An Observant and Desperately Ironic Teenage Perspective

Meji Shrine in Harajuku district. It's very difficult to take pictures of shrines and temples in Japan because you're not allowed to walk or stand in the middle of the path towards the shrine in case god pops up and wants to walk there. You're also not allowed to take pictures of the actual shrine itself. Therefore my pictures are mainly of the sides of the shrine, littered by the other English teenagers that were there with us. It's difficult to capture the shrine nicely because it's so calm and quiet in there despite being in the centre of the city.
 
This is looking back at the first courtyard of the Meji Shrine. We were taken there because apparently it's 'the best.' I don't know if you're supposed to be favouritist about these things but then after having so many churches shoved down my throat in Vilnius it was nice to visit a different kind of religious building. Shrines have also cottoned on to the fact that if you've come all the way to Japan, you're going to buy a hell of a lot of Japanese-looking stuff to take home. Therefore the shrine has an excellent gift-shop where I was interrogated by a Texan couple who insisted that I keep an eye out for their son Bill who lived in London. It's good to know these people get everywhere.
Different to the gift shop, this is the Meji Shrine shop itself, selling all the religious paraphernalia one may ever wish to buy. Aside from the pointed arrows for new year, they also sell wonderful luck charms. These come with different messages in different colours, with a handy clip to attach it to the mirror of your car or handbag and promise to bring you luck throughout the day. You can buy them for a myriad of conditions, including but not limited to wishing a sick friend good health, passing an exam, general good luck, congratulations on a new child, and my favourite, wishes to pass your driving test.

This is the tip of the iceberg where Japanese vending machine mania is concerned. In the (somewhat morbidly named) Japanese Youth Memorial Olympic Centre where we stayed, there were 4 vending machines to a building and if you were between rooms and in need of an energy drink, jelly, some green tea or chicken (yes, chicken from a vending machine. We tried it for the novelty value as a midnight snack but I strongly advise against it) you could pop 20 yen in a machine littered around any wall and they would top you up until you made it the further 20 metres to your building. I also like the regulation bins that come with the vending machines as they are designed to smile as they eat your rubbish.
This is the entrance of the shrine of the Asakusa Temple with the biggest lantern I've ever seen. Temples in Japan are mainly concerned with death so it was either sad or confusing to see it so busy when we visited. Apparently the Japanese don't consider themselves religious but they follow both Shintoism and Buddhism. Shrines are for matters of life - passing exams, weddings, new year etc. and are very calm and quiet. The temples, however, are noisy, bustling affairs - this one was right in the middle of a busy bit of city.

