Tokyo secrets

I recently stumbled on to a list of Tokyo attractions which included some surprising, and hitherto-unknown, sightseeing options, such as:

House of the Insect Poet (10 minute walk from Sendago subway station in Bunkyo Ward) is an insect museum inspired by a Japanese translation of famous poem about insects by the French poet Jean-Henri Fabre. Opened in 2006 in a building designed to resemble a cocoon, it houses specimens of insects and butterflies from around the world. Most of the specimens belong to a scholar of French literature who began collecting insects in the fourth grade and has since collected 100,000 specimens.

And who knew there was an ancient Egyptian museum in Shibuya?

Another surprise was the discovery of this very instagram-chic guide to the outer suburb of Fussa, by a very visual-savvy Hong Kong-based food stylist and “social media content provider.” My memories of Fussa are of a down-at-heel, but interesting, dormitory suburb on the Western fringes of Tokyo. I used to pass through every morning on my way to work at a small and shabby “English school” in Ozaku, almost the last gasp of metropolitan Tokyo before suburban sprawl hits the beautiful hills, cedar forests and lakes of the Oku-tama ranges. Fussa stood out for its vast US military base and the streets immmediately surrounding it, which featured Filipino and Thai bars (and bargirls) and family-run Latino restaurants (I was once called a gringo at the local station).  With its white and (more often) brown and black faces, American fast food and slightly raffish, red light air, it actually does provide quite a unique, and interesting, perspective on the metropolis – but not one I would have expected to see style-blogged. Until, that is, I realised that it was a paid promotion for a campaign to highlight more “regional” parts of Tokyo prefecture. Still, certainly worth a look.

Pink

Images from Kazuyoshi Usui’s Showa 88 and Showa 92 series, imagining a world in which the Showa era never ended, and the colourful seamy side of the Japanese bubble still exists  dreamily in a colourful haze.

Tokyo calling

Gucci continues its recent fun flirtation ( or rather, full-on affair) with the Seventies, this time in Tokyo.

Insect Buddha, disco minotaur and Kardashian

Gaycation: Japan

Well this is an interesting beast: a hipsterish, yet very North-American-earnest, look at gay life in Tokyo. Its the first in a new series by Vice on gay life around the world hosted by Hollywood lesbian starlet Ellen Page and her gay BFF – with future episodes promised for Jamaica and Brazil. Keep an eye out!

Showa: almost a century of weird

I have just finished reading Shigeru Mizuki’s three-part manga epic “Showa,” a history of Japan from the 1920s through to to the death of Emperor Hirohito, posthumously re-named “Showa,” in 1989. What struck me on reading the volumes was how Japan’s progress in our lifetime, which I had assumed to be a stable and placid accumulation of wealth from the end of the war until the burst of the bubble was actually much more dramatic; there were Communist plots, recessions, terrorist outbreaks and assassinations. But also covered in the book are a selection of some of the bizarre fads and shocking crimes which captured the public imagination, and various strange figures who surfed the Showa zeitigeist.

For example in  1977 craze for marine dinosaurs swept the nation after a Japanese trawler discovered a supposed plesiosaur off New Zealand in 1977, known as the Zuiyo-maru corpse.

Elsewhere there is the strange story of the “Fiend with Twenty Faces” extortionist who poisoned candies on shop shelves around Japan and tried to blackmail their manufacturers for millions, all the while leaving taunting cryptic messages with the press, and the emergence of the hedonistic “Sun-zoku” 1950s youth tribe who dressed in bright-coloured prints and aspired to be bourgeois playboys, inspired by a racy novel by later-Governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara. A decade and a half later the “futen-zoku”, Japanese hippies, set up camp in Shinjuku where they apparently slept in bushes outside Shinjuku station and transformed parts of the district into their own Haight-Ashbury.

Three Japanese soldiers emerged from the jungles of the South Pacific in the 1970s, where they had been living since World War Two, either unwilling to believe that the war was over or simply at a loss as to what to do next. One soldier, on return to Japan, found himself disoriented and disappointed by the direction in which Japanese society had moved, and promptly moved to Brazil. Another, an indigenous Taiwanese villager who had been recruited when that island was a Japanese colony, could speak neither Japanese nor Chinese and died in Taiwan just a few years later of lung cancer.

