How long would you wait for your loved one?

10 years is how long Hachiko waited for his master at Shibuya station. Every day from 1925 to 1935, the dog would go to the station and wait for the afternoon train, the train that his master used to take home from work. Only he wasn’t coming because he was dead and so Hachiko waited in vain. Did people talk to him, I wonder? Did they gently pat him on his back and say, “go home,” “he’s not coming.” Or did they just watch quietly, feeling a little pinch in their own hearts where a lost love ached?

Whatever the case may be, Hachiko’s faithfulness and persistence made him quite famous and he is now a sort of mascot for the neighborhood. You see him on buses, on elevator buttons and in front of Shibuya station there is a little statue of him, which has become a popular meeting place for locals. Every time I passed by, it was surrounded by throngs of people waiting. And there is more fame in store for the little dog, according to Lisa; Richard Gere is at work turning the story into a film. The Hachiko legend lives on.

Hachiko statue a popular Shibuya meeting spot

In other news: We are at Narita airport waiting to board American airlines flight back to New York. Thanks for following our adventures here on the blog, hope you had as much fun reading it as we had writing it.

– Pejk Malinovski

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How to modernize your kimono

Last night Roland brought me along to his friend’s kimono Party. Yes, you guessed it, a kimono party is a party with people dressed in kimonos. Of course it was somewhat tongue in cheek, but as most Japanese these people were dead serious about their hobby. There was a one hour presentation on ways to modernize your kimono, like a 100-yen attachment to carry your cell phone in your obi (kimono belt) or a turtleneck undershirt to keep warm in winter. These things aren’t cheap either; $2000 is about average for a good kimono. And how else to finish the evening but with a kimono striptease?

– Pejk Malinovski

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Post-Tokyo high

Last night I visited the new highrise called Tokyo Midtown, which is the tallest building in the city and on its lower floors contains — thanks to vast swaths of wood, elaborate lighting, and other beyond-the-call-of-duty architectural and furnishing details — the most convincingly, tastefully luxurious shopping mall I’ve ever experienced.

And the luxury extended from the sublime to the ridiculous — that is, from a terrific little Picasso retrospective at the mall’s Suntory Museum (including Death of Casagemas, an electrically van Gogh-ish painting from 1901 I’d never seen reproduced) to a store selling nothing but very, very high-priced fruit — such as $10 strawberries and $100 melons.

I’m posting this from Narita airport, drinking good free espresso and feeling happy to have had such an amazing opportunity to marinate in Japanese culture these last two weeks, and happy also to be returning to New York in time for Thanksgiving.

– Kurt Andersen

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Design for the (Japanese) World: Vol. 2

More great design solutions that I wish we could bring back with us to the US:

ITEM 1:

Say you’re shopping in a department store with your toddler and you need to go to the bathroom… where do you stick the kid? TOTO, maker of the world’s most amazing (and complex) toilets offers another great product, attached to the corner of the stall.

ITEM 2:

The Japanese are known for being extremely considerate — but sometimes, even they need reminding. Or perhaps they’d like to politely remind their visitors? This public courtesy campaign is in train cars and stations. This is not your brain on drugs — rather, it’s a gentle, rational reminder not to be stupid:

"Texting while walking means putting a blind-spot in the center of your field of vision."

ITEM 3:

We’ve enjoyed staying 20 stories above Shibuya, one of the busiest pedestrian intersections in Tokyo. So busy, in fact, that they’ve done away with crosswalks: at the signal, hundreds of people cross every which way, then clear out completely to make way for the cars. The wash of people — like four dark waves, crashing into each other and then receding back onto the sidewalk — takes my breath away every time. Especially since I know we’d never be capable of sharing the street so efficiently and gracefully in Times Square.

– Jenny Lawton

(Frustrated Writer/flickr)

(Shibuya on a relatively light day)

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Name that building: revealed!

This afternoon, Leital and I were hitting up some souvenir shops when we spotted this building across the river.  We were just as surprised when we found out what company it represents.

Any guesses?

===============

THE ANSWER:

Indeed, it is the Asahi Breweries HQ.

Our pal here says that the French architect actually planned 3 gold flames, all sticking straight up.  But Tokyo nixed that plan — not earthquake safe.  (Speaking of which, word has it we had a small one yesterday evening, though I didn’t feel it.)  However, one flame blowing horizontally has been quite enough to make the building famous.  Of course, it also has its share of not-so-nice nicknames… which I’ll let you imagine (or post!) yourself.  No comment here, except that I give the beer a thumbs-up!

– Jenny Lawton

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New Amsterdam, New Paris

I will probably never be an expatriate. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize in every foreign city I visit about which neighborhood I’d live in. In Tokyo, I think it’d probably be on the Naka-meguro canal, a quiet, Amsterdamish stretch of just-hip-enough gentility only two subway stops from the high-rise neon clangor of Shibuya.

by coder.keitaro/flickr

And by Amsterdamish I don’t just mean the canal. My favorite bits of Japan share DNA with northern Europe — the seamless combination of the up-to-date and traditional, the devotion to jewel-boxy craft and detail, the appreciation of minimalism in all realms, the surprising doses of humor to leaven the high-style sobriety.

