Esrock Meets the Harajuku Girls

« Return to Japan (Tokyo)

Picture me, sitting in a black leather chair, with a fluffy bunny tail sowed onto the backrest. A drop-dead gorgeous waitress is dressed like Alice in Wonderland, serving a group of girls with a stuffed teddy bear at the head of the table. The decor is purple velvet, with private mirrored booths cloaked behind thick curtains. My pint glass is lit from above by a 10ft desk lamp, and the girls are chattering away like grannies at a late-night dungeon tea party. It’s innocent and perverse and culturally extreme. This is Tokyo through the looking glass.

It’s tough not to feel like someone has turned the cultural sweater inside out. The brands are all here; Prada, Gucci, KFC, MacDonald’s - but they’re re-imagined, adapted for a country that is…different. Hence shrimp burgers and skyrise Prada stores. Bigger, brighter, bolder, in creative directions the west might not handle.

Take the Elvis’s. Every Sunday for over a dozen years, these guys dress up in black leather, slick back their hair and dance to 50’s rock n’ roll. They do this in Yoyogi Park, publicly, and they bust their moves all day, rain or shine. A few yards from them, another group has started, and this brewing park side rivalry has all the makings of a West Side Story. We call this theatre, but in Tokyo, this is life. Further along the path, young rock bands are performing for their enthusiastically supportive girlfriends. They are so close together that the music blends into one distorted punk-folk-Japanese-pop-metal-ballad. My stomach grumbles so I pick up a chicken yakitori stick from a street vendor, which cost $5. Next time I’ll let my stomach grumble, because street food anywhere shouldn’t cost $5, much less one stick of chicken. Rain pitter-patters, but something’s happening under the bridge. In most parts of the world, a group of older men openly perving out over three schoolgirls in uniform is cause for criminal investigation. In Tokyo, it’s Sunday, so the cameras are rolling, the girls are singing high-pitched anime-pop with pompoms, and I feel a little dirty just looking at them. But here come the Harajuku girls. Every weekend, a large group of girls dress up in their best S&M, fantasy, Alice in Wonderland, punk rock or insectoid outfits. That teenage girls own such outfits says a lot already. Tourists gather on their way to the Meija Jingu Temple, and take pictures of the freaks. The girls love posing, although they are determined not to show it when it’s time to say “cheese”. This is not Halloween. It’s another weekend at the park. The girls travel for hours each way from the suburbs, expressing their creativity in a manner that is bizarre, fascinating, sexy and disturbing. This perfectly sums up modern Tokyo.

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