In the 1980s Issei Sagawa became an unlikely (and unsavoury) celebrity after killing, cooking and eating a Dutch girl and evading the justice system, spending only eight months in an institution before he was released to do the morning talk show circuit, promoting his new cookbook and writing restaurant reviews(!) along the way. He lives freely in Tokyo to this day.

There are plenty of strange occurrences in the Showa era that aren’t captured in the book too: a 1984 frilled neck lizard “boom” after the Australian creature was featured in a Mitsubishi television commercial, seismic appetites for tirimasu and red wine which erupted and then evaporated shortly after and the later 2008 banana diet which swept the country.

  

The Kaleidoscope

Tokyo is a kaleidoscope. It is a giant, all-seeing eye that takes in the whole world and refracts it in bursts of colour and movement. It is disorienting, inexhaustible. Familiar shapes are distorted. They are exaggerated, reversed and broken down into new forms. Tokyo is a source of endless amusement, a giant toy. Just shake it – hop on a train, go for a walk down the street – and something interesting will pop up.

Tokyo is a pleasure chamber. It is life-affirming, often confusing, never predictable and more than anything else, fun.

Concrete jungle

Above, the Setagaya convenience store King Kong, and below, a lone lion by the Tamagawa and a bear selling energy drinks.

 

TKYO monsters: strange beasts and where to find them

Just before my trip to Japan, master manga artist Shigeru Mizuki passed away. Mizuki had been well-known for his lifelong love of “yokai,” the incredibly strange creatures of Japanese folklore, and perhaps because of this influence, I had decided that I wanted to find some monsters in Tokyo.

I asked around. Apparently an obscure Shinjuku ward museum in Yotsuya had a specimen of a “mermaid.” I had seen one of these before, specimens once widely shown around Japan in travelling freakshows. My friend who had seen it thought it might be a monkey sewn onto a fish. But sadly, when I researched more, I found the museum closed for renovations. Definitely one for when I get back.

I heard there was a yokai museum at the DECKS mall in Odaiba, but I never made it out there.

Look closely

But nonetheless there were other strange beasts around town. A gigantic new Godzilla burst out of a hotel in Kabukicho – I saw its head unexpectedly peering through Shinjuku skyscrapers while walking home one day.

I also found this in Tokyo Cultuart, the funky UFO and paranormal-centric Tokyo giftstore in the Harajuku branch of BEAMS clothing boutique. It is a phone card (retro!) bearing the image of the briefly-famous “human faced fish.” This creature ,which lives (lived?) in a pond in Shizuoka,  rose to fame with its own snack foods and Sega video-game, part of a long tradition of “human faced animals” in Japanese urban legend.

On the other side of Harajuku, the Dragon Museum is still there, in a backroom of a rockabilly fashion store on Cat Street.

And I had already been to the kappa shrine.

I also found this bar on the outskirts of Shinjuku Nichome, named after the baku, an elephant-like beast said to eat bad dreams. It is often carved under temple eaves and is said to have been inspired by the Malaysian tapir, now also called “baku” in Japanese.

But perhaps the best bet was on the night of New Year’s Eve, when according to legend, foxes from all over Japan gathered under a large tree in the Oji neighbourhood to transform temporarily into humans and join in the New year festivities. The fox was considered a mystical and shadowy creature by the Japanese and the Oji-jinja had been built to placate them, although it was “fake” in the sense that no real god sat on the altar – it was purely to keep the foxes happy. Today, the shrine marks this history with a midnight “fox parade” of revellers in masks and painted-on whiskers. Sadly, due to a google translate mishap, we arrived at the temple far too early, before the festivities had really begun, although we still glimpsed white fox masks on the back of heads around the district and fox lanterns being strung up on the streets. A tantalising near miss.

In the end though, I just had to be content my “little monster” – the cat – at home in Shin-Okubo.