This is the second building of the temple - I'm not sure of its function but the five roofs are supposed to represent earth, water, wind, fire and something else. It was great to see one of these up close as this is the sort of thing you see in pictures of Japan. However, the roof was very similar to that of my old Georgian art teacher's in Zalia Ezeri in Lithuania. She had a funny little house where the roof hung over the ground floor and someone had attached some decorative temple-inspired mouldings to the edge of it.
A rather ornate sink with baby dragons spurting out water to wash your hands with before ging into the temple. Using the little pots suspended on the end of bamboo sticks, you must wash your right hand first or god won't believe you're a serious Buddhist. Because most Japanese carry hankies they have no problem washing their hands and then whipping out their camera phones to take pictures of the tourists gawping, but for us foreigners it proved more difficult.
This is the shrine itself - I'm not sure I was supposed to take this but it's too late now. As you can see, it's off centre so hopefully god, or in this case Buddha, won't smite me too much as I gave him plenty of room. I found it somewhat disappointing. Probably due to my lack of religious faith regardless of religion, but in churches, shrines, synagogues and temples alike, there's always a little corded off area that's very holy and yet always painted gold and with ugly lighting. The rest of the shrine and temple were very tasteful - well, they managed to avoid plastering up pictures of a dead man on a cross which is a nice change. Perhaps I am coming across as anti-religious but I find the Japanese take on religion rather more practical than the European.
This is the view from under the very large lantern back through the temple. Past the big red gate pictured is a long shopping street, part of the temple. If the shrine had cottoned on to the tourist market then the temple practically invented it, as there was a mile of shops selling all sorts of awful tourist tat, including but not limited to polyester kimonos, chopsticks, wooden fans, bowls, plates and boxes of dried shrimp. Many of these, upon closer inspection, were made in China, so I turned up my nose and went for a wander.
Japan is probably the only country where there is reason to take a picture of the public toilets. Unfortunately I was told off before I was able to take a picture of the western style toilet which I thought was much more exciting. However, this was a brand new toilet block and I just thought it was interesting that they'd chosen to renovate and modernise a squatter past the usual bucket facility. Riga bus station could take a tip or two from this.
Additionally, it was interesting that in one toilet block, there was a choice of western or traditional toilet. The western toilets are probably one of my favourite things about Japan - they come with a huge range of gadgets that you may or may not want attached to a toilet that include music, different coloured lighting, a bidet-like fountain, a waterfall sound for the more timid lady, and a heated seat. Frankly I found most of these creepy, but being a timid lady I found the waterfall sound very practical.
Because all of these appendages are labelled in Japanese, the official message to tourists is not to press the buttons because you don't know what you'll get. I followed this instruction with grave seriousness after my Japanese teacher told me of the time her (Irish) husband unwittingly pressed a button and ruined the ceiling above the cubicle with the bidet function.
The waterfall function I discovered by mistake as all you have to do to switch this on is wave your hand in front of a sensor. Despite being made for the timid lady, if you don't know the sensor is there it can provoke quite a jump.
Despite the fact that it was October, the Japanese had their seasonal street decorations out. Like the plastic flower garden we used to have in our house in Somerset, the Japanese had no shame in using brightly coloured plastic flowers and attaching them to the lightposts. They were very pretty anyway.
The Japanese end of the trip was organised by Seisen University, a Catholic all-female institution which boasted over 200 students. Since they organised the (rigorous) schedule we could do nothing but follow our tour guide, sheep like, through the city as they took us to what they assured us were the essential Japanese tourist attractions. Including a bizarre, tiny museum in the red light district that consisted of two rooms holding bizarre Japanese interpretations of Western things, like this Blaue Engel poster. I'd translate the text but I can't.
I wasn't joking about the mile of shops outside the temple. Above the shops you can see the proper plastic autumnal foliage. The place has a lovely bustling atmosphere at night, as most things in Tokyo claim to be 24 hour establishments, though why you'd need a kimono at 3am is beyond me.
These, however, I would go out for at 3am. This man is operating a very sweet miniature cake machine. Running on a conveyor belt and even equipped with a plastic wrapping bit, tiny little cakes with bean curd inside are produced at an astounding rate. A friend and I had smelt them cooking and had been searching for over half an hour before we established that they were coming from the little machine. A traditional semi-religious snack, it seems, as I bought my mother some in the form of Buddha.
About the size of a pebble, this was the temple shaped one. Very tasty it was too.

Strangely, included in the itinerary of our trip was a visit to another Catholic, all girls international school, housed in this building. Sitting in an adapted shed watching tiny 7 year old Americans beat us at Japanese brought back huge waves of nostalgia for my international school days. As we toured the campus I was reminded of the best and worst things about my days at AISV. The weirdly adapted campus (this used to be a block of flats), the mini library with a bizarre collection of books, mostly donated, the car park playground and 1 computer to 20 kids. However it also made me very happy to realise that tiny international schools all over the world share these traits. The school had just celebrated their 200th student, which reminded me of the great celebration AISV had had on receiving its 100th student, only to lose 2 others the next month.

This was a fluke event - a festival that was happening not far from the campus we stayed at for a saint who died that week. A huge procession ensued and most of the people in it were either drumming or carrying these amazing big jellyfish. Meant to represent spring blosson, they were giant shower puffs on strings, lit from the middle and attached to a man pulling a generator along on the back of his bike. These things were huge, probably 3m high and it took 5 men to carry them and bounce them up and down so their blossomy strings flowed a bit like a jellyfish's tentacles.
This one was a jellyfish blossom made with coloured shower puffs, accompanied by men in the traditional fireman's costume, for lack of a better one available perhaps.
More firemen came out in force. The twirly bit at the top is the big stick carried when a fire was on. Basically, a very primitive fire engine, but it rattled as it was twirled. However, the men carrying it soon got tired and kept swapping with each other, so perhaps it was just as well that they were later replaced with a big truck.


This man had been brought out not just for his generator but his generator-transporting scooter. Hastily covered with a cloth and a drum, he had a kid chasing him up the street banging away on it in an attempt to cover the generator's roar. We also spotted a man dressed as a woman, possibly Britney Spears. No comment.
As with any carnival comes carnival snacks. Look closely and you will behold chocolate covered bananas decorated with fluorescent icing. Genius.
The biggest sweet potatoes I've ever seen! They were at least 40cm long and as thick as a full sized shower puff.