Consider just three characteristic shops along Naka-meguro canal. Higashiya sells tea and sweets, but the sweets are each like little abstract sculptures, the teas are kept in dozens of pristine and dramatically lit white cardboard boxes behind the counter, and the storefront is a gorgeous copper slab into which they’ve cut a single deep opening, maybe two feet by one foot, more of a giant keyhole than a window. Nearby is a cafe and upscale children’s store called Snobbish Babies. And I ended up spending almost $100 in a button shop, of all places, called & Stripe: “button shop” hardly does the place justice, since it’s more like an art gallery in which buttons are the medium.

Not that Tokyo is wall-to-wall chic, of course. It now makes sense to me that Paris Hilton is a star in Japan. A small but significant fraction of young Japanese women — the aggressively cute, highly glossed, vacant-and-faintly-debauched-looking ones — are Paris Hilton simulacra, I swear.

– Kurt Andersen

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Bad Fortune Lack

While the Japanese are known to be secular or atheist, at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples you’ll often see people dropping coins in an offering box and praying (albeit briefly). Another ritual at these sites is to get a fortune, or omikuji. At the Akasuka Temple in Tokyo, you deposit 100 yen in a slot, pick up a metal cylinder, shake it, and a stick falls out with a number on it. You then go to a drawer with the matching number and pull out your fortune.  Just like a cookie, right?  Um, not quite.  Here’s what we got:

Ouch!  I was hoping bad fortune would lack, but it’s just bad luck.  As if all those awful things are not enough, they throw in the last line: “Everything will come out to be bad, so you should be patient.”  Patient for what?  Death? But apparently this is only one level of curse, and not even the worst one.  Only after getting home and reading up on omikuji did I realize that you’re supposed to tie the paper in a knot around a tree (or special wooden rack at the shrine) to deflect your bad luck away from you and to the tree.  Guess I’m going back!

-Leital Molad

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Pachinko wizard

I was alone in Kyoto part of last week getting tape for a story.  One night after doing an interview, I was looking for something to do… and I stumbled into one of the city’s gigantic pachinko parlors.  The sliding doors opened to a wall of sound — a cacophony of pop music and high-pitched cartoony explosions. Of course, I got out my recorder. (Stay tuned.)

(Suviko/flickr)

After I was ordered put it away, I wasn’t quite ready to leave.  And thanks to a very patient lady attendant, I soon joined the ranks of pachinko-crazed zombies.

Here’s how it works:  about $10 gets you 250 little silver balls to start.  You turn a dial and it releases a ball up to the top of the machine — then it bounces down through a series of pegs, and if you get it in a hole, you win that ball back — plus more.  The goal is to win as many balls as possible.

The pachinko machine we had in our basement growing up was basically just a lever, balls, and pegs — but these machines had crazy lights and sound and a video that with every level won told a new chapter in a manga story.  Picture a modern pinball machine on speed.

(evhead/flickr)

Although my lady attendant had to correct me several times on proper pachinko form, I soon started winning back balls.  A lot of them.

After 20 minutes though, I got bored (couldn’t understand the screaming cartoons on the screen) and decided to give back my balls and leave.  My lady attendant fed them into a machine, then hurried me to the front of the parlor where I was given a candy bar and some plastic cards with numbers/credits on them.

Then things got weird: she spun around and hurried me out the back of the parlor into a creepy alley.  At this point, I was sure that my little cultural experiment was about to get me mugged.  But instead, she led me to a little booth — behind a lace curtain, a woman’s hands appeared and traded me my cards for cash.  A lot of cash.  Like nearly 10 times as much as I put in.

Shocked, I thanked her and ran away.

Now from what I hear, pachinko parlors are run by the mob — and I was supposed to act like my prize was really that candy bar and the credits to keep playing.  (In other words, the hurrying out the back door to get my pay-out part never happened.)  But you’d never guess that gambling is illegal here from how ubiquitous and mainstream these places are.  They’re the biggest, brightest, loudest businesses on the block — and certainly the most popular.

Of course, I gave all the money back.

– Jenny Lawton

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Tokyo Confidential

As we walked down one of the narrow side streets of the Times Square-ish entertainment district around the Shibuya train station, past swank rock clubs and “love hotels,” we came upon an unlit, grimy, highly decorative stone-and-stucco facade that looked to be from the first third of the 20th century — an anomaly in a city where buildings from the 1950s and 60s count as unusually old. We entered. And discovered one of the oddest, most wonderful little establishments in the developed world. Do you, like me, fantasize about time travel? Are you a fan of Eric Ambler or Alan Furst novels? Then this is your place.

It’s called The Lion, an 82-year-old lounge devoted not just to classical music but, in effect, to reproducing a particular highly atmospheric time and place — Europhilic Japanese cafe society of the interwar years, tatty old-school gentility with just a touch of noir.

The wood is dark. The lights are dim. The tobacco fog is thick. The menu consists mainly of coffee and tea. The chairs are red velvet, each with its own white linen antimacassar. And nearly all the seats are turned to face loudspeakers contained in elaborate wooden cabinetry, over which Shostakovich is playing — Shostakovich from an audibly vinyl recording punctuated by heartbreaking pops and hiss. Although Lion’s two floors could easily seat 100 people, the arrival of the four of us at 5:30 yesterday increased the patron count by a third. People read, people write, one man sleeps, but no one (except the loud Americans from New York) speaks.

– Kurt Andersen

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Be here now

Buddhist word of the day: On the overview map of Kyoto train station I noticed this funny thing, instead of saying “You are here” it simply said “Now”. I guess it comes to the same, except “Now” would be true not just for the Kyoto train station map, but for most places you go, if you think about it. A little lesson in how to never get lost.

– Pejk Malinovski

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