There are piranhas lose in the Tama River! At least, according to Al Jazeera.
Piranhas stalk Japan river – Asia-pacific – Al Jazeera English.
Frankly it would not surprise me though. I still remember the crocodile they found in a river in Ebina (a policeman waded in to wrestle it out), and a dead white shark that floated to the no-doubt-stinking surface of a Kawasaki industrial canal. Strange things have a habit of turning up in Tokyo waterways.
I recently saw this book “Tokyo on foot” in a Hong Kong bookstore. As soon as I get a more stable income, I am going to buy it. It is a book of illustrations by a French graphic designer. Florence Chavouet lived in Tokyo for six months while his girlfriend interned in one of the city’s big hotels.
In a big, exciting city with nothing concrete to do all day ( I can relate) he ended up wandering around and drawing sketches of “his” Tokyo.
The book is really evocative of Japan. For anyone who has spent time in Tokyo, the illustrations will probably strike a chord. But for me particularly it was really amazing to be able to pick out individual buildings – in the biggest city in the world – which I knew, time and time again.
I know where this is:
(That rickety old house on Shibuya’s “Cat Street”).
And I know where this is:
(In Shinjuku Nichome. Elsewhere he sketches the really quaint little restaurant on the same street that goes to Word Up bar.)
There are also lamposts I recognised from Daikanyama, maps of Okubo – one of my favorite old stomping grounds – and those typical suburban streets – neat and cluttered at the same time – that define Japan
.
It is a really cute book.
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.
For a city of its size and importance (it is often said) Tokyo offers remarkably slim pickings for the sightseer. Held up against its peers (say, Paris, London and New York) , one starts to wonder: “Where is Tokyo’s Louvre, British Museum, Statue of Liberty?” (Although, actually it does have one of those, at one-third scale, in the harbor.)
Flattened by war, earthquake and greed, little of its history remains. Its “big ticket” items are pretty lackustre; Tokyo Tower (an Eiffel knockoff slightly shorter than the surrounding buildings), Disneyland ( fun, but an imitation), the Imperial Palace, invisible behind its moats (nothing to see here, folks!)
Even the “national shrine” at Meiji-jingu is little more than an impressive gravel driveway, leading you to expect a monument of much greater proportions than the wooden shack waiting anticlimactically at the end.
All this is true. And yet, it misses the point. Because with a few exceptions (the skyline view from Rainbow bridge, Fuji on a clear Winters morning), Tokyo is not about the “Big Picture”. It is all about the details.
A visitor’s most memorable experience here could be the walk from their hotel to the nearest 7-11 : a weird sticker on a vending machine, a teenager with shaved-off eyebrows clumping down the street in a Little Bo Peep dress. Bizarrely branded snack foods in odd flavor combinations.
In Shibuya, androgynous gigolos lounge around in shirts with “Muthafucka happy time” stitched on the back in rhinestones, and black neo-fascist trucks roar past playing disco music, down streets of teenage malls and whale restaurants.
That is the joy and the beauty of Tokyo. It never makes sense. You never know. You can walk around a corner – any corner – and find a stray medieval castle, or a lifesize blue elephant statue, or Missy Elliott on a shopping spree, a dog on a skateboard, or a shop selling chocolate-covered squid, or a tiny ricefield in the middle of a highly urbanized suburb, or a vending machine selling rice or batteries, or (yes, the legends are true) used underwear.
And this is what gives Tokyo its boundless energy – more than anywhere else I know, there are no limits – not of taste, or logic, or even economic feasability. Anything goes. And once you are attuned to this – the city’s hunger for the new, its insatiable and unerring instinct for weirdness – you see it everywhere.
People often ask me “Where do you find this stuff?”. But I answer; “How can you live in this city and not see it?” Its everywhere. There is so much weird shit you are tripping over it on a daily basis.
So in this spirit – the spirit of what makes Tokyo tick – I have thrown together a list of some of my favorite attractions; no Tokyo Towers, no Imperial Palace, nothing you could conceivably find in London or New York. Just Tokyo ; raw, uncut and deliciously random.
