Japanese Valentine's Day & Chiyoda, City of Music

If you can't tell from that photo, take it from me: Valentine's Day in Japan is like nothing you've ever seen before.

Here, Feb. 14 is a family holiday more than anything else, and whereas couples still spend extra time with each other and exchange corny gifts, I was a bit surprised when my host mom bought me a package of chocolate (with rum inside). I awkwardly thanked her, but later learned that I have to repay her in chocolate three-fold a month later on March 14.

But if you thought Valentine's Day was commercialized enough in the United States, then Japan would look like a 24-hour advertisement. Balloons, cards, candy, clothing -- hell, even the dogs were celebrating.



Some friends and I met at Ebisu to celebrate the memory of St. Valentine, who would probably be smitten with shock to see what his name has become in the Far East. Ebisu is a quiet area near Shibuya with French-style eateries and courtyards. The main plaza is even called a chateau. Hand-in-hand couples were abound. Gag.

But I thought the sights of everyone carrying balloons was much more interesting. I also think kids really enjoy Valentine's Day, or at least all the pretty colors.









We also walked around a playground near the train tracks and through a residential area that seemed as if it had been dropped into the community haphazardly, with hardly enough room for even one car on its roads, and in some cases fewer than two inches between houses.

Since it was a pretty warm day, we headed to Shibuya in late afternoon for some karaoke, which is kind of a requirement if you're in Japan for at least two days. I sang "Johnny B. Goode," "I've Got You Under My Skin," the Ghostbusters theme and "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Walking through Shibuya at night afterward, I couldn't even tell it was nighttime. The lights are so damn bright.



But I had to get a good night's sleep, because my friend Kohei was taking me to the fashion explosion that is Shimokitazawa and the music cacophony that is Chiyoda City the next day.

We were to meet in Shibuya at the Hachiko statue, a dog structure that is a famous meeting place, but since I got there early, I walked around a bit and noticed a stone sculpture that reminded me of a certain philanthropist who died for our sins:



Shimokitazawa is a popular residence for college students and Japanese pop-punk rockers. It has bustling roads lined with clothing shops (new and used) and is home to several popular and successful Japanese bands.

And, of course, there's Gyoza King, a restaurant well-known for its cheap and delicious gyoza (tiny Chinese dumplings). It was delicious.

But since Kohei and I kept talking about music, we had the urge to play, so he took me to Chiyoda City in the dead center of Tokyo. The area itself houses mostly businesses, but along the main street for at least two blocks are the goofiest and most frequent music shops I've ever seen. There must have been at least a dozen stores for just guitars, not to mention violins and other stringed instruments, horns, speaker systems, turntables, effects pedals, percussion ...

It was pretty much a musical fantasyland, especially since it had been been a couple of months since I'd played my guitar. (A note to my fellow musicians: Just like at Guitar Center, you can try any instrument you want, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of yen it costs -- and the store workers even tune it for you.)









By the way, Kohei is totally awesome at bass:



It was great to go to Chiyoda and get all that built-up musical energy out of my system. It's a nice area, too, particularly overlooking the water on the bridges, where the view has kind of an industrial beauty to it. Or, walking by the temples and shrines that are seriously so random that you walk into them almost by accident.





I've been in Japan for almost seven weeks. In some ways it feels as if it's just been a few days, but in other ways it feels as if months have gone by. I know that I'll be leaving before I even know it (in about nine weeks). So, if anyone wants any specific made-in-Japan crazy thing, let me know. Otherwise you'll be getting either an anime keychain or a big pack of Calorie Mate.

Won't You Be My Yokohama?

For weeks, I had been anticipating the bike ride through the diverse streets of Yokohama, Japan's second-largest city that is about 30 minutes south of central Tokyo by train. It quickly became one of my favorite spots in the country, for reasons that were surprising even to me.

Yokohama has two very distinct sections: the glitzy, European-style fashion center by the waterfront and the poverty-stricken, cramped corridors home to thousands of migrant workers. Both are equally captivating.

The train station that the group of about 15 students and a professor met at is Sakuragicho (sakura means "cherry blossom" -- my Little Run friends will remember learning the song in fifth grade). It opens up to a spacious plaza right near the harbor, where you can see Landmark Tower (one of Japan's tallest buildings) and a colorful amusement park with a huge digital clock in the middle of its ferris wheel.





As we rode through the promenade, we crossed a bridge that spanned a man-made waterway that trickles through the city and circled modern shopping centers and stores that are a hot spot for well-to-do Japanese splitting their time between Tokyo and this prettier metropolis.

