Curing Rubbish in Tokyo

Some more shots from Tokyo ...

This shrine/temple (honestly, I can never remember which are which, and that's pretty lame on my part) was just a short walk from my hotel. They lit the sucker up at night, and it was very cool to walk around and check out for 30 minutes or so on my way back to my room. The thing about Tokyo was, you would just be walking down the street, and something like this would just pop up out of nowhere. I didn't make a point of seeing this, or arrange to have my hotel near it. It was just there. And there was a lot of that going on in Tokyo.

I think that's an Edo-period gang sign he's flashing.







A note about the subway system in Tokyo: on two different occasions, a random stranger approached me and asked whether I needed help as I stared and stared at the complex subway map up on the wall. One guy was with his wife and two kids, and they had this patient look on their faces that told me he had done this before. The other were two giggly girls. I noticed them looking at me, and when I looked over at them, one of the girls pointed at herself and said, "Me?" I said, "Yeah, sure." And she helped me to the point of pulling aside a train worker to make sure I was going where I needed to go.

These are just a couple pics of the crazy electronics/magna area in Tokyo, Akihabara. The one picture is going up the escalator, and notice, that not a surface is spared of advertising. Even the tiny space in between the wall and the escalator itself gets a tiny strip of adage.




And this is Harajuku, where teenage girls (and one boy) dress up in odd outfits and pose for western (and, without a doubt, plenty of Japanese) tourists. Also there were, as the picture indicates, kids giving out free hugs. And my favorite was this guy dancing very passionately to U2 while someone with a very professional-looking camera filmed it all. And lastly, the crowd, which seemed pretty typical for Tokyo. Just an unbelievable amount of people.

And finally, my favorite picture of the weekend. There were many street-corner bands in Tokyo, but this one stood out for its music, and most of all, for its seriously-cool name.