A Buddhist sect’s black-pyramid-deathstar Cult Headquarters in Roppongi
Strawberry House in Den-en-chofu. There is a Hello Kitty gift shop inside.
Primitivist-shipping-crate boutique by Brazilian designer Alexandre Hercovitch, in Daikanyama.
Cyborg-facade karaoke parlors in Roppongi and Shinjuku
Yoyogi Uehara; the impressive Turkish mosque
New Cocoon Building, West Shinjuku
King Kong storming a convenience store (for some reason) in inner suburb Sangenjaya
Shonandai Cultural Centre. And this is what it looks like inside:
Mikimoto Pearls, Ginza
Takadanobaba Gothic
Aoyamadori – United Nations University’s ziggurat, and alien pod buildings
Shinjuku; castle in the sky floating above the traffic of Yasukuni-dori
地底神殿
With less than a week til I now leave Tokyo, I have been making a mental checklist and ticking off the things I still want to do in this city. How to say goodbye? How to say goodbye to the city where I did so many of the things that being in your 20s is all about; my first real job, first flat, first time living with a roomate, first hangover, first big relationship, first heart-break …?
All of that was in Tokyo for me, and I have pretty much loved every minute of it. What was left?
I had finally made it to the Tsukiji fish market (just before it closed to tourists), been to Club Yellow (before it closed for good), climbed Fuji ….
What else was there?
I decided my last big hurrah would be underground, to explore the vast and secretive, billion-dollar network of tunnels and drainage canals that lie under the city.
The project, known as G-Cans (above), has now opened to (Japanese-speaking) tourists on guided tours but when my friend Ryu called for me, we discovered it was booked solid for the next four months!
One for when I come back, then.
Instead, I thought I would take a few days of work and just walk around the city, savor the atmosphere, and go back to my favorite places, or fill in the remaining blanks. A few days – just me and the city I love.
As a guidebook I took with me the sightseeing guide from Tokyo Damage Report – the best, funniest and most in-touch of the gaijin-in-crazy-Tokyo blogs, written by some American punk dude I have never met, but who rocks my world. Some of his recommendations I knew and loved before I read about them, others I had never been to and was anxious to explore. So I printed out TDR’s directions and set off, to say “sayonara” to Tokyo.
So, on a baking clear-skied day, I set out early to explore the city of Tokyo. The sun was searing, people on the trains looked flushed and tired, wiping their faces and gazing out of the windows as the hot, buzzing city passed by. On overhead monitors, advertisements flashed for robot pet dinosaurs. On the screens, a girl was looking longingly out a window, when her adorable little green-skinned companion walked up and nuzzled the curtain behind her.
The ad changes – to a DV for a gay romantic comedy (which looks neither very gay, nor very romantic).
I get to Shibuya and change trains, descending to the Fukutoshin subway line. Destination: Ikebukuro.
Ikebukuro is what people who don’t like Tokyo say Tokyo is like: crowded, dirty, grey and concrete. It is the most charmless of the city’s major transportation hubs. Outside the gargantuan station sits the world’s biggest department store and a large plaza – but there is no sense of drama, or buzz of being in a great city. It just looks grey and bleak, like some Soviet design from the 60s. People scurry by. Discount sex business with blinking lights lie in stinking alleys. So how surprising, to find a tiny, hidden pocket that contains one of the most beautiful buildings in Tokyo. Because according to Tokyo Damage report, Ikebukuro is home to one of the city’s little-known treasures, an “insane Giger building” (Giger was the Swiss artist whose designs for the “Alien” movies and Debbie Harry’s solo album cover merged human and machine.)
I didnt know what to expect. But it wasn’t this.
A few minutes from the station, tucked back off the main road lies this – a stunning, plaster art nouveau-meets-machine-winged-masterpiece. I couldn’t believe it.
Who knew Tokyo had gems like this, tucked away?
I ventured into the gloomy lobby and stared in awe.