  

Meguro-gawa

Kiko Mizuhara: current face of the Yamanote line

Nishi-shinjuku surprise

While walking around through the towers and suited crowds of Nishi-Shinjuku looking for the Ginza Renoir (not quite where I remembered it) I ran into some surprises: a gaudy Chinese temple in an Okubo backstreet first, and then a view of the new Kabukicho Godzilla appearing over the traintracks. I scurried past the unnerving Eye of Sauron, watching maliciously over streams of office workers marching in formation from the subterranean West Exit of Shinjuku station,  and was shocked to find a man masturbating on the street above outside Yodabashi camera.

I then passed a basement Haitian restaurant (Haitian food in Tokyo!) and was so excited that I emailed a picture to a Haitian friend in Montreal (expecting him to be dumbfounded) only to receive the reply, “Oh, I’ve eaten there. It’s not good.”

And finally: this building, the Rurikoin Byakurengedo,  a space-aged concrete lotus looming up on a “stem” and then blossoming into a concrete flower. It is home to a Buddhist sect and highrise cemetery, just around the corner from the “Shinjuku Space Hall”, whose function I never ascertained.

 

The Subconscious

The Golden Gai is a tangle of streets between the Hanazono-jinja shrine, the blinking lights of Yasukuni-dori and a bamboo-lined path leading into the heart of Kabukicho. By day, the district slumbers in broad daylight and at night, it creaks to life, its alleys filled with tiny, closet-sized bars with bizarre names like “Slow hand” or “Kangaroo Court Decision”.

Of these, the most intriguing to me was a Matthew Barney-inspired art bar named after his surreal opus, the Cremaster Cycle: the Cremaster Experimental Psychoanalytic bar.

Shinjuku Nichome

A good chunk of my twenties was spent on the streets and bars of Tokyo’s gay quarter, the notorious Shinjuku Nichome. Here, on six to ten city blocks, tiled buildings are piled high with tiny local gar bars, sex shops, gay manga, bear ramen stores and a rentboy-staffed octopus ball stand, poky dance clubs, basement “underwear lounges” and sexy underwear shops, two temples, a twenty four hour sauna, a party central all-night convenience store, cruising dudes and the men who love them.

It is a super-gay oasis in an otherwise super-straight city, a warren of seedy little streets and dark doorways, connections found and lost, lives and loves coming together, lust hanging in the air.

Above Cauro Hige and below, Inu Yoshi.

I had been sad to hear of the rumoured decline of the area, faced with the same challenges as gay bars everywhere, their role as meeting places under threat from the convenience and reassuring anonymity of phone apps.

Advocates, the most-loved bar by foreigners, had closed although I found it replaced by another gay bar, Aiiro, whose business model seemed to be a carbon copy.

Dragon and Arty Farty were still there, as was Word-Up, the foreigner-unfriendly “Japanese only” bar, as well as a host of smaller nights. I had been looking forward most to the FancyHIM Party, a wild Tokyo fashion folly unlike anything I have since elsewhere in the world where chic revellers turn up in the over-the-top homemade outfits. US singer AB Soto was appearing and I had seen him out on the town the night before.

But in the end, the evening took a different turn and I ended up instead with friends piled up inside one of the district’s little bars, up a dingy flight of stairs on a second storey landing.  Zero One is one of the new generation of bars in the district targeted at Chinese guys and their fans; I saw at least two others, Taiwan Bar and Panda, as well.

At Zero One, its name derived from Chinese gay slang, we sat at the counter knocking back vodka with green tea while Taiwanese pop videos played. It was a fun, unexpected night.

There were other discoveries too. A new (to me) Latin themed “anticapitalist” bar was strung up with people power flyers and Zapatista posters. A women-only bar advertised monthly female-to-male transexual nights. A longstanding Thai restaurant (of which the area has several) had moved premises. The portly owner of a bar called Cholesterol  had become famous in Taiwan as a “blowjob expert” and he was being mobbed by tourists asking for pictures. Chic new cafe-bar “Phonic Hoop” had opened up across the street and the ‘cruisy’ Starbucks on the corner of Yasukuni-dori now seemed suspiciously straight.

