Inspire me and they'd come to my rescue
I'd dress them wicked, I'd give them names
Love, Angel, Music, Baby
It was raining cats & dogs last Saturday afternoon. I was soaked to the skin as I trekked down a quarry dragging my climb gears behind me. I got home and collapsed into my bed. When I woke up a couple hours later, I smacked myself on the head before throwing a few clothes into a suitcase and caught a cab to the airport.
Thank God for sleeper beds, I slept fitfully for once in a moving transport for the next 7 hours.
When I finally peeled off my eye mask, it was Sunday morning and my plane has landed. I shuffled through immigration, grabbed my suitcase and caught an airport bus. Two hours later, I was in my Westin hotel room. I took off my shoes, hop in bed and switched on MTV.
I couldn't understand a word the VJ was saying.
I turned off the tv, got out of bed, put on my shoes and got out of the hotel. The bell boy pointed to the direction of the train station. I bought a ticket and hopped on the next train I saw.
I was absolutely clueless where I was going. I got off at the station where most people got off and followed the crowd. When I exited, I was swamped by a wave of people, noise and music. The scene is exactly out of what I have watched 20mins earlier on MTV.
I peered through the mass looking for a road sign. There is a huge oriental style arc leading into a very colorful street. It reads: “Welcome to Takeshita-dori Street”. Just about then, a pink tutu-ed lady sashayed pass me at this moment with her poodle. Followed closely was a gentleman in a tall hat and mascara. Minutes later, I passed by a group of gothic lolita brides in leather tunics and wedding veils.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, this is what Gwen Stefani has been raving about.
It suddenly occurred to me that barely 12hrs ago when I was drenched in the rain in Singapore, I have now landed myself in the heart of HARAJUKU.
I am tempted to start raving on and on and on about what I saw, hear, taste and felt the rest of my trip in Tokyo. But you will be bored and I am a horrible travel reviewer. I don't remember names, signs and directions.
So, I will just share with you some interesting facts I learnt from my trip:
1. SMS me later? No way! If you see the Japanese busy typing away on the mobile phone, they are not sms-ing. They are sending e-mails. SMS service is rarely used in Japan as you can only send a sms to another user of the same service provider. Instead, each mobile phone has its own email address which can receive messages from another mobile phone (of any service providers) or computer.
2. Confused culture? When a Japanese child is born, he/she is baptized in a Shinto. When they grow up, they get married in a church with a western style white wedding dress. When they pass on, they are buried according to the Buddhist custom.
3. Ever wondered what the creature you see on a can of Kirin beer is? Kirin stands for ‘giraffe’ in Japanese. However the Japanese do not have any idea what a giraffe looks like before opening of their doors to the foreigners. Thus, they drew it out the way they imagined it would be from hearsay. Alas, it was far from what the real thing looks like!
4. Hungry for noodles? Do you know that 'ramen' do not taste the same throughout Japan? In the South, the soup base is cooked using pork. In the north, chicken is used. In Tokyo, it is cooked from miso (soy). Funny enough, people from Tokyo usually prefer northern or southern ramen. The thickness of the noodles used for ramen depends on how oily the soup is.
5. Looking for a mate? The Japanese answer is ‘Matching Parties’. Essentially you bring a single friend for someone who is looking for a date and he/she in return does vice versa. Double dating is common elsewhere too but apparently this is such a frequent affair in Japan that it is the only way most people meet– pickups are rare.
6. Down on your luck? If you visit the Meiji-jingu shrine, there is a chart which tells you which age in your life are your 'bad years'. Each person normally have two such cycles. For example, if you are born in 1979, your down years will be when you are 19 and 33 yrs old.
7. Need to light up? In Tokyo, you can smoke in almost all indoor restaurants and indoor buildings would have smoking rooms. However if you wish to light up outdoors, you are only allowed to do so at designated smoke stations and absolutely not while walking along the streets.
8. Hachiko who? At the junction of Shibuya just outside the train station is a statue of a dog built in memory of a loyal beagle named Hachiko. His owner goes to work everyday via Shibuya Station and Hachiko will wait patiently for him at the station. The owner died one day and stop turning up. Poor Hachiko waited at the station for days and in the end, died of starvation.
The above facts stands corrected in my head only. Please pardon any loss in translation and understand that my most used Japanese word during the trip is 'Nani?' (What?) to everything asked of me.
One fact that I know for sure, is that the Japanese sense of fashion and style is unmatchable in the Asia region. I may sound like I am just ploughing the street in leisure all day, but I was actually 'working' and part of my job is to check out what the kids are wearing. It's not uncanny that the Japanese boys look good in skinny 'shoe' cut pants in neon colours and the girls can wear a potato sack and still look as 'kawaii' (cute) as ever. There are absolutely no rules and I never saw a replica of another person's clothing in Tokyo ever - unlike here where if you walk 100m along Orchard Road, you can pass at least two girls wearing the same Zara/Mango top.
And I boil it down to this: They don't look good because they have great figures. Come on, all of them have figures of pre-puberty skinny adolescents. But what is amazing is the attitude they carry wearing what they do. They don't have silly esteem issues nor are they judgemental about others. It is the 'i'm-wearing-this-cos-I-look-damn-good-in-it' attitude that makes them so cool.
I can only sum it up,
Tokyo absolutely rocks!
I can't wait to go back into Japan
Get me lots of brand new fans
Osaka, Tokyo
You Harajuku girls
Damn, you've got some wicked style
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