Harajuku Sunday

One of the more famous areas in Tokyo is a place called Harajuku. Harajuku is home to a vast variety of stores selling very off-beat clothing called ‘street fashion’. Within street fashion there are many different sub-groups, but the one that I am most familiar with is called ‘gothic and lolita’, which grew out of clothes worn by Japanese bands in the early 90’s, I believe. This style draws heavily on rococo and Victorian clothes as well as more punk-looking styles, and while often in black or other dark shades it is also found in pastels for a cuter look. While some people do wear these clothes to do everyday things, many people wear them in a park near Harajuku where they can see and be seen. The streets were absolutely packed with people, many of whom where foreign, and lined in many different boutiques selling all matter of different clothing. While we looked in many shops, I didn’t find anything that particularly jumped out at me until I caught a glimpse of a very colourful shop out of the corner of my eye. It turned out to be a costume store unlike any I’d ever been in before. The place had everything from large sequined headdresses to French aristocrat-style men’s jackets, all of it very well-constructed and unique. When I found a rack of men’s military costumes based on styles from Takarazuka I knew that I had to get one, and so, in an uncharacteristic impulse-buy, purchased a white square-buttoned uniform that was rather reminiscent of ‘Rose of Versailles.’ After leaving that store we looked at a couple more, and my friend found a really cute outfit for herself that was cute without being overwhelmingly so. After this we decided to head over to Shibuya, where the map that we had been given at our hotel said that there was a dim sum restaurant, the first that either of us had heard of in Japan. Shibuya station is enormous. It seriously felt more like an airport than a train station and was very difficult to navigate, even though the signs were in English. Near Shibuya station is a district called ‘Kabuki-cho’, which is rather infamous for its sleezy clubs and the like. We didn’t go in. Unfortunately, when we got to the promised dim sum restaurant it was closed for remodelling, forcing us to find somewhere else to eat in a very expensive area. We finally found a nice, clean, Thai restaurant, where we ordered a 2-person lunch set that was very good but extremely spicy to the point of being mildly painful. Our next planned stop was at something called a ‘butler café’, which is a take on the much more common maid cafés that crowd the Akihabara area of Tokyo. Basically, in a maid café the waitresses are dressed in frilly maid outfits and do everything in a very cutesy manner. Butler cafes come in two types: ones where the waiters are men, and ones where the waiters are women. Both types of butler cafes cater to young women, and my friend and I decided to try out one of the later type. The café was on a side street in Ikebukuro, and had I not known what to look for we would have walked right past it. The décor was elegant and the black-tea ice cream was really tasty, although I had, in an unfortunate oversight, chosen to sit in a corner about a foot away from a young couple that started smoking about 15 minutes after we got there. Part of the point of this sort of café is to talk to the waiters, which was, sadly, a bit difficult from our vantage point in the corner. We were both pretty tired after a long day of walking, so we headed back to the hotel early and watched some dvds, though we took a short break to go down to the corner for some curry.
-Harajuku is *very* busy on Sundays
-There just doesn’t seem to be any dim sum in Japan. I have heard rumours that there might be some in Yokohama or Kobe, both of which have historically had a lot of foreigners, but I’ve been to neither yet.
-In butler or maid cafes you basically can stay as long as you like if you buy something every hour. In the case of our café everything on the menu was 500yen, which really isn’t bad in Japan.
-Most sleazy areas in other towns seem pretty much okay in daylight, but Kabuki-cho is pretty unsavoury even in daylight.
-If you want to get to the other side of Shibuya station, I would recommend leaving the station entirely and navigating around it.