And what was this building? Most amazingly of all, a large part of the first floor seemed to be used as a soft drinks warehouse facility. (I also realised, with a start, that the architect responsible had almost certainly also designed the building housing Shibuya’s “Subway” restaurant. Next time you are there, take a look at the facade and the the little lobby around the elevators).
Across the street was another interesting building – a purple, mosaic-walled building, thin and narrow like so many Japanese commercial buildings. At the door, a sign for “Hiro’s bar” flashed and metallic mushrooms and frogs clustered – a whimsical touch that made me wonder if the two odd buildings were connected.
And just down the block from both these buildings lay a beautiful temple with a mossy garden, looking out over grave markers to a wall of bland concrete apartment blocks.
A little triangle of grace and beauty – and weirdness – in the most unexpected place. I felt totally excited about my plan, and invigorated. What else was out there to discover? I couldnt wait to get to it.
I followed up this revelation with my second architecture recommendation from Tokyo Damage Report ; a fake Gaudi-stye building in the nearby university precinct of Waseda.
This is what I found:
Amazing. And inside, the lobby was dark and moody with carved, stalactite dripping ceilings, moody lighting courtesy of lit glass apples and a huge disembodied arm by the elevators.
According to Tokyo Damage Report:
“This is a cafe that serves incredibly hot Thai food. However the main attraction is the decoration: half West African tribal stuff and half 1961 Atomic Hepcat’s Chemical Science Den. Carved masks and tusks rub shoulders (figuratively) with giant molecular models and cubist objets. The only connection I can see between the two is color: everything in the shop (and its full to the rafters) is on some point on the continuum between brown and mustard. Teak abounds. There’s a floor-to-celing vertical garden on one wall and a stuffed cassowary”.
Here is the cassowary.
TDR goes on to give directions, concluded with “when you see an African cow in the street, thats where it is”. Which was funny because I immediately knew- oh, that place with the African cow!
Anyway, the food was good (and not too hot) and the place was full of Aoyama beautiful people doing lunch, not wannabe schoolkids but the real movers-and-shakers, dressed expensively in casual style and doing media/fashion deals over dessert. Recommended.
The temples of Tokyo were, initially,a disappointment to me. Every guidebook directs you to Meijijingu – but other than the “Birds”-like squawk of the huge crows roosting in the sacred forest, the temple itself has nothing much to see. It is the smaller, more atmospheric temples that I came to enjoy: the beautiful Nezu-jinja with its Kyoto-style walkway of torii, Hanazono-jinja with its kimono market and outdoor theatre, perched right on the neon edge of Kabukicho, the lovely Tojo-jinja just steps away from the teenage kicks of Takeshitadori.
I set out with my directions courtesy of Tokyo Damage Report for two more shrines – located in the tony inner suburb of Meguro. Meguro is an odd area. It is a well-off, lowkey place. Nothing special, you might think. And yet this “low key place” , on closer examination, hosts an art deco palace-cum-art-museum (the Teian Museum), a patch of cool forest (the National Centre for Nature Study), the infamous parasite museum (housing in a jar the world’s longest tapeworm!), a shopping centre built like a mini-Venice complete with canal and gondola, a medieval castle and exquisite Japanese hotel (see below) and the twin shrines of the Octopus and Toilet gods.
The Octopus temple, a small shrine quietly dozing down a hot suburban street, was announced with this banner:
…but it was locked up and I couldnt see inside.
The Toilet God’s temple was a harder nut to crack though. It was bigger and more impressive than I had expected, standing in a large graveyard. On a decrepit apartment block opposite, maybe twenty crows sat massed, looking down at the graves. The entrance was guarded by huge, fearsome stone beasts and a notice in red kanji issued a stern warning to be careful of…something that I couldn’t read. I was a little freaked, but kept going. The building itself was contemporary- built in the concrete, Indian-inspired style of the more modern shrines and a look that I associate (perhaps unfairly) with cults. There was nothing to indicate the festival which took place here every October 28th, when priests blessed special underpants that worshippers could buy to protect them against incontinence in their old age.