My favourite finding of all though was just outside Nichome proper, down the little lantern-strung shotengai (shopping street) across Yasukuni dori, leading down a gentle slope. Here, passing by on a bike from ‘the neighbourhood’ I found a bizarre little restaurant, announced with a statue of a cat eating spaghetti on an upside-down acrobat. It was late at night and the restaurant was closed, but my curiosity was piqued.

Peering in, I could make out the retro interior, littered with angel statues, more images of cats, marionettes, Joan Miro prints and circus memorabilia. I decided to come back in the daytime to explore. It was called Cafe Arles.

Cafe Arles, it turned out, had something of a cat theme. A live specimen greeted me at the door the next day and prowled lion-like under the tables where lone customers read newspapers at lunchtime or furtive couples whispered. One woman’s fur coat was slung nonchalantly across a stone cherub. Stale smoke hung in the air and Ella Fitzgerald was playing. I ordered the house special, the Neapolitan spaghetti, from the Japanese-only menu and was delighted to be served first a place of starters: one-third of a banana, still in its skin, a single maple syrup cookie and some nuts, as well as lemon tea in a bone china cup.

The restaurant had been there, it transpired, since 1972. And yet in all my Nichome nights, I had never found it. A district full of surprises.

The Kowloon connection

I wanted to take my boyfriend to Kawasaki’s Warehouse amusement arcade – not for the billiards and ping pong tables (although that would have been fun) – but for the theme: several floors are modelled after Hong Kong’s notorious slum, the Walled City, a place the bf had visited as a child before it was torn down in a civic improvement scheme in the early nineties.

The city was a dark, densely populated block where illegally built tenements blocked out the sunlight and police feared to tread – due to legal loophole, the area was not included in the handover of the rest of Hong Kong to the British, but cut off from China proper it was rendered effectively lawless: a haven for backstreet dentists, sweatshops and triads.

Today, almost nothing of the city remains. Its site in Kowloon City has been turned into a park. And yet the Walled City lives on in Kawasaki, a nine-minute train hop from Shinagawa, in this dark and creepy games centre.

The red-lit front doors open with a terrifying bang, leading to dim corridors where Cantonese voices whisper (apparently saying things like this “don’t choose the wrong door children, or you’ll never come back..”) There are tattered posters in sometimes misspelt Chinese for Filipina hookers, fake little apartment windows strung with laundry and blaring authentic Hong Kong TV-B dramas, and in one touch of high melodrama, a a path of stepping stones through a pool of green ‘acid’ – leading anticlimactically to the carpark.

CLOSED: Tokyo treehouse

I had been looking forward to visiting the “Hideaway”, a hippy-run cafe located in a treehouse in the heart of Harajuku. But when I finally got there, it appeared to be closed.

As so often in Tokyo, finding the venue was an ordeal but when I finally located it I realised that it was fact right next to the store whose name I considered borrowing for this blog back in 2008: Banal Chic Bizarre.

Sadly though as you can see from the photo above, the actual “treehouse” has been removed, as shown below in photos I found here.

 

Instead I ended up eating around the corner, at a restaurant that served avocado cuisine (everything had avocadoes in it) and played great, deep house music.

Park/body

Inokashira Park is one of Tokyo’s most beloved green spaces, strung around a little lake in the shopping district of Kichijioji and famous for its cherry blossoms, cursed boats and occasional gruesome murder.

I had wanted to go back though to visit its zoo, a modest attraction most often visited by local mothers with small children who come to pet guinea pigs and see the collection of ducks and pheasants, squirrels, Japanese monkeys and mountain goats and Tokyo’s most famous, aged elephant who lives alone, sadly, in her concrete enclosure.

But my favourite part is the adjacent sculpture centre, displaying the works of sculptor Seibo Kitamura, who was best known for his Zeus-like Atom Bomb site memorial at Nagasaki (you can see a two-storey prototype here.)

His work is, in my view, not very good – lots of clunk anatomy – but it fits in with Japan’s longstanding love of poorly-made pseudo-classical public art, dating no doubt back to the Meiji era and the country’s attempts to appear Westernised.

  

Still, the latent homoeroticism in his work blazes through (despite the prudishly removed genitalia) and wandering in the late afternoon sun and crisp Winter air, the sculpture park is soothingly silent (being of course, little visited.)

I left refreshed.