One of my main
missions for this trip was to find a wedding dress. Because let’s face
it, if you can’t find a nice dress in Tokyo, there’s little hope for
you anywhere else. All of my hopes for finding this elusive dress were
pinned on Day 2, the day we would explore the main shopping havens of
Tokyo. I knew that if I didn’t find the dress on this day, I could
pretty much forget about getting a dress ever.
Well in short, I failed.
We started off the day with breakfast at a café outside Shinjuku station’s new south exit, which
faces Takashimaya Times Square. The menu was completely in Japanese so
I just pointed to a photo of some fried things and hoped for the best.
They turned out to be giant fried oysters. Success!
Then we took the subway to Roppongi.
It took us something like 10 minutes just to find our way out of the
Roppongi train station and figure out which exit to take, because all
the train stations in Tokyo are MASSIVE. They just go down and down and
down until you wonder just how deep underground you really are, and
then they sprawl this way and that. Some stations have over 40 exits.
According to Wikipedia, “the Toei Oedo Line platform 1 at Roppongi
station is 42 metres underground, making this station the deepest of
the Tokyo subway stations.”
Eventually, we found the right way out, which was the way that would
lead us to Roppongi Hills, the upper class mega-complex which
incorporates office space, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafés, movie
theaters, a museum, a hotel, a major TV studio, an outdoor
amphitheater, and a few parks. Our main destination within this area
was the Mori Tower.
It was gorgeous. It was modern architecture at its best. It oozed class and money and good taste.
The Mori Tower is a 54-story building. The first six levels contain
shops and restaurants. The top six levels house the Mori Art Museum and
the Tokyo City View.
To get into the museum and city view, you have to take a separate
entrance, which is really just a lift that brings you straight to the
52nd floor. Outside that entrance is this super cool spider sculpture
by Louise Bourgeois, named “Maman” (”Mummy” in French).
At the 52nd floor, we bought tickets that would gain us entry into
both the art museum and the city view but unfortunately the museum was
closed. The museum doesn’t have permanent exhibits so it’s always
closed in between exhibitions. We were really quite unlucky — the
museum would have been opened on the very next day, with an exhibition
that looked extremely cool, judging from the posters and videos they
were playing around the tower.
So we just went to city view, which was in
itself pretty awesome. It took up the whole of the 54th floor, and had
floor-to-ceiling windows all around, which meant you could get a
360-degree view of all of Tokyo. Pretty fucking awesome.
While the city views took up just the
outer edge of the 54th floor (where all the windows were), all the
space in the centre was used to house a large and beautiful aquarium. Lianyi loves fishes, so he was very pleased. I’ve never been fascinated by the creatures, but this aquarium arranged all the fishes so
that they became works of art.
We thought that was all but no! After we came out of the aquarium,
we found out that we could go to the rooftop of the Mori Tower to see
the views without all those pesky glass windows to block us from death.
According to this plaque, the open air sky deck is a Lovers
Sanctuary. Indeed, nothing says I Love You like vertigo and heatstroke.
Once we got tired of the view we went back down and made our way to Harajuku. HARAJUKU!
Once we got out of Harajuku station, it was another pain in the ass
trying to figure out which way to walk. There were maps outside the
station but they didn’t help much. Eventually we just decided to follow Lianyi’s instinct and walked towards what we hoped was the Meiji
Jingu Shrine. His instincts proved right!
This Shinto shrine was built after the deaths of Emperor Meiji and
his wife, Empress Shoken, in the garden area which they sometimes used
to visit. It’s a tourist attraction, but also a working shrine, where
people come to pray. Shinto weddings are also held here, but we weren’t
lucky enough to see one.
The shrine is enclosed within a 700,000-square metre forest. Once
you’re in, you don’t hear the noise of the city anymore. It’s quite
amazing, like a whole different part of Japan altogether.
You can buy a votive tablet and then write what you wish for on it and hang it here. The monks will collect it and pray for you.
After the shrine, we went searching for the Edo Memorial Museum of
Art somewhere in Harajuku. It was a pain in the ass to find, but
eventually we found it, almost by accident. It was a very small museum
and we couldn’t take any photos inside of course. We had to take our
shoes off at the entrance and change into Japanese slippers. The museum
contained a lot of wood block prints from ancient Japan. Some of them
were really beautiful. I would have bought a print if they hadn’t been
so expensive.
It was already dinnertime after we were done with the museum. We had
skipped lunch (so much to do, so little time!) so we were pretty damn
hungry. We decided to hunt down a sushi place recommended in one of our
guidebooks. We found it along Omotesando, Harajuku’s main shopping
street. It was a little conveyor belt-type restaurant, and it was
delicious and surprisingly cheap. We had our fill of sushi and
okonomiyaki for just about SGD10 each!
Then we just wandered along Omotesando, feeling very unhip and uncool. We entered La Foret, a shopping centre that is just shop after
shop of painfully hip clothes that neither of us were cool enough to
wear (or wealthy enough to afford). For example, one of the items of clothing on
sale there was a t-shirt that was already pre-torn with holes all over
it and cost something like $200. Most of the other buildings in Harajuku are just single shops
devoted to one designer label. The one above is the Gap store. Unlike
in Shinjuku or Shibuya, the buildings here aren’t very tall, which
makes the whole area feel less claustrophobic.
After that we went into Kiddyland. Kiddyland is 5 floors filled with
toys and all sorts of nonsense that you don’t need. In short, it is
amazing. We must have spent an hour there. The first floor held all
kinds of crazy things, like a USB stick with a humping dog (so that
when you stick it into your PC it looks like the dog is humping your
computer), stereo sets that look like they’re made out of Lego bricks
(I really wanted one), cutesy kitchen utensils with faces cut into them
and dancing animals of all sorts.
Each of the other floors contained toys dedicated to specific
cartoons, like a floor for Hello Kitty (of course), a floor for Snoopy
and a floor for Naruto. On the top floor we found a toy that you have
to put together yourself, and then it will light up and make funky
colours. The box said the act of fixing up this toy would bring you
back to your childhood days of assembling train tracks and Lego houses.
“Remember when your eyes used to be bright?” What a way to sell eh.
There was really a lot to see and explore but we were already damn
tired and running out of time so we couldn’t take much of it in. Along
Omotesando there are lanes branching off of it and each lane consists
of more shops and art galleries that look really inviting and
happening. I was quite sad that we couldn’t spend more time in Harajuku
or Roppongi. I would love to go back to Tokyo and just spend entire
days exploring these two cities.
After Harajuku we went to Shibuya, which is like Shinjuku on drugs.
It’s just filled with tall buildings all over, so all we did was take a
photo with the statue of Hachiko, cross that famous eight-way traffic junction and then pay a visit to Tower Records, which is 7 storeys tall.
We spent like an hour inside Tower Records, that’s how great it was.
They even had special booths dedicated to the bands performing at the
Summer Sonic music festival which we were attending at the end of the
week. Lianyi wanted to buy a box set of The Who CDs but decided
against it and then came to regret it later. We ended up buying a CD
that the store was playing, by a band called The Faint which we’d never
heard of before.
After that we took a cursory glance inside one of the shopping
centres and then went back to Shinjuku for some sleep. It was about 11
pm when we returned, we’d been walking around for about 12 or 13 hours
non-stop and we had to wake up early the next day for Hakone.
Exhaustion was pretty much the theme of this trip.