There was however, a gravel path leading into a little grotto under the building. Hesitantly, I glanced around and stepped in. Down the little cave-like path I came to a diorama of golden figures stared out into the darkness – including this terrifying, demon-faced dog.
Then I heard a noise. An old woman had emerged from a doorway (I could see her through gaps between the steps, as the grotto was located under the main staircase). Gravel crunched under my feet and the crone was staring at me maliciously . She began to slowly advance across the courtyard. I made a break for it….
As I left, I saw this statue – is he on a toilet????????????
Now suffering from heat exhaustion, and with my camera almost depleted, I walked back towards the lovely tree-lined canal of the Megurogawa where two Tokyo landmarks stare each other down, across the water.
One is the medieval “Imperial”, one of the city’s best-known (and loved) love hotels, with its turrets poking out above the rooftops. And right opposite, is the shining heliport-topped blue and gold tower that houses the truly remarkable Meguro Gajoen.
Built into a hilltop down an unremarkable street, Gajoen is not something that you would find unless you knew where to look. But it is probably the city’s plushest hotel, and almost certainly its dreamiest. Guests enter through a Japonesque entry portal into an airy atrium where staircases and escalators soar over an interior forest of thatch-roofed dwellings around a burbling, carp-filled stream. Through a glass wall, impressive waterfalls tumble down a garden cliff, while a constant procession of gorgeously-kimonoed brides are ushered in and out of the lavishly decorated ballrooms.
The whole complex is like some cartoonish secret little world – the garden and the lobby bleeding into each other, plump goldfish dozing in interior streams and lotus ponds in the coffee shop, elevators shooting out above the indoor forest, people in secret caves look out behind the waterfalls, and rooms are brimming with exquisite artworks. Even the mens bathroom look this:
One of Tokyo’s special places.
Right next door is a lovely, tranquil shrine is full of Buddhas sitting around a pond, each one with a different expression on their face. An adjacent garden is full of red-capped statues, commemorating children who died too young.
My last stop was for dinner, at Rue Favart – a beautiful cafe in Ebisu, located right next to the bizarre faux-chateau of Garden Place.
In keeping with the area’s French pretentions, it boasts a Parisian name and a charming interior:
But look up. On the ceilings, huge creepie-crawlies scuttle and poppie flowers bloom across the ceiling in one of the city’s most striking and unusual wall murals :
The food is good too.
Other interesting things in Ebisu; an English used book shop, the best Thai restaurant in town (Mai Thai), a playground with a giant concrete octopus, the cafe with the huge bronze tortoise sculpture, a (bad) Tibetan restaurant in a glass dome, the Nazca lines building (below), a charming shrine in a shady square surrounded by bars and boutiques, the pork BBQ restaurant decorated with pictures of pigs abducting and eating humans, and the landmark red-nosed “Hinomaru driving school” by the train tracks (also below).
What is this odd metallic tendril, reaching out towards the traintracks at Osaki?
Surprise!
For the second day of my Tokyo farewell tour, I boarded the train for the area around Ueno on the other side of town. First stop was the adjacent area of Uguisadani – a lovely name (it means “valley of nightingales”) for a seedy area. One side of the station is a cluster of love hotels around a fiercely pronged temple, while on the other side a graveyard stands on a grassy bluff.
I headed past the cemetery and in a few minutes I was at my first stop : the Kan-eiji temple. This was once one of the most important in Tokyo – all of what is now Ueno Park was part of its lands, and it was used as the personal temple of the Tokugawa family. In1869 it was attacked by supporters of the emperor, whom the Tokugawa shogans were trying to usurp. Supposedly, there are still bullets imbedded in parts of the temple walls. But I went there to see this:
In 1821 Sessai Masuyama, a feudal lord, ordered this monument . Its purpose was to console the sprit of dead insects. Sessai had sponsored scholars working on anatomy books – one of which, called “Chuchi-jo” was famous for its realistic depiction of insects. The shrine is to honor those insects who were killed to serve as anatomy models for the book, giving up their lives for the advancement of science. Today, its officially designated by the city of Tokyo as a historical monument.