Through the nearby park, where cherry blossoms bloom in the springtime (the same time they do at the Washington, D.C., mall), you can catch a panoramic view of not only the Pacific Ocean but the seemingly infinite ships and tankers that line the harbor, and the cranes that load materials onto them. It fits right with Japan's blanket theme of duality. Here we have a calm, grassy area and dark-blue waterworld, sprinkled with industrialization's footprint. There is something distinctly beautiful about the fusion of both worlds.





We then turned off the side of the long park and biked through the pretty nearby streets, winding up some hills and eventually carrying our two-wheelers up a steep, stepped path to a lookout. A couple of decades ago, water actually rose and flooded the area where we stood, which was at least a couple of hundred feet up. From there, we could glance out over all of Yokohama, to see the natural beauty, the modernization, the cascading orange-and-white cranes, the less-developed housing and the mountains in the distance.



From there, we strolled through another beautiful, yet much smaller, park with a tiny fountain in the middle, lined with incredibly close-cropped, dark-green trees, and with an old Japanese sundial off to the side. No idea why that was there.

We also rode around a path that looked down upon a traditional-style archery dojo, which is actually public and will teach anyone for a few thousand yen. It was dead silent except for the wsheeoow and THUMP of the whizzing arrows every 30 seconds or so.

Another unexpected and historical site was the foreigners' cemetery, a graveyard perched high above the main drag of the city where hundreds of non-Japanese are buried. Most of them are British citizens from a hundred-or-so years ago, who died in battles, but a few were from the late 20th Century. The city itself is home to huge Chinese, Korean and Thai populations -- as I discovered in great length later on.

But our next stop was one of the richest parts of Japan, a downtown shopping area whose wide streets stretch through miles of high-priced clothing and jewelry stores, chic cafes, electronics vendors and dessert parlors.



At this point, after spending about 45 minutes walking through the fashionistas and Japanese Rockefellers, we were faced with what may be one of the starkest contrasts in the country. We had just seen the richest part of Yokohama; three blocks south and we were in the poorest.

The Yokohama ghettos are practically a cultural case study. Thousands of migrant workers from Korea, China and Thailand have moved there seeking work, many of them laboring at the harbor. The streets are dirtier, the buildings are less kept -- even some of the vending machines are cheaper, with one selling drinks for 50 yen, about half the normal price, though the beverages were all colorful knock-offs.

It's maybe the one place I've been to in Japan where I didn't feel totally safe. Nothing happened to us or anything that was cause for alarm, but the safety taken for granted in virtually every other part of the country is in absentia here, mostly because the inhabitants aren't homogeneously Japanese. As we biked into the area, a man drinking with his friends said to us in Japanese, "Safety first, safety first!"



(Above: A man, possibly ashamed to be living in a poor area, shields his face from my camera in the middle of an alleyway in the Yokohama slums.)

The neighborhood, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also home to the headquarters of the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Our guide, my sociology professor, told us that he spoke with a young yakuza member once who was testing out his English, and when the professor asked him if he ever runs into trouble with the police, the man replied that the police and the yakuza work together. Kind of scary -- not the corruption, because even the United States isn't a stranger to that, but rather the openness with how obvious the criminal-police relationship is.

Remember how I mentioned Japanese duality before? Yokohama speaks to this facet in so many ways.

From that neighborhood, we biked to the city's Chinatown, which is the largest in Japan -- so big that my two friends and I got hopelessly lost even though we had directions of where to go.







But it was a fun time. Chinatown has oodles of tasty treats, cheap toys, funky fashion, rickety rickshaws -- come to think of it, not too far off from New York City's version. Interestingly, though, most people were Japanese and not Chinese, despite the heavy Chinese presence in Yokohama.

The sun was setting, and it was time to speed back to the promenade and return our bikes. But if Chinatown was any premonition, we were doomed to get lost again.

It didn't even make sense. Our professor headed the line, while an older student/tour guide picked up the rear -- it was a foolproof plan. Somewhere along the way, the professor and about four students pulled ahead, and the caboose yanked away another handful, stranding eight students and me in the middle with no idea of where the hell we were in Asia.

If you know me, you know I have a terrible sense of direction. But if you know me, you also know I love an adventure.

My friend James and I decided to keep heading straight up the street we were on, because it felt right, and it was pretty at night. (Look, if we're gonna get lost, we're gonna have a fun time with it.) We figured out which way was Sakuragicho, and we headed there -- all in a night's work. Along the way, I captured this gem:



After we returned the bikes, about half of us headed over to what my professor calls "the real Japan." This may have been the most profound part of the trip for me. We walked about a third of a mile into another neighborhood, densely populated by both Koreans and Japanese, that is virtually untouched by the globalization that covers the rest of the country.

