The City That Sometimes Sleeps in Pods: Part 2

I wrote about the first half of my trip to Tokyo here, if you missed it. This will be about my third day in Tokyo, with a final post coming later. Let's return to September and pretend that this isn't what my living room looks like right now:

You didn't see this.

Day 3


In the morning we saw kabuki, which is far too sophisticated and important to sully by taking photographs (also the lady told me not to). A full play is usually three or four hours long, but Kabuki-za in Ginza, Japan's premier venue for this sort of thing, sells cheap(ish) tickets on the day of the performance so you can see a smaller play or section of a play. This was ideal, since we didn't know too much about kabuki and, eager though we were, did not much fancy sitting for four hours through something we couldn't understand anything of. The act we saw was interesting, and you can certainly see the skill of the performers - their movements and vocal inflection are very specific and almost surreal to experience - but I'm glad I opted for the short version. Without speaking fluent classical Japanese I'm not sure I could fully enjoy it, and even then it might, well, go on a bit. Also kabuki only uses male actors, and -  while there is supposedly a high level of skill and artistry involved in playing the female characters, and these characters are supposed to be exaggerated tropes and not played realistically - the performance of the female characters just comes off as silly and distracting, to be honest. The actors' voices are thrown and broken all over the place, and grate on the ears. I'm sure I'm being totally crass and uninformed on this subject, but I still went and saw it so I'm more cultured than you.

Stop number 2: the owl café. Japan loves theme cafés. There's cafés where you can play with cats, and rabbits, and maid cafés (and I mean, there's this). I've been to a cat café (only once so far, unbelievably), but Nagoya has yet to bless us all with a place to cuddle owls, so this was one of our priorities in Tokyo.

We were here an hour, which felt like about fifteen minutes. Time flies when you're trying not to get pooed on. We were given a brief talk on how to handle the owls - which was all in Japanese, but the gist was "if they bite you, they don't like it" - and then were allowed to hold and pet them with the supervision of the staff. Big owls, small owls, some as big as your head. At the end we all received a drink (covered in clingfilm, so as to protect from aforementioned pooing) and a little souvenir. The recipients of the best gifts were chosen in the traditional Japanese manner (rock-paper-scissors), but we ended up with some very cute novelty chopsticks. And I got to hold several owls. Several.

Stop number 3: The teen fashion Mecca of the world. Harajuku. My thirteen-year-old self just nibbled her own fingers in delight.

I've wanted to go to Harajuku ever since I discovered its important role in the wars of the Edo period yeah okay, since that Gwen Stefani album came out. Nowadays, I just appreciate it as a good pop album with a lot of solid karaoke choices on it, but when I first listened to Love Angel Music Baby - wow, ten Christmases ago almost to the day - it became the core around which I built my fantasy future identity. Put yourself in my scuffed-up school shoes - I was greasy and uncomfortable and had this big red spot on my forehead that just wouldn't go away. Listening to that album, even looking at the cover and turning the glossy pages of the inlay, took me somewhere far away from school and home and my own increasingly gross body. Travelling to this Harajuku place that Gwen was singing about - this magical quirky district on the other side of the world - was my firm goal. It was full of amazing people. It was full of amazing places to discover. Going there was somehow - somehow - going to transform me into the kind of super-cool, original, fearless person that I desperately wanted to be. I'm still not the super-cool steampunk fantasy icon I imagined my adult self as, but the spot did go away eventually. And I did finally get to go to Harajuku.

It wasn't quite the fairytale I used to picture - a dengue fever outbreak had sprung up in a nearby park and the subcultural kids had all sloped off to hang out somewhere else for a while - but I still got to do a bit of shopping:

I also ended up with a pair of shoes and a lilac pinafore dress from an Alice-in-Wonderland themed shop, because I'm a goddamn grownup and I can do what I want now.

(If this post feels incomplete, it's because my trip to Harajuku felt a little incomplete - it was dark and almost closing-time when I went shopping, and I didn't have time to explore the smaller side-streets, and then there was the whole massive disease thing. I enjoyed myself, but it felt more like a quick stop than the fulfillment of the dorky dreams of my youth. Definitely something to return to another time, so my tween self can more fully spread her oily, disgusting wings.)

Coming up: The City That Sometimes Sleeps in Pods: Part 3