From the insect shrine it was a brief walk to the Northern fringe of Ueno Park. The tone of the neighborhood also changed- from the lovel hotels and seedy sidestreets of Uguisadani, to this :
a leafy street of imposing Georgian and Victorian buildings, with the copper domes of the National Museum poking up on the horizon to the South and (pictured above) the Library of International Childrens literature. It was more like Bloomsbury than anything else I had seen in Tokyo.
Then, I was at the park itself – announced by a striking blue giraffe …
… and a cluster of homeless men – more than 100, 150 of them – sitting around quietly, chatting, or collecting aluminium cans. One pair of old dudes was fighting a spirited duel with umbrellas. It was jarring to see such a large-scale show of poverty – even poverty as good natured as this – in a city like Tokyo, but Ueno Park (as well as Yoyogi, the Shibuya traintracks and Shinjuku-chuo Park) is famous for its “colony” of homeless in blue tarpaulin tents, and boxes.
I walked along. Ueno is not a park in the sense that I understand it. Although big, there is no feeling of space – its absolutely filled with buildings, crowds and paved-over plazas. There are precious few patches of lawn to sit on, or leafy areas in which to lounge.
I walked by one of the park’s numerous museums – this one, of Science and Nature – and although I hadn’t planned to stop, I went in on a whim. They were having a gold exhibition with the star attraction a loaned display from Colombia’s Museo de Oro in Bogota. When would I have another chance to see that?
First there were gold bars you could touch, various gold ornaments, famous gold nuggets from history (including one on loan from Australia – the 75kg nugget we had all learned about in history class that had helped to fuel the 19th century Gold Rush that built the city of Melbourne. It was called, with typical Australian humor, “the Welcome Stranger”). There were also displays on gold in Japan – a single red camellia in a vase in a gold and red room – and then the glittering, beautifully displayed collection of pre-Conquest Colombian treasures.
The rest of the museum was as cool as I had remembered it. Unexpectedly perhaps it is one of Tokyo’s best, more for for its imaginative design than the exhibits themselves. For example, you walk into a room built like a fake forest with fibreglass trees and stuffed squirrels and recorded birdsong, only to be surprised when it morphs halfway into a library. Then in a huge, dark chamber, a multitude of beasts stare out at you from a neon ringed pedestal -leopards, camels, tigers, gorillas. You can even walk over the glass floor above the antelopes’ heads, looking down at their sharp little horns. Amazing. In the sea hall, whales and sharks frolic above you, suspended from the ceiling, while imitation kelp streams upwards to the roof. Aquatic dinosaurs swoop down at you in the basement through dramtic smoked glass. It is a revelation. But what would the priests and scholars of Kan-eiji have thought after this – these halls full of the unhonored spirits of dead beasts? What grand gesture would be necessary to make up for this, I wondered?
After the park, the rest of Ueno is crowded and dingy and down-at-heel. Traffic roars by on overhead freeways, and the shops look poor and tatty. The trainstation is located next to a ten-lane intersection, bridged by a pedestrian plaza, bleak and windy, with bad modern art.
The day of my tour, the sky was looking dark and ominous. I headed over to the motorcycle district – lining both sides of a busy street, divided by a raised freeway. Block after block of dealerships, shops selling helmets and riding gear…
Note the color of the sky on the left!
Right in the middle of the motorbike district is my favorite snake shop – selling the beasts dead and alive for medicinal use.
I wandered the backstreets of Ueno for a while, with rain starting to splash down from leaden, rumbling skies. The buildings here have that old, worn-out charm that you find in parts of Tokyo. I realised, if I hadn’t already, that the city is at its most aesthetically appealing at its most homely. For all the bright lights and shiny shopping malls, it is scenes like this that say TOKYO to me, and I will miss them the most:
Then, the rain started. Still, I was relieved to know that in all of Tokyo this is probably the best place to get stuck in a downpour. Stretching along for miles under the train tracks is a rabbit warren of arcades that go all the way to the next Yamanote station. Ameyokocho and Okachimachi – parrallel shopping streets on either side of the raised tracks – started life as black markets during the occupation. Today they sell denim and cheap clothes, dried fish, old army uniforms and enka records, bags and backpacks and military surplus. There is also a Chinese shrine, and a basement food hall for Asian immigrants selling imported durians and rambutans, and live turtles flapping around in buckets, with pigs heads hanging on hooks. West African traders push barrows loaded with denim and T-shirts. I made my way through the market to Okachimachi station, and hopped on the train – a few short minutes to Akihabara.
