Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong – March and April 2008

For more photos and less commentary, you can check out my Flickr.

 

Shoppers crowd Takeshita street on a Sunday afternoon, in search of sartorial trash and treasure. If you’re under 30 you can find almost anything in Harajuku to suit, from vintage stores to designer boutiques to the latest in extreme cosplay. Even if you’re not interested in the clothes, watching the people is entertaining enough. On your way out, struggling your way through the tight-packed but ever-polite throngs, pick up one of the fresh, hot crepes that Takeshita is famous for, filled with berries and cream.

 

The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, is a playhouse for children and adults alike. There’s no set way to explore the museum. We wandered around, from room to room, up tiny spiral stairs and down long corridors. At every turn there’s something to marvel or delight over – giant robots from Laputa, the interior of the Three Bears’ house, a Totoro catbus for children to clamber over – right down to the tiniest details like the stained glass in the windows, the little broomsticks in the courtyard, tap handles in the shape of cats. There is also beautiful art, of course, as you’d expect from the creators of films like Spirited Away, and a small theatre plays a short original film throughout the day.

 

Sushi and sashimi are probably the first to come to mind when you think about Japanese cuisine, and it was a consistently fresh and delicious choice throughout our travels. But we sampled so many other types of food too – ramen and gyoza, unagi-don, shabu-shabu hot pot, sizzling Kobe wagyu beef – most of which I brilliantly forgot to take photos of, probably because I was so busy going nom nom nom and making haste with the chopsticks.

 

Expatriate hang-out Roppongi is reasonably busy even on a Wednesday night. We hit the bars for cocktails and the clubs for dancing, then relaxed with some crepes and water outside 24-hour discount store Don Quijote (a great place for bargains and oddities) before heading to karaoke. The trains in Tokyo stop at midnight and don’t start again until 6 in the morning, so if you’re out for the night, you’re out all night – but it’s easy to pass the time when you’re having fun.

 

The famous Shibuya crossing seen here rather dimly, through a crosshatched window inside Shibuya station. As you’d expect, Shibuya is huge and its department stores are scaled to match. Close to this photo are Mark City and Tokyu, each the size of small villages (even if you’re not interested in the clothes, their restaurant parks and food halls are well worth visiting). Nearby is the famous 109, retail mecca if you’re female and aged under 30, as well as ubiqitous chain stores like HMV. And yet, just a few steps away, we also found tiny, quirky bars, small enough to sit only 5 or 10 patrons, half of whom seemed to be friends with the bartenders. Here, as much as anywhere, Tokyo seemed like a city of huge contrasts, with enough space for almost any niche or subculture.

 

Sunset in Kyoto. You can often pretend you’re the only tourists around in Tokyo, whereas in Kyoto every street corner and every bus is packed to the gills with foreigners, clutching maps and poring over Lonely Planets. Meanwhile, the residents of Kyoto go on about their business. Even the geishas we glimpsed in the traditional Gion district, though mobbed by tourists-turned-paparazzi, were merely on their way to work – stopping politely for a moment or two before hurrying onwards on their teetering platform sandals.

 

Springtime is a beautiful time to visit Japan. Cherry blossoms, and other flowers, are everywhere, even in crowded Tokyo. It is also school holiday time, so be warned of the queues if you decide to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

 

There are many temples you can visit in Kyoto, all exhaustively listed in Lonely Planet. We limited ourselves to four, spread over a few days. The stone temple, Ryoan-Ji, was one of the best. The gardens are large and beautiful, and for a small entry fee you can rest for a while beside the zen garden, a simple space of raked gravel and placed stones.

 

Another beautiful temple is Fushimi Inari Taisha, famous for the red wooden arches (torii) that frame its mountain paths and fox-statue shrines. There’s a 4km looped walk up the mountain, paved but very steep, that at times I thought would kill me. Halfway up we stopped for a rest in a teahouse and after a fortifying drink of ameyu (hot and gingery and sugary) continued on our way. The walk was worth it.

 

The castle in Himeji. This too takes a lot of (narrow, slippery, dark) stair-climbing to reach the top, though it’s not nearly as strenuous. As impressive as the fortress is, it was the women’s quarters with its long winding corridors and cool, darkened rooms looking out over the cherry blossoms that really made me wonder about what it would’ve been like to live hundreds of years ago, contained inside these beautiful but narrow spaces.

 

Seoul is just as busy and complicated and fun as Tokyo. From our brief visit it also seemed more direct, the Koreans louder and brisker and more inclined to what was on their mind. The streets are lined with cheap delicious restaurants and expensive designer stores; while the pavement outside grows high with the day’s rubbish (in that respect, very different from Japan). The stall above was by far the craziest at the Dongdaemun Stadium markets, everything piled up whichway. DVD players and porcelain vases next to microscopes and fishing poles. Crazy but also strangely hopeful, the thought that there could be someone out there who’d want these things, that it’s only a matter of time before finding a second home, a new purpose.

 

We were waiting for a table at the Peninsula hotel in Kowloon when we read in a magazine that Kanye West, N.E.R.D. and Teriyaki Boyz would be playing that same night in Kowloon Bay. Hyperventilating with excitement, I made the call straight away and bought tickets on the spot, for the most expensive A-section no less. Ostensibly A Bathing Ape promotion, this was just a straight-up concert. Japanese hip-hoppers Teriyaki Boyz, with BAPE’s Nigo on the dj table were fun and catchy. Second act N.E.R.D., whose first album I still love, were somewhat disappointing – though it was pretty funny when they called the Olsen twins (!) out from backstage to dance during one of the songs. But this was Kanye’s night. With the stage bathed in fog and lights, he ruled with an all-hits no-filler set that included a rap breakdown during Flashing Lights about the price of fame and the importance of staying real that was felt honest and heartfelt. For the encore, Teriyaki Boyz came back out for a song before introducing Kanye and Pharrell back to the stage. I paid about twice what I would’ve considered my normal limit (for an artist I like but don’t love) for a show in Sydney but it was totally worth it.

 

Of all the cities we’d visited, Hong Kong was the only one I’d been to before. I remember from that first visit years ago – one of the first times I’d been to an Asian city – feeling like this was a real city, what a city was meant to be. Walking the streets of Mongkok and Central with my ears open for the Cantonese I only half-remember, watching these loud and busy people going about their business, I felt that way all over again. Like London and New York and now Tokyo as well, it just seems like a place where there is something new and different every day, where stories happen.

AL.