harajuku

Harajuku Fashion is a sub set of Tokyo Fashion

Takeshita-dori - Harajuku Fashion
A narrow street packed with young fashionable people and lined with fashion boutiques and cafes. This is definitely the place to be seen if you are young Tokyoite, but well worth visiting as a tourist. Takeshita-dori represents the cutting edge of fashion in Tokyo where you can see all the latest in Japanese street fashion and then buy in the boutiques. Takeshita-dori is opposite the exit to Harajuku station. You can see over 40 photographs of Takeshita-dori in our picture gallery.

Harajuku Fashion - Youth Culture
If it's Harajuku's youth culture you want to see, don't even bother unless it's the weekend and preferably a Sunday. The bridge across the train tracks from Harajuku station to Yoyogi Park is full of Gothic Lolita or GothLoli. The costumes are very outstanding and you can't miss them. It is funny to see the surprise of the western tourists heading to Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu who clearly had not read their guide books fully on Harajuku. You can hear their comments that make it very clear they just don't understand what is going on. Essentially the youth who have dressed up are just hanging out with friends, many of them come with the hope of being snapped by one of the many magazine photographers who mingle in the crowd. Failing that there are lots of western tourist happy to take their pictures. See nearly 50 exclusive pictures of GothLoli in Harajuku.

Harajuku Fashion Omote-sando
The broad, tree-lined avenue leading downhill from the southern end of the JR Harajuku station is Omote-sandō (表参道). This is the other side to Harajuku fashion and its challenge to Shibuya and Ginza. Not only is the street full of cafes and clothing boutiques, but now features the very up market Omote-sando Hills. This very stylish centre is full of the who's who of the world fashion brands.

Harajuku Girls - Harajuku fashion is a hot Tokyo fashion style of Harajuku girls with many pictures and shopping guide.
Harajuku Girls is a term to describe women and teenaged girls in Harajuku (Tokyo Japan) who wear a style of clothing that originated in the street culture of major cities in Japan, i.e. Tokyo and Osaka. The "Harajuku style," named for the Harajuku district of Tokyo, combines a wide range of diverse influences, and is also known as "Fruits Fashion" by followers of Fruits Magazine. The terms "Harajuku Girls" and "Fruits" are not used by the Japanese to describe themselves.The term has come into popular use via Gwen Stefani's music videos and songs from her Love.Angel.Music.Baby album.

There are many fashion styles, and many different groups who spend time in this area. You may see people dressed in the following styles: Gothic Lolita, Decora, Kogal, Ganguro, Wamono, Second-Hand Fashion, Cyber Fashion.

Decora comes from the word "Decoration" and is a colorful style, usually with layered bright clothing and an emphasis on "cute" and brightly colored accessories.

Wamono is a style that mixes traditional Japanese clothing with western clothing styles. (See the brand name Takuya Angel for an example). Visual Kei or Anime Cosplayers also gather in Harajuku. However, these are not fashion movements.

so would you dress this way? what is the craziest or most daring outfit that you have ever worn?

replica food

How's this sound? An ice cream parfait in a tall, frosty glass with fat scoops of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla topped by milky clouds of whipped cream and a single, shiny, red cherry.
The cost is steep -- about 5,000 yen -- but the calories are no problem at all. For there are none. The parfait, in all its creamy majesty, has a calorie count of precisely zero. That's because this parfait is not meant to be eaten, except with the eyes. It's a yummy example of another unique Japanese innovation -- replica food.

From sleek Chinese noodles glistening in pork broth, to pepperoni pizza dripping with extra cheese, to charbroiled steak straight from the grill, to freshly-sliced sashimi atop slender fingertips of white rice and on and on -- if a restaurant in Japan serves the real McCoy, odds are that a plastic replica of it is sitting outside in its showcase. The food replicas serve several purposes. They attract customers, advertise menus and whet appetites. A common sight at any Japanese row of restaurants is hungry customers drifting from one window to the next, trying to decide which display looks tastiest.

