Slingshot

On a recent business trip to Tokyo, I took advantage of a Friday finish and extended my stay over the weekend to take a little time to discover the city. A word you hear a lot when people are explaining Japanese culture to you is “contrast”.  It’s in their architecture, their food, their interior design, their lifestyles.  A black cup on a white saucer.  Sushi, green tea and miso soup all at the same time.  Youth disguised as teddy bears in a city park surrounded by ancient Japanese religious monuments.  There are few blends here, and many stark contrasts. At first, there seems to be a sort of brutality to the juxtaposition of such completely different things, but you soon come to realise that the Japanese aesthetic is all about contrasts, and it’s really very elegant in its own way. In two days, I discovered plenty of these contrasts, and realised that they are for me a large part of what makes Tokyo such an extraordinary place to be.

Everything works as planned in Tokyo.  At least that’s the appearance it gives to casual visitors like me.  The metro system is metronomic in its efficiency, when you reserve at a restaurant you are expected to show up at the time you reserved for, and when Tokyoites cross the road, they all do so simultaneously, and they keep within the pedestrian crossings. This last point is all the more remarkable given quite how many people can be crossing the road at the same time.  Within a day of being there, I started unconsciously behaving the same way, being scrupulous about crossing the road only once the lights had changed, and only where I was supposed to.  I expect there may be something to the broken windows theory after all.

I spent most of my weekend either eating or walking the city.  I thought it would be rude to whip out my camera and start taking pictures in the restaurant, but I had a particularly pleasant experience at SushiZanmai where I finally managed to see for myself what people mean when they tell you Sushi is just better in Japan.  Never have I eaten sushi this good, this fresh, this plentiful or this cheap.  What we get in Paris compares very poorly with the flavour, the freshness, and in particular the helpings that you get at this very standard sushi restaurant. Food in Tokyo is generally good, and walking into a random ramen or other restaurant was – at least in my case – always a pleasant experience.  The city clearly has an “eating out” culture, with more restaurants per block than anywhere else I’ve ever been.

Ginza

Ginza is the most western part of Tokyo I visited, and my hotel happened to be nearby, so I spent more time there than anywhere else.  This is where you get to pay 10 euros for a coffee and feel like that was cheap.

Everywhere there are megastores with brands that we all recognise, but aren’t used to seeing in such large and extravagant architecture.  Massive glass-walled showrooms announce brand names like Chanel, Dior, Emporio Armani, Omar Piguet, Rolex, Vanessa Bruno and so on.  There’s also a bit of a French fetish at work, with local chains of Dalloyau, Mariage Frères and Printemps, as well as the Belgian chocolatier Pierre Marcolini.  Basically, if it’s branded and expensive, you’ll find it here.

One thing you quickly notice about this area as well as all the others is that Tokyo is vertical.  A building will have a shop on the ground floor, and then signs indicating stores on the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh floors.  And those stores are no less impressive than the one with the glass facade – for example Abercrombie and Fitch are on the second and third floor above (as I recall) Dior.

The restaurants are often hidden away on the top floors of these pseudo-shopping-complexes, as this area is quite possibly the most expensive in Tokyo in terms of rents.  The joke that I was told was that if you take Japan’s highest-denomination bank note and fold it up as small as you’re physically able, then you drop the folded up banknote on the ground in Ginza, it’s value will not be sufficient to purchase the ground it landed on.

Shibuya

I unfortunately don’t have any photos of Shibuya, but there’s really not much that’s visually impressive in terms of architecture.  What you do see here is Japanese youth in all its crazy splendour.  This is the area where the teenagers and university students gather to preen in public and purchase more of the outlandish clothes they like to wear.

Actually, that’s a little unfair.  The girls dress in the most original way they can, each wearing clothes that look as though they were personalised by her just to ensure nobody else would be wearing quite the same thing.  Dresses with frills and layers with different patterns, tops with designs each more colourful, outlandish or three-dimensional than the last, headwear and hairstyles that probably take more time to put together than your average European spends grooming in a month.  The boys, on the other hand, fall into two clear categories.  Either they really don’t care what they wear and they’re in branded T-shirts and jeans, or they’ve got themselves a job and they’re all wearing near-identical suits, white or blue shirts and a tie.  All of the differentiation among this latter class of office-worker is in the hairstyle, which is clearly a matter of great importance to the Japanese.

