maids and lolitas

Saturday night (after exploring Kamakura all day) and Sunday, Maya and I made a breakthrough: We had been worrying a little that Tokyo wasn't nearly as crazy as we had expected - where was the insane Bladerunner-with-screenplay-by-Nabokov apocalyptic future-world we were led to believe we would find? No worries. We found it.

That night, when we went out looking for a laid-back place to get dinner, we stumbled on the "shopping arcade" area right around the station that we had first come into from the airport. A multi-block netherworld lit in neon and bustling with video-game arcades, pachinko slot-machine halls, jampacked outdoor bars/eateries, "love hotels," and adult video/toy stores, the place was completely insane - and had been right under our noses all along. Outside one of the adult shops we noticed one of those sort of vending machines that in the U.S. usually sits by the exit of a grocery store and dispenses gumballs or friendship braclets. This one dispensed little toys of traditionally dressed Japanese women intricately bound in extremely compromising positions (let's just say that one of the toys involved an octopus; another, a candle)! Needless to say, I bought one (which ended up being one of the tamer models - see below; those little transparent thingies on the lower left? Toy dildos...of course).



Then Sunday we went to the Akihabara district, which is home to "Electric Town" (basically a seemingly neverending super-mall for electronic goods), as well as numerous Manga (Japanese comic books) stores and, uh, things called "Maid Cafes" (click the link for an explanation - I can't wrap my mind around this shit enough to even begin to explain.) As soon as we came out of the train station, we were assailed by Japanese girls in various maid costumes (see below) handing out flyers for various cafes. (I thought about going to one, but felt so dirty just considering it that I decided not to.)





After eluding the maids, we stepped out into Electric Town, which was literally blocks and blocks and blocks of stores selling cameras, iPods, cellphones, computers, etc. And with salespeople shouting at potential buyers on the street with megaphones.



In between the electronic stores were shitloads of Manga store and toy shops (Akihabara has, in recent years, become the headquarters of the so-called otaku), some of which were literally filled wall-to-wall with the aformentioned vending machines, dispensing, in this case, more benign toys than that machine: shit ranging from bananas with baby faces to mini musical instruments to anime girls in bikinis. Maya was shocked and awed at the absurdity of it all.



Then there were the toy stores that brazenly displayed what should have been X-rated figurines, like those on the shelf pictured below, which was situated in a shop right next to Transformers, Hello Kitty, and shit, and right in plain view of the many kids and parents who came through.



Overwhelmed by the blazing sun and, even more so, by the stunning strangeness of Akihabara, we moved on to the Harajuku area, which is famous as a hangout for bored Japanese kids dressed in outrageously awesome goth/Hellraiser/Lolita fashion. Here I am, looking not at all like a goth hellraising Lolita, at the head of Harajuku's main strip, Takeshita street.



I had been expecting the kids to be sitting around together, basically posing for photos while making distainful expressions at the people photographing them. While this wasn't quite the case (the kids were kind of just walking around, mixed up with everyone else), there were plenty of cool-as-fuck outfits and they were actually more than happy to pose for pictures.



(Maya deserves a shoutout here for chasing down this amazingly outfitted couple to snap the shot below.)







Harajuku made me think of St. Mark's Place in NYC - like, the old St. Mark's (punky, funky, and cool) crossed with the current one (Japanese). The stores along Takeshita were selling all sorts of over-the-top clothing - including some stores that literally specialized in "Lolita" fashion, from "strawberry shortcake Lolita" to "gothic Lolita." One shop was even selling these amazing goth kimonos, which I personally think Maya would look great in... but she refused to spend our hardearned money on it. Oh well.