Right, have any of you been to New York City? And more specifically, 5th Avenue NYC? Well, even if you haven’t I’ll provide you all with a simple analogy to compare Ginza, Tokyo to 5th Avenue, New York since they’re both major somewhat high-end shopping districts/streets in their respective large cities.
Take 5th Avenue, give it multiple doses of a few drugs that don’t exist yet and probably won’t ever exist, and stick it in Tokyo. Wham! You have Ginza.
Looking down a main street in Ginza.
Block the five lane streets off to cars during the day and set up a bunch of tables and chairs in the middle and let society take its course. All in all I was quite blown away at first sight of Ginza. There were people everywhere, tons of shops, wide streets and lots of tall buildings. My original reasons for going to Ginza were to see the Sony Building and the new H&M. In the end, both were rather disappointing. The Sony Building seems much changed compared to what it once was and the H&M was rather lacking of men’s fashion. Of course, to get in H&M there was a line. And a second line. It’s like going to an amusement park or something. The Japanese love it!
But, other than those two stores I found a great Uniqlo with jeans for ¥3995 (about $39) which is a great price for jeans in Japan considering most other pants and jeans I see range from $70 to $200. But, I never did buy anything and eventually saw that most stores in Ginza were very high-end like many of those in 5th Avenue NYC. There was a Swatch, Chanel, Coach, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, etc. All catering more to the rich high-life people in Tokyo. Other evidence of this includes the multiple Porsches, Ferraris, Benzs, etc. Also, there didn’t seem to be a lot of people from my age group. All the people there were older married couples, rich couples and foreigner tourists. Everyone was attached and their style of dress seemed to often be more formal than the fashion I was wearing or what one might find in Harajuku.
So, by the end of Ginza I was rather bored with it and kind of taught myself a moral. There I saw so many couples or married people. All were dressed formally. Not young-looking and fashionable, but young-looking and formal. Young married couples and such. But the whole time I didn’t really feel any air of happiness among the crowds. (And there were a lot of people.) Everyone still seemed to kind of drone through there. While being able to buy anything there at any time was there happiness, it wasn’t mine. So I left unhappy and arrived eventually at a trendy area closer to where I live called Kichijouji. There I walked around to a few shops just before closing and stood watching a band called Jamgo Five play a bunch of cool rock songs outside the train station. I love Kichijouji and I think it will get its own separate post sometime soon.
Note: As I was writing this I felt the second earthquake since being here. The first was magnitude 5.0 and today’s was magnitude 5.0 as well. Both with their epicenters at about the exact same place. The second felt like the same old same old, it was the first that freaked me out at first. I was excited to have experienced it but kind of freaked out about the potential danger of that situation.
Writing from Koganei, Tokyo, Japan | October 8, 2008
