Monday 14 April 2014

Dsy 5: Tokyo Sunday, part 1, Akihabara, Yoyogi Park

We set out for Yoyogi Park, right across town, with a brief but sufficient stop in Akihabara, fabled as 'Electric Town' but not really buzzing for us.

Here's the movie of scenes at Yoyogi Park





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And here some photos and comments

Social interaction, Electric Town Sunday morning



Ultimate doll shop.

On the third floor of a games store... the ground floor noisy games music, the next floor war games with classical piano sweetly playing, on the thrid floor, dolls, the music lullabies, the customers mature man, the gentleman in the brown jacket is softly combing the hair of a doll. A particular corner at the fetish end of otaku. Akihabara is Otaku Central.
We moved on...

Sunday morning on the Chuo Local Line



There is a trick to the Chuo Line, the important line that runs east west across the city, the 'omega' slash of the O of the Yamanote Line, like this Swedish looking ΓΈ my keyboard easily produces, but east west. There's the Chuo Line Local and the Chuo Line Rapid. The Rapid begins at Tokyo Station comes north one stop alongside the Yamanote to Kanda, then heads west for Shinjuku and beyond, going fast. Our quick ride to Koenji as you will know from earlier entries. The Chuo Line Local comes from the next prefecture to the east, Chiba, and arrives goes through Akihabara... where it is still known and signposted as the Sobu Line. I hope you're reading this with the map handy, but I hope you notice on the downloaded maps that they all have little discrepancies. It can be as interesting as the Falklands War may have been if it weren't so horrid, fought on the boundary of four naval charts, as I understand. But that's away from the point, sorry... Anyway, there's this lovely station Ochanomizu, one stop from Akihabara for the Chuo Local and one stop from Kanda for the Chuo Rapid. They've organised the tracks so that the Local and the Rapid going in the same direction pull into the one platform at the same time of course! This can be disconcerting at first experience, you think that the carriage might be on fire as so many people rush out the door and then you realise that there's a matching crowd now scurrying across the platform for your train. We did in fact make some mistakes getting to Yoyogi Park, including getting off at the lovely quiet Yoyogi Station. Where we should have gone another stop to the mad rush of Harajuku Station. But had time to take a photo of this lovely advice to schoolgirls as to what to do if hat comes off and blows onto the track.


... and then at Harajuku Station, where worlds meet: the Yoyogi Park crowd, the Harajuku kawaii crowd, the Omotsando types. 


and on into the park. 

The main video of the park is at the top of this blog entry. There are also scenes at Yoyogi in the second and third parts of this movie.




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