Shibuya is one of those places where you wish there were more coffee-shops so you could just sit and people-watch for hours.

Shinjuku

Shinjuku is the area that contains Tokyo’s equivalent of Pigalle.  It’s the red-light district.  Of course there’s more to Shinjuku than the red light district.  If you leave the central area near the station and head west you get to some skyscrapers and expensive luxury hotels.

I got completely lost here.  Everything is extremely gaudy and disorienting, the shops are all either gaming parlours (the Japanese are clearly very into video games and gambling machines of various descriptions), bars, restaurants, nightclubs, private clubs, cabarets, hostess bars, love hotels and a wide variety of perplexing businesses that, I presume, offer services that border on prostitution while studiously avoiding crossing the legal boundary between “adult entertainment” and brothels.

The Japanese attitude to this sort of thing is something I have yet to figure out.  Europe is clearly extremely prudish in comparison to the overt nature of the adult industry in Tokyo.  The Love Hotel evolved out of the lack of personal space in the home, and provides an apparently socially acceptable place for a couple to go spend some intimate time together, the rooms are clearly rented by the hour.  I think the sex trade also uses them as a venue for their services to avoid anything “illegal” happening in the local clubs.  There is a wealth of information, including books studying, cataloging and even photographing the phenomenon (see link to the right).

Harajuku

Harajuku is where you go if you want to see the Japanese love of dressing up taken to an incredible extreme.  This is where young Japanese meet up on weekends dressed as their favourite anime characters, or their favourite rock band. The disguises they wear know no limits, with groups of friends wandering around in full-body teddybear outfits and others in extreme goth disguise that would put to shame any real goth hanging around a London suburb.

I’m not sharing the photos I took here because they’re of people, and I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to use them, but a google search will give you an idea of what it’s like.  Harajuku is now the name given to the hobby of dressing up in this DIY fashion, and has also been “borrowed” by Gwen Stefani for her new perfume.

Ueno

Switching from one extreme to another, I took the extremely efficient metro to Ueno on the Sunday to take a look around the old temples and the park in this district.  There’s more of this in Tokyo than just this district, but I didn’t have all the time in the world at this point.

Ueno station is much like any other, crowded and efficient, but when you enter the park, you enter a haven of quiet and serenity.  As you approach the temples and shrines themselves, you realise again that “a country of contrasts” doesn’t really do Japan justice.

I was sorry to see that the Toshogu Shrine was being renovated and was therefore not open to visitors, but you can still walk up the approach, see the bronze lanterns and the front gate.  The temple itself was hidden behind a canopy which was no doubt there to protect scaffolding from the elements.  It’s hard to begrudge a country with such wonderful landmarks the opportunity to maintain and renovate them, but their timing really sucked.

On the approach to the Shrine, I came across the prayers, wishes and thoughts of those who had passed before, in the form of inscribed wooden tablets hanging on a form of billboard.

Although some were very thoughtful, globalisation’s dark side was manifest in the occasional “Ted woz ere” prayer, but the concept of people leaving their wishes and prayers in this form is quite moving.

There were several shrines and temples, which meant that even though I didn’t get to see the Toshogu Shrine, I did get to see what these look like inside. I don’t know whether the Japanese are particularly religious.  My guidebook indicates that they’re remarkably tolerant of various belief systems and that the most religious people in the country are the Catholics.  Perhaps there’s a strong dose of superstition as there is in China, but I didn’t really see much evidence of that either.

There’s certainly a healthy respect for religion, with everyone studiously washing their hands before entering temples, even if they seemed to be tourists from another part of Japan.

Overall, I was very lucky to be able to spend a weekend in Tokyo – it’s much too far away for me to do that without free-riding on my company’s need to send me there for work.  I found the Japanese to be incredibly nice, with their general behaviour being much more considerate of others than what life in Paris leads you to expect.

More than anything though, what I love about visiting a place so different from where I live is that it opens your mind and knocks you out of the rut that the daily grind constantly threatens to trap you in.  It’s the same when I visit Africa, or the Middle East.  But Tokyo is special. Whereas in Africa or the Middle East there’s a constant effort necessary to adapt to local customs and expectations of your behaviour, I found that on the one hand I wanted to act in a way that let me blend in, it was an intellectual effort but not an unpleasant one, and on the other hand, when I got it wrong, the Japanese laughed, and explained things to me, because they’re really very tolerant, and the fact that you made the effort and you tried is what really counts.