This is rather sweet - instead of horribly oversized cuddly toys for prizes at the carnival's booths, you could win fish. Tiny little goldfish in giant tubs like these were being scooped up into plastic bags by the handful for kids to take home. Probably not a great life for the fish though.
There are many misconceptions about the Tokyo metro, but these should be ignored. It's a little expensive at 300 yen for a ride but it's clean and labelled in English. We rather enjoyed this sign, detailing who got priority seating on the train. As you can see, seats were to be given up for those with walking sticks, crutches, children (born or still in embryo form) and those with hearts.
Food at the Olympic Youth Memorial Centre was dismal. Cafeteria style, mass produced curry served up with endless rice, miso soup and tinned fruit. Vegetarians had it worse, as they couldn't even have soup as it was cooked with fish stock. Avoiding the pork and beef didn't prove too hard for me, but there were a few good things. Breakfast sushi was fun - turning tiny packets of seaweed sheets, smoked fish and rice into a tasty breakfast snack. Grape juice that tasted nothing like grape was very satisfying, and the lotus root. We came upon this one day for lunch and it was delicious. Anything that wasn't rice or gristle (Japanese seem to like their meat with extra gristle) was delicious actually, but the lotus root was lovely. It would have never occured to me to want to put a lotus root in my mouth but it was crunchy and very sweet.
Probably one of the more well-known aspects of modern Japanese life - the anime obsession. Anime are Japanese cartoons - I don't know why they're famous but they are. Think Pokemon. But there are cafes themed around anime where the waitresses dress up like characters (this is called cosplay) in very over the top costumes. We spotted a few from a bus window.
The caption may say cafe but it wasn't quite that. At a visit to the National Museum of Japan a friend and I got bored and wandered off and found this in a strange outdoor area between floors of the museum. At first we thought it was a cafe but we ventured inside and while it contained tables and chairs there was no one to be seen and the closest thing to refreshment was a nearby vending machine. The whole thing was strangely European - the tented rooms seemed more appropriate to Spain or Germany than Japan.
  This was the platform roof of a very curious building. To the left are more tented rooms like those pictured above. The large, ominous looking building was the rest of the museum and below us were the first 5 floors of the building. Very curious indeed.
Japanese vending machines were treated with caution as there was no way of telling what anything was. This, however, we bought simply for the fun of the name and it was delicious. Like a mango flavoured Yakult.
At the weekend Seisen University no longer cared to take care of us so we were set free to arrange our own excursions. Our group chose to go to Kamakura, the old capital, to visit Japan's second biggest Buddha. First we visited a temple up a very steep hill with a special shrine to the goddess of music in a cave.
This was a very sweet little statue in the temple, perhaps praying or just enjoying the sun.
Because temples are concerned with death, they are also concerned with abortion. Apparently the pill isn't so widely used in Japan, probably because of the pharmaceutical market being dominated by men, so abortion is a frequently used method of contraception. Every time a woman has an abortion in Japan, she goes to the temple and buys a tiny statue of the goddess of children who wears a red bib for luck. This part of the temple was absolutely covered in these statues. They line the walls and cover all the surfaces and it was very sad.
Inside the shrine of this temple was a replica (entertaining Japanese pronunciation: leprica) of the biggest Buddha in Japan which the greedy emperor of 17something wanted in his town. Next to the temple was a little building with a prayer wheel. This is an incredibly clever invention: inside the wheel are some of the holy texts of Buddhism, but they're very old so you can't just get them out and thumb through them. Instead, you grab hold of the wheel and run round it seven times, and it means you've read them. I ran round 14 times just to be sure, but I felt tired enough at the end to be sure I had read each text thoroughly.
Temples and shrines in Japan and very well maintained and have these lovely gardens and streams all around - good for the chi apparently. I don't know what state my chi is in but the gardens helped I'm sure.
This is the greedy emperor's Buddha. Unfortunately when he had it built it only measured up as the second biggest - he wanted the biggest one. But it is very, very big. Buddha has 365 curls on his head, we were told, and each curl represents intelligence. Curly haired people in Japan, therefore, are revered as very intelligent. I preened and tossed my curls but then realised that almost no one in Japan is curly haired - it's not a gene they got hold of. Curious.
No Buddha is complete without his flip flops hanging on the wall next to him.
A perk of Seisein letting us free for the weekend was not having to eat the cafeteria food. We were taken to a restaurant by our tour guide and this was placed in front of us. To this day I have no idea what it is but it looked pretty and tasted nice.
As we walked along a long street that led to a shrine on top of a hill that was remarkably similar to Unter den Linden in Berlin, we passed through three of these gates. Present at every shrine, the gates are to cleanse the mind as you enter a shrine. Maybe you have to be Japanese to fully appreciate the gesture but they're very handsome structures.
Atop the hill in the distance is the shrine itself.
And visiting the shrine were hundreds of very cute little girls in kimono for their 3rd, 5th or 7th birthdays, all of which require a visit to the shrine to thank god for allowing one to achieve such a landmark. They are all very cute in their mini kimono with tiny flip flops.
At the shrine we came across a traditional Japanese wedding going on. Another sexist affair, the bride wearing the big white hat to show herself as a blank slate to her new husband.
And then, in direct contrast, this pink meringue appeared. Frankly I don't know which wedding attire I liked least.
There's an acute family obsession with steamed buns ever since we discovered them in a dim sum restaurant in Oxford. They translate as 'Glutinous steamed bun' which is exactly what they are. We had only had the white ones but I asked and the green is tea flavoured (jade buns, very popular at home and can be bought frozen from Jing Jing's Vietnamese shop on Cowley Road). The brown buns are earth flavoured, apparently.
Harajuku is Tokyo's answer to Camden, with Japanese teenagers milling around dressed as over the top goths in ways that only Japanese girls can get away with.
This is the entrance to Harajuku, which I was rather disappointed by. It has a glamarous reputation but it's really just like Camden - full of shops selling punk clothes and shoe shops where the largest size is 39, sob. Harajuku shop keepers also have a very unattractive screeching habit. On entering the shop, the woman at the door will welcome you by screeching 'Konichiwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!' at the top of her lungs in a very high pitch. This alerts the other staff members to your presence and they quickly follow suit. As you wonder about the shop they'll screech a 'sumimaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen' as they squeeze past you in the tiny rooms and when you leave you get a 'sayonaraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!' with the rest of staff following suit.
I saw this in a supermarket in Shibuya. It's labelled as an English sandwich and looks wonderfully disgusting. A woman saw me inspecting it and asked me if I missed English food. Given that the cream in that sandwich was over 2 inches thick, I told her that I didn't, and she nodded approvingly.
Central Harajuku, where the smart shops were. There was even a Topshop, which I've never seen outside of England before.
Seeing this after seeing Topshop provoked a weird moment of 'where am I?!' panic, but I was reassured that it's just a bus that advertises the NHK TV studio we were to visit later. There was also a lorry going round playing Backstreet Boys music with their pictures illuminated on the side. Slightly creepy.

