Tokyo Five

On Sunday we started our day with a visit to the teenage shopping street Takeshita Dori in the Harajuku neighborhood.   This area is Tokyo at its tackiest, and something of a tourist attraction.    While some members of our party investigated socks, I was busy with my camera.

Crepes of many kinds!

Lolita floor or Gothic and Punk floor?

So some people actually wear these kind of boots:

As an antidote, we next went to visit the Ota Memorial Museum of Art, which had an amazing exhibit of wood block prints by Hiroshige.   Most of us are familiar with some of the classic images of the prints, like these:

But this exhibit featured some of the very first printings of the images; what was startling was the absolute vividness of the colors, which made the compositions really come alive.  No photographs were allowed, and, in any case, they could not reproduce the effect of seeing the originals.   It was an eye-opening exhibit.

Then we walked along Omotesando, a very high end shopping street, famous for its flashy modern buildings like that by Herzog and de Meuron for Prada.    I don't know if anyone really buys much in these stores; I was entertained by the sight of t-shirt and shorts clad tourists entering the building and being greeted by the so elegantly clad store personnel.

Sunday shoppers, out in force, entering a funhouse mirrored shopping mall:

The Prada building:

Reflections of an adjacent building in the Prada windows:

Then it was a retreat from commerce again, this time to the Nezu Museum, a small and very elegantly designed museum of Japanese art.   There were some amazing screen paintings and ancient bronzes and pottery.   No photos allowed.
The museum also has a spectacular garden.  It's a beautiful oasis in the middle of Tokyo.

The iris season was just about over:

There was a small bamboo grove:

We had our delicious green tea at a counter in a very stylish tea room overlooking the garden.

Continuing our pattern of alternating retail sights with art museums, we decided to finish the day with a visit to Shibuya, the true mecca of young people's shopping, and home of the famous crosswalk where all traffic stops and thousands of people cross the large intersection, going in every direction.  It's an unforgettable spectacle.

Advertising and neon signs are everywhere:

And more strange architectural manifestations:

Omelettes, anyone?

I don't know what this is about:

Tokyo Four

We had noticed that there was an art fair in Tokyo in the International Forum, and we all wanted to go see it.  The idea is very similar to other international art fairs like the Armory Show in NewYork; a large number of galleries have small exhibits featuring their artists.   What was immediately noticeable was the absence of the smell on money floating in the air that you sense in New York.  No important looking people on cell phones; but mostly people coming to look at the art.   And most of the art being things that New York critics might sneer at.   We all found things we liked; the stuff that intrigued me the most were those works that invoked various traditional Japanese art techniques, and made something new out of them.   After our trip the day before, I was amused to see this piece created out of scrap wood:

We walked around the Tokyo forum a bit afterwards, because it is such an amazing building.  The roof was having some kind of problems, with a protective sheet covering it.

After a very tasty lunch at a tempura restaurant in yet another high end shopping mall, we went for a walk in the area surrounding the Imperial Palace.

View of the Tokyo Station (modeled on the Amsterdam train station) from inside a French restaurant in the shopping mall.

The area around the Imperial Palace is wide open and beautifully planted.   You can't actually see the Palace itself, but the fortification walls and moats are quite impressive.

There was also this architectural oddity from the 1960's, a music hall built to honor the Empress.

After that, we went back to the Shinjuku area to visit one of our favorite Tokyo stores, Tokyu Hands, which is sort of a combination hardware store, craft store, stationery store, and whatever else you might think of.   It features every possible permutation of whatever you might need or might never have thought of in a typical display of Japanese inventiveness and thoroughness.

The Shinjuku area also has numerous skyscrapers of all kinds.

Then it was back to Nakano for dinner.   I mentioned earlier that Nakano has many restaurants.  We ate there almost every night, and the meals were always very good, and very reasonable in cost.   It was sometimes an adventure, especially if we were in a restaurant where virtually no English was spoken, and the only food descriptions we had were in pictures.   Sometimes you were never quite sure what you were going to get.  But it was always good, and the quality of the fish was extraordinary.

It was a pleasure to walk around at night, with narrow pedestrian streets and lively crowds.

 Whenever you look up, you see the ubiquitous electric wires which are found in every small Tokyo neighborhood; nothing is buried here.

Restaurants and bars:

This is one of the restaurants we ate in.

 We didn't go in here:

Other enterprises:

The local pachinko parlor:

The ubiquitous you-know-who:

Places like Nakano are part of what makes Tokyo special.  It's like a little village in the middle of the huge metropolis, five minutes train ride away from  Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world.