In all my time in Tokyo I had only been once to Akihabara – the far away ( from me), “Electronics city” of hightech gadgets, and the painfully shy men who love them. Originally famous as an electronics retail centre, the area has recently bloomed into something quite different – the Ground Zero for Japan’s otaku (nerd) culture , with its penchant for video games of elementary school-looking girls with huge breasts, and colorful polyester outfits, and its disturbing social implications.
Clearly, it was time I gave it another look.
The area has been, tragically, in focus lately with a murder rampage a few weeks ago. A shy, socially-inept man working in a dead-end job and angry over his inability to find a girlfriend, drove a truck into a crowd waiting at the main intersection, and hacked to death survivors with a knife.
A few days later, a similar copycat crime was foiled when police (acting on “intuition”) stopped another man and found him carrying a 12cm blade.
Naturally the events have lead many here to wonder how much the introverted, tech-obsessed but human-interraction-poor lifestyle that Akihabara represents, played a part in the crimes.
The most shocking and unexpected sight in the neighborhood was a makeshift, rainsodden shrine to the victims, where wellwishers had left flowers, streamers of paper cranes or little offerings at the site of the crime . Here, someone left a manga comic book for the dead:
I was surprised by Akihabara. It was so big – block after block of shops towering buildings and bright flashing lights. Girls in maid uniforms were handing out flyers in the streets, and more surprisingly, the murmur of multiple languages was all around. Tourists flock to the area. Signs in English and Korean and Spanishs announced “great duty free deals” and shop clerks even addresed me in English. In this way, it felt more international than Shinjuku or Shibuya – a true globalised world hub.
First stop was “Radio Hall”, a six-storey mall of action figures, software, consumer electronics, manga stores and a huge, creepy top floor doll store selling little plastic figures in shrine-like reverence. Middleaged women, who looked like adulthood had brought them nothing but disappointment, circulated dreamily while sweaty men in caps and wifebeaters scurried down the aisles.
Even creepier was that you could buy the body parts separately – not only their wigs and clothes, but little plastic bags full of hands, or different faces.
Around the corner, there was also a “robot store” (one of the Tsukumo stores, but be careful as there are several branches in Akihabara and only one sells robots), with a stage where little robots played pianos or kicked goals into nets, or (as I watched on a giant video screen), wrestled each other with surprisingly fluid moves while their Korean masters looked on through gritted teeth, willing on their little metal warriors. The “Pleo” – a toy dinosaur robot “grazing” in a plexiglass “enclosure” – looked right at me as I walked in.
This one looks familiar. Was it in a movie?
Also in Akihabara I found a takeway crepe shop with (real, non-robot) penguins in the window!
As part of my farewell circuit , I had decided to revisit one of my favorite Tokyo buildings. It lurks in a residential street near the Yamanote train tracks, between Shibuya and Ebisu. I had stumbled onto it once, years ago, by happy accident…there I was, lost in the jumble of quiet streets, looking for a landmark to orient myself – something, anything – when this popped up, peering out at me:
Intrigued, I tried to get a better view, wondering what it was. Answer: the “Aoyama Technical School”, better known to viewers of my blog as ” the terrifing robo-cockroach building” because it looks like this, ready to devour the poor little Showa-era shophouse next door:
The school is also, happily, just around the corner from one of the city’s coolest cafes, “Pile Cafe” (yes, shame about the name…) Nonetheless, the place is great: a cool, cavernous, high ceilinged room right by the train tracks, where you can recline on plush brown leather sofas amid potted palm trees, listen to Brazilian music ( today it was a male vocalist covering Elis Regina songs) and watch the trains rush by through huge, soundproofed windows.