All the replicas are handcrafted to perfection. They are not mere rubbery copies of grapes or bananas, as one might find in the West, but rather stunning imitations of cookery at its finest. More than one customer has noted that the plastic model in the window can sometimes look more sumptuous than what arrives on the plate.

The concept is certainly tied to Japanese dining aesthetics, where items are arranged on the plate with beauty in mind. Yet, oddly enough, the custom of replica food was born from contact with the West.

In the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century, Japanese restaurant-goers were frequently confounded by the strange new Western cuisines flooding into the country. Even with Japanese translations of menu items, most guests had no idea what they were ordering. To help, many restaurants took the expensive and space-consuming means of preparing samples for their customers to peruse. To cut costs, some restaurants provided elaborate drawings or photos. But these one-dimensional presentations did not pique many appetites. The Meiji era slowly gave way to Taisho and then to Showa with little change.

Enter an entrepreneur from Gifu. Takizo Iwasaki was a young man bent on making an impact in the business world. By 1926 -- the first year of Showa -- Iwasaki had yet to find his niche. So he left Gifu for Osaka in search of his fortune.

Life was hard for Iwasaki in Osaka as well until one day -- perhaps while eating a rice omelet in a crowded lunch shop -- something clicked in his imagination. He remembered the wax models of the human body on display at most Japanese apothecaries and the wax fruit and vegetables used in school nutrition classes and thought: "Why not!"

Iwasaki hurried back to his cramped apartment and -- after days of trial and error -- finally perfected a wax model of a rice omelet. Other models followed. Then he loaded them on his bicycle to see if any shops would buy his replica food. To his joy, they all did.

Even among imitators, success leads to imitation, and Iwasaki soon had competitors across Japan. Yet the company he founded in his Osaka apartment -- Iwasaki Be-I -- remains the largest purveyor of replica food to this day.

Wax eventually gave way to high quality plastic. The replicating process goes like this:
A restaurant wishing to have a model of one of its dishes first prepares that dish for the replica food company, which takes photographs and makes sketches of each item's placement on the plate. The sketches are then whisked to the factory where the actual food is dipped in silicon. When the silicon dries, the food is popped free, leaving exact-size molds for hamburger patties, deep-fried prawns, spring rolls or whatever the dish requires.

Replica artists then prepare sauces and garnishes flawlessly matched with the photographs. The factory wall is lined with drawers and sacks containing plastic copies of any food conceivable: fake carrots, onions, eggplant, cabbage, shrimp, bacon, squid, rice, noodles of all varieties and much, much more.

To make a meat sauce, for example, the replica artist will first stir up a synthetic tomato-like paste to match the colors in the photograph. Next he or she will dice up phony carrots and onions, exactly like a real chef. A handful of artificial ground beef is mixed with the paste to give it authenticity, and the final production is topped with a sprinkle of winter green peas -- bogus ones, of course.

Just like real chefs, replica artists spend a lot of time mastering their craft. Full training can take as long as two years.

And the time needed to make the meat sauce, including ladling it onto a heap of synthetic spaghetti, microwaved to give it that "just boiled" look? No more than 15 minutes. And in the end, the real thing and the ersatz model may be indistinguishable.

The heart of the replica food world is the wholesale shopping district of Kappabashi in northeast Tokyo. Here various stores peddle nothing but imitation goodies for restaurants across the land and around the world. Tourists are welcome too, and many come to take home copies of their favorite Japanese delicacies.

Looking for a brimming bowl of tempura udon? In Kappabashi it can be yours for 4,000 yen. Or how about a massive strawberry frappe, just like the one you enjoyed at the beach in Kamakura? There it is, for just 5,000 yen. And the cost for that perfect food souvenir -- a full tray of counterfeit sushi? Over 20,000 yen -- a lot more than the genuine article perhaps, but not nearly as perishable. Would you buy fake food for a souvenier??? Curious.