Visiting a sushi bar in Harajuku I was taught a valuable lesson. As in most sushi bars, sushi goes round on a little conveyor belt on plates of different colours, each colour representing a different price. Being a poor student, I was grabbing the cheapest blue and green plates without really looking at what was on them and I ended up with this: raw egg yolk sushi. It was disgusting. I have no idea what the brown stuff opposite the egg yolk was either but it was also disgusting. After that I paid more attention to my choices. Even then it hardly mattered as the bill came to 1000 yen or about 3 pounds for 10 plates. We also saw hamburger sushi being made for kids, with a tiny hamburger atop some rice with ketchup on top.
Here is the sushi bar we went to. Looks pretty much like any other sushi bar in the world, though he had to queue for half an hour to get a seat.
Some teachers from the Tokyo Institute of Flower Arranging, who, apparently, designed flowers for the emperor, came to teach us a thing or two about their craft. Apparently I have quite the eye for flower arranging, as the head teacher of the institute declared mine the best and said I had arranged the flowers with very good chi. I'm all about the chi, it seems.


This was in my favourite shop of Harajuku - Kiddyland. It sold toys and gadgets mainly, but had a floor of Hello Kitty stuff and then shelves of Moomin and storybook merchandise that I had no idea existed. This was the Hungry Caterpillar shelf. Everything was rather tasteful, I thought. I bought a moomin mug for mother and an inflatable Hattifattener for big sister. This was a foolish gift as it had a bag of sand at the bottom to weight it which didn't agree with the baggage limit at the airport, but when inflated my hopes were restored. Big sister and I discovered it looked like a giant inflatable sperm doing jazz hands. Observe:
Next on the itinerary was visiting Tokyo's best middle school. I have no idea why. It was a lovely school though, and boasted many exciting facilities: unicycling in sports lessons, a swimming pool where the floor could be moved up and down to alter depth, 8 judo studios and rice growing facilities on the roof. The rice is then used in the cafeteria which I thought was rather nice. We were went off to eat lunch alone with the kids in different classrooms which was rather terrifying but I managed to get rid of some of my English gifts that we were instructed to bring. Hanging proudly in a classroom in Tokyo middle school is my old Cheney school jumper. Luckily the kids went mad for it as it was rather less formal than traditional Japanese school uniform, which requires students to dress like sailors.
Here are some Japanese school girls going nuts over the blonde English boy. Apparently he looked like a Backstreet Boy - I just remember him being rather annoying. They spent ages screaming and giggling among themselves, getting up the courage to go and say hello. A photoshoot ensued, everyone doing the peace sign (which is still going strong in Japan, apparently) and the boy signing autographs.
Ah, the Dyson Airblade. It's causing quite a storm in England these days, but they're old news in Japan. A modern hand drier, where you just shove your hands in the gap and it does all the drying work for you. I think they're great, but the Airblades in the Olympic Centre left one's hands with a funny smell.