The sun now setting, I pushed on to my final destinations. First was aanother remarkable building, but one I had never seen. “Tokyo Damage Report” had described it as the most “brutal, scary, fucked-up looking thing”…and it was. Peering out over Okubo, is this brutalist hulk of a building, like a flash-forward to some dystopian future, of crumbling angular concrete and totalitarianism. Even its name seemed vaguely sinister: The New Sky Building.
Scary shit, man.
Here you can see the weird little, submarine-lab-fortress tacked onto the higher levels (with added gigolo posing in the foreground).
And the lobby? Looks like this:
The building looked like it was being held together with glue and safety pins- mesh drapes were strung across the facade. Two separate Thai supermarkets were doing a roaring business at ground level, and as the whole complex lies just across a busy street from the Kabukicho redlight district, I think its fair to assume that a proportion of the residents are immigrant hookers. Defunct futurism, cracked concrete, the poor and desparate, and yet a certain air of funky in-your-face attitude; this was what my memories of Sao Paulo were like…
Nakano, just one stop from Shinjuku on the JR Chuo line, is one of my favorite places to take out-of-towners. It has an unmissable shopping experience, for one thing, at the SunMall – a dank rabbit warren of maid cafes, anime shops, creepy toy and figurine stores, an alternative bookstore, and of course the shop that only sells things that people left on trains.
Its also one of Tokyo’s gayest neighborhoods.
But today I was going there for a different reason: a beetle shop. Collecting beetles in the summertime is a favorite tradition for Japanese children. Most people here have treasured memories of scouring the countryside with nets as youngsters for a prized “rhinoceros beetle”, so much so that in the Summer months they sell beetle-nabbing nets in 7-11s. And of course, it has become a big business. The rarest and most precious beetles, called “six-legged black diamonds” go for over 100,000 yen ( or a thousand US dollars). Importers have been accused of raping the forests of India and Nepal as villagers clearcut rainforest trees, only to get at the beetles nesting at their tops.
And where to buy these beetles? In this shop in Nakano, so famous that it advertises at the train station:
The beetles, were indeed, huge – and the whole shop had a weird humid smell ….
Outside was a statue on the pavement of a unicorn-eagle:
From here it was just a two-minute hop to neighboring Koenji. Koenji is like a cool little inner city kid-sister to Harakuju that most foreigners don’t know about. A vast arcade runs under the train tracks, and marching off it are alleyways and tiny pedestrian streets, densely packed with vintage stores and boutiques, hipster inner city kids, long-haired noseringed hippies, rock dive clubs, jazz bars, art bars, offbeat bookshops, cheap clothes, funky clothes, a drunk African dude, a kabuki ? or Chinese opera? performer in full make-up doing his grocery shopping, and this :
On Saturday morning the storm clouds had cleared. INdonesia and Colombia were both spruiking their national days ( Colombia in Hibiya Park, the Indonesians in Yoyogi) but there was only one place I wanted to go. Daisuke and I drove down, pumping reggae music and Latin music, through the suburban sprawl, past flashing love hotels and (on the outskirts of Yokohama) an impressive ziggurat-like mountain made entirely of rubbish – until we got to the green hills around Kamakura,where cicadas chirped in trees by the traffic-choked roads, running through tunnels under the forested slopes and towards the sea.
Destination: Yuigahama Beach!
Bronzed, hot lifesavers and tattooed beachboys frolicked along the shore with bikini-ed girlfriends, or sat at the thatched beach bars enjoying a drink, and th view, across the warm sea to the lush hills tumbling down to the bay.
As always a food market had been set up on the beach called “Little Thailand”, where you could eat Thai food, or get a massage, and listen to regge music. Other pavilions along the beach featured funkily decorated, but rustic, changing rooms or mini volcanoes or Mt Rushmore style facades:
A wonderful side of Tokyo that so many people never see…..
ROBBED
Now your fortune is gone
I hope you are OK with just lies and disappointment
ilbonito blog 2007 
