8 November 2016
Glay
A day exploring the streets and suburbs of Tokyo
Today the weather is very glay, you may think thats me being racist, however from the wikipedia article on the awesome Japanese band Glay -
Officially, the name Glay is a deliberate misspelling of the word gray and represents the style of music they wanted to play: a mixture between rock (black) and pop (white). Friday magazine ran an article quoting a former classmate of a band member as saying the glay spelling was a simple spelling mistake rather than a deliberate decision.'
So given today glayness, I stayed in Tokyo and walked around the city streets a lot, eating $2 vending machine sandwiches to see if I can get awesome food poisoning.
My path from Ueno was largely a familiar one, going through Akihabara to look at dolls of naked pre teen girls, followed by the Tokyo area to look at people in bad suits looking sad, followed by the imperial palace garden, to see if I could find Crown Princess Masako, long suffering from 'adjustment disorders' and apparently trying to escape the Imperial Palace by levitating above the walls using magical powers.
Actually there are lots of stories about female members of Japanese royalty that make for alarming reading.
Then I went past Budokan, where tonight the Up-Up girls are playing. This group has 7 members, each assigned a color based on their personality and whos main song is genuinely called 'YOLO'.
There was a lot of people waiting in line at 11AM for tonights show.
Then I made my way back across town in the forever glaying glayness back to my glay hotel to plan what I might do tonight and tomorrow.
There were fire engines and people in helmets charging around everywhere in Ueno when I left the hotel this morning, but it seems it was a drill, as here they all are with official press photographers getting awards and clapping for themselves.
Last night I saw super mario kart in the street, amazingly this morning I was wandering down a back alley, peered in a window as I do, and here is where they keep the karts and onesies when not in use. Pure coincidence that I went past.
Akihabaraabrabrasadaabra. Always mildly concerning whats for sale here.
The biggest Yodabashi. Good food court. Lately I seem to have less and less interest in the things contained within. Must be too old, prefer running up mountains.
An Australian guitar shop in Japan, only selling Gibson and Fender. But its not a guitar shop, its a corner of one floor of Yodabashi. So the equivalent in Japan of shitty Australian guitar store is a store that you would assume does not even sell guitars.
Main glay street of Akihabara with very glay sky. Dont need to mention what todays word of the day is.
Places now have entire floors dedicated to star wars. So in a 7 floor store we have plush toys, models of naked pre teens with guns, star wars, trading cards, animated porn, real porn, real porn with CGI enhancements and puppets, golf driving range.
I found the shrine where you take your toys to be cremated by a real shinto priest. I read about it, here it is. You get an urn with the ashes of your old toys.
Now heading into Kanda and Tokyo, big buildings, not many shops, but lots of cafes with smoking areas for salary men to sit and not work.
Todays moat. There will be more moat photos. Moat is todays secondary word of the day runner up prize. Note the Moat is framed with glayness.
You can get a free lunch in the Imperial Palace gardens.
Terrace of hedges, and plastic.
Tokyo central.
The gardens are quite bare, and look a bit plain with the glay sky of today.
Photo of the day....runner up! Palace walls, moat, glay sky.
Live at Budokan. I did this before.
Photo of the day! Just like the runner up only better angles and some color to offset the terrible glay. Nice dead lillies.
Back in Ueno, always a cool place. This is shoe store street.
And this is fresh food street, where people will hold a slice of rock melon (cantelope) and scoop the flesh out with chopsticks, then try and get wet fruit flesh into their mouths without dropping it. Why not just hold it and chomp into it?