When you go to Tokyo, or Osaka, or even some of the suburbs and rural parts of the country, globalization is everywhere: the giant shopping complexes, the Hello Kitty/short-skirt-high-stocking/dyed-hair-with-dolled-up-makeup fashion statements, the somewhat artificial lifestyles. It's all fun, and it's all Japan, but frankly, it's all a bit weird.

This part of Yokohama had none of that. It was just people of different origins living their lives. Parts of the neighborhood were astonishingly beautiful in their simplicity.





I titled this post "Won't You Be My Yokohama?" in part to play off the Barenaked Ladies song, but also because I feel that should I decide to return to Japan someday to live here, I would like to live in Yokohama. It's a city that certainly deserves more than a cursory bike ride, but that's why I'm here for four months.

Freaks & Geeks

I thought I was going to Meiji Shrine. I thought it would be a nice trip through a forested, sacred patch in the middle of urban Tokyo.

I didn't think it would be like getting zapped into a live anime show with more over-dressed characters than the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Right outside Meiji Shrine, the more-recently-built area dedicated to the emperor who helped modernize Japan, Tokyo's most character-obsessed cartoon nerds gather every weekend to take semi-professional photo shoots, eat cake and flirt with each other. There are girls dressed like crosses between Alice in Wonderland and Pikachu. There are boys wearing tear-off leather tights and dark makeup all over their faces. There are some who I can only describe as asexual, or nonsexual, or pansexual, or -- just look at some photos.





It was crowded, seeing as about 200 fanatics were crammed onto a small bridge that just crosses over some train tracks, but that didn't stop me from getting a free hug from one of the characters holding a sign that read, "FREE HUG." At first I was worried that she was offering something else that got lost in translation, but my fears were dashed when I did indeed receive a genuine, authentic, anime-freak hug. My first one.

Meiji Shrine is just around the corner. Leading up to the wooded temple is an area shrouded in giant foliage, bubbling creeks and open spaces. Teen-and-shop-filled Harajuku is right outside the walls of trees, but all the sounds vanished once I walked under the Shinto gate marking the entrance to the shrine.





Just like when I visited the Imperial Palace, the sun was at a perfect place to strike the shrine in golden rays as it crept slowly beyond the tall trees. Turns out I was even luckier -- a traditional wedding ceremony was making its way through the main part of the shrine just as I arrived. Japanese and foreign tourists visit the shrine every day, especially on Sundays, so I didn't feel out of place in the line of people that formed down the middle as the bride made her way across the wide-open grounds. An escort held an umbrella over her as she walked with her mother and the groom.

When they reached the entrance of the shrine, they paused and bowed, then did some other Japanesey things, and then everyone crowded around to take pictures. She looked gorgeous, dressed in all white and wearing a very large traditional head garment. I got lots of great photos, but I like this one best.



This is where people throw yen into a cage and then pray:



In short, the Meiji trip was splendid, and was a really nice break from all the commotion that swarms me every day, from my daily commute downtown on a crowded train to walking back at night amid a storm of salarymen.

About a three-minute walk from Meiji Shrine is Yoyogi Park, a gorgeous green space roughly the size of the Boston Common where all sorts of people gather on weekends. For example, your average Japanese Elvis-impersonating rockabillies that fight turf wars over the space in which they can sing and dance ...



... to the run-of-the-mill, amateur Japanese street group performing a shot-for-shot remake of the Broadway musical "Stomp" ...



... and, of course, the possibly-homeless rogue feeding bread to hundreds of crows, which are about twice the size of their American counterparts ...



There's usually a giant flea market on Sundays at Yoyogi Park, but I arrived too late to see it -- although I'm told it has some breath-taking views, including gay streakers. So I'll be sure to return in a couple of weeks and post those photos up, too.

And, as usual, I'll save the truly bizarre photos for last. Before I headed into Meiji, I walked around the shops along the main street next to it. There were the somewhat-weird mini-doughnut shops (delicious smell) and unique clothing boutiques. But then I saw a tiny store that looked like it specialized in selling exclusively Tamagotchis -- and when I walked in, I was dead right.



Remember those things? You feed the digital pet some food, and it gets happy, and sometimes it sleeps, and then later it pees and you have to clean it up, or else it dies. Apparently they never went out of fashion here.

(WARNING: Pregnant women and children should not read the end of this blog post.)

I thought I was done window shopping when I saw an almost hidden sign for an underwear shop. Again, I thought it was a lost-in-translation advertisement for a clothing store. Again, I was wrong. In case anyone wants some ridiculous underwear, please let me know -- because I can get you loins from your wildest dreams. The lady behind the cash register let me take lots of pictures, so I did, although I'll only post one up here, because if ever the word epitome were properly defined, it would be in this.



I'm not saying whether I bought anything.