there was a Kyoto-themed Japanese izaakaya in its place!

So we just ate there instead.

In fact we didn’t have much luck with restaurants in general. I had wanted to take Daisuke out to “Le Cocon”, a French restaurant in an angular cave in Shibuya (below) but it too had closed…sigh…

But we did have two great nights. One of them was spent on the Tokyo Bay Summer cruise, watching the city’s surprisingly pretty harbor lit up with its ferris wheels and bridges and floating neon Chinese restaurants and giant robots, and the “yukata girls” dancing hip hop moves on a kitschy stage, between Summer kimono fashion shows to a wildly inebriated and up-for-it crowd.

The other night was spent, of course, in the gayberhood of Nichome,  drifting from bars where white dudes in underwear brought you drinks, to the crowded streets where Brazilian boys stood laughing and flirting on streetcorners, and crowds drifted around from Advocates to Dragon to the parties going on around the district. We had elected to go to “Arch”, a smoky, poky club holding a “Masquerade party” where the DJ for the night was – amazingly – former Japanese pop queen Suzuki Ami, once a  million-selling J-pop superstar and now apparently a techno DJ (!!!) in small gay clubs.

Ami had come out at about the same time as Ayumi Hamasaki and the two were often considered rivals for the title of Japan’s new pop queen. But it all fell apart when Suzuki’s dad deciced to sue her record company – it emerged in court she had been receiving a paltry 0.44% royalty rate from her sales. Despite winning the case, she lost the war. Having broken one of the Japanese entertainment industry’s unwritten rules – you never, ever sue – Suzuki was  effectively blacklisted and her career ran to a decade-long standstill, only broken with a recent, not entirely successful comeback attempt, a surprisingly odd collaboration with indie-rock-funk band Buffalo Daughter (bel0w) and her new DJ career.

The club was packed to the gills, with drag queens dressed like extravagant Marie Antoinettes and masked gogo boys thrusting on poles, but it was so smoky and so claustophobically crowded (it was almost impossible to dance) and the warm-up musaic was sooooo cheesy-gay-bad, that we left just as the star – Suzuki Ami – was being ushered into the crowd by security to cheers and whistles.

I heard afterwards from my friend Ryu who stayed that she DJed techno records with real passion in her eyes and did a pretty good job – she has gone up in my estimation!

In the milling crowd outside I met a friend with his new friend – Filipino fashion blogger Bryanboy. A mini-celebrity meeting to end the night!

Sayonara to the Tokyo Tribe

 

What lies beneath

One of the things that I really wanted to achieve before I left Tokyo was to see the little-known G-Cans Project – a huge network of drainage tunnels that lie underneath the city (or more accurately its far Northern Saitama suburbs). The network of tunnels includes this spectacular, cathedral-like drainage chamber and a 6km long tunnel that is ten metres high, plus five storage tanks, each of them large enough to contain the Statue of Liberty or Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Together with Daisuke, Taizo, Rie, Ryu, Kenji, Alex and Hitomi, I set out into the tunnels; you have to sit through a boring high-schoolish lecture at the visitors centre and then you descend into a cool, gloomy bunker. The first sight of the columns – wreathed in chilly mist ina  huge echoing chamber – is truly spine tingling. Unfortunately though the “tour” doesnt go anywhere else. We didnt get to see this, for instance:

After the tunnels we hopped on a train to Kawagoe, once a farming town but now  far-flung Tokyo sattelite suburb, but still known as “Little Edo” for its quaint street of craft shops and traditional Japanese sweets.

Buying and selling

Tea flavoured coca cola, my new Shibuya shoes, magazine I bought at a 7 11 entirely about Nicole Richie, Beyonce sells water,  train advertisement for online fortune tellers, and a suburban Mariah Carey-mobile.

A quick stopover in the gay world

Since I was flying with Singapore Airlines, I had eight hours to kill in the island state on each leg of the trip, and I spent most of it wandering the streets of one of the city’s funkiest neighbourhoods, called Geylang Serai.

Its an interesting name. In one version, “Geylang” comes from a Malay word for “warehouse” but in another more colorful variation it is comes from “Gay Land” ; the area was once home to Singapore’s pre-World War 2 amusement park “Gay World” (meaning  “Happy World”. The other kind of gay is after all, still illegal here, though increasingly tolerated).

“Gay World”,  along with its sister establishments “New World” and “Great World”, closed in the 19060s, and were demolished. Until the early 90s the Geylang site existed as a public park called “Gay World Park” but (perhaps embarrassed by the name?) authorities turned it into a nondescript housing estate. Luckily this jaunty little hotel near the former site  remains as a reminder.

Geylang is a cosmopolitan neighborhood. Around Joo Chiat Road it was once the stronghold of the Eurasian colonial elite; where wealthy Chinese and mixed-race bureaucrats and business tycoons nestled in privelege.

Other parts, by contrast, have been strongly Malay and Muslim.

The beautiful shophouses that still line many streets, with their tiled roofs, pastel colours and elaborately shuttered windows, are the product of the ” peranakan” culture – a Singaporean/Malaysian hybrid of Chinese and Malay influences.

Today, the area also has a large population of foreign guestworkers – Thais, Vietnamese, Indonesians and bangladeshis – many of them working in the “entertainment districts” for which the area is locally famous – mostly innocuous looking karaoke bars on the little sidestreets known as “lorongs”.

As with everywhere in Singapore, in the evenings the streets fill with people cooking and eating; openair restaurants put out plastic chairs in the laneways and on footpaths, and people kick back to eat and gossip and enjoy the evening breeze.

The local specialtyhere seemed to be frog restaurants.

Singapore sounds

Stefanie Sun – Shen Qi

Indian-ish song sung in Chinese (how Singapore!), by hometown Mando-pop star Stefanie Sun.

Coldplay-ish local band Electrico (they just broke up) with their song “Faces”.

Artwork by Shohei Otomo

From:    http://www.hakuchi.jp    (NSFW)

Flying on the wings of love

I’m off! Back to Tokyo for ten days of romancing, catching up with my memories of the “Big Umeboshi” and exploring some of the sides of the teeming metropolis that I missed the first six years around. I really can’t wait. Back to the city – and the man – I love. Watch this space!

Tokyo monochrome

John

The fourth edition of the “john” party was (as usual) dark, smoky, filled with hot fashion-y boys, bears, Sam Sparro-look-alikes, chesty stringy singelets, and a minor pop star, and sounded like the 80s had come back to life.

But it was much more sparsely attended than previous parties and next month it will be “taking a break” – who knew Melbourne hibernated so much in its grey, drizzly Winter? Apparently people just aren’t going out. The party had been packed to the gills on my other visits, but this time the whole upper dancefloor was closed and though the lower dancefloor- strung with bedsheets on wires for that cool lo-fi decorations look – was packed, the bar adjacent wasn’t.

I still liked it though. It is still Melbourne’s best part and I hope it will bounce back after its mini-break.

I was startled to see an enthusiastic reaction to this song; INXS’ “Original Sin”. Time hasn’t been kind to them; once one of Australia’s (and indeed, the world’s) biggest bands today they are hardly remembered. I hadn’t thought of them for years. But this song, from way back in 1984, seemed absolutely modern and in tune with the dancing gays (interesting as well, since in its time INXS were the antithesis of “gay music”).

INXS – ORIGINAL SIN ( DANCE VERSION )

View out my window