Replica food can last for years if kept out of the damaging rays of sunlight which bleach the coloring. For this reason most restaurants renew the displays in their windows every few months.

Amazing. Tantalizing? Possibly. If you could replicate the best of the best of Anerican cuisine, what would you choose and why?

The manga craze

To many Westerners, one of the hardest things to understand about the Japanese is their voracious appetite for manga or comics. In particular, the fact that middle-aged men can sit with their heads buried in comic books on rush-hour trains without any sense of embarrassment. While in the West mainstream comics are almost entirely for children, in Japan there many types of manga and some of them are very definitely NOT suitable for children. Graphic violence and sex (but with restrictions on the visibilty of actual organs) have been commonplace in manga for years. A law introduced to curb child pornography (most of the world's supply being from Japan) for some reason excluded manga - probably something to do with it being a ¥500-billion-a-year industry.
Manga come in two main forms: weekly, twice-monthly and monthly magazine style manga and paperback books, usually in a series. These series often spin off from the magazines and in turn are made into TV shows or movies; like Dragonball Z and Naruto.

Manga is read from the back of the book forward and one the page from top to bottom, left to right. It can be kind of confusing.

Have you ever read a manga comic or book before?? Do you collect any comics or love a particular character?

Many manga carry full-color advertisements for muscle-building devices and pheromone sprays. As you might have guessed, most manga are geared toward shonen (young guys). But there are also shojo (young girl) manga. They deal mainly with science-fiction, sports and romance and tend to portray male characters as stereotypically as the guy's manga do with female characters. A popular girl's manga is Sailor Moon, which also became a successful TV show and several movies. Naturally, they're popular with girls but also with a certain number of boys and young men. This and the popularity of animated porn is, I'm afraid, beyond my understanding. Suffice to say that the world of manga and anime (animation) is huge in Japan and beyond and there are countless Web sites dedicated to it.

Most weekly manga are the thickness of a telephone book. Even though they are printed on recycled paper, the price of around 200 yen seems ridiculously cheap. But with weekly sales in some cases of over five million copies and the most popular stories going on to become paperback collections, TV cartoons or dramas and even full-length movies, manga are very big business. Just two examples are given below.

Shonen MagazineOne of the pioneers of the fat shukan manga (weeklies), along with Shonen Sunday, Shonen Magazine debuted in 1959 and is still one of the most popular boy's manga (shonen means young boy). With over 200 pages and a cover price of 230 yen, it seems like pretty good value. All the stories use kana (phonic) characters next to the kanji (Chinese characters), which makes them readable for the younger or less literate Japanese and useful for students of the language. As well as the manga stories and advertisements, the magazine has full-color photo spreads of a couple of teenage bimbos, usually in bikinis and with a contact address for fan-mail. The October 27th, 1999 issue (right) includes the mangas GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka), which has been made into a TV drama and a movie, and Psychometora EIJI, made into a TV psycho-drama starring heartthrob Matsuoka Masahiro. Other subjects include soccer, fishing and sushi, while with some of the manga it's hard to tell what exactly they're about.

Launched in 1968, Jump tried to do things differently from the start. In order to compete with the already successful Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday, Jump concentrated on hiring and hanging onto talented but as yet undiscovered cartoonists and keeping a close eye on what its readers wanted, through surveys and polls. This approach helped Jump become by far the biggest manga in Japan with sales as high as six million copies a week. Its most successful series have been spun off to create TV cartoons, movies and video games including Dragonball Z and Dragon Quest which have been hugely popular both in Japan and abroad. Other huge domestic hits include Kinnikuman (Muscle Man) and Slam Dunk, which capitalized on the NBA craze of the early and mid-90's.

Naruto

Have you ever watched any anime? It is highly entertaining and the art work is amazing! You should check it out. Some popular TV shows that you can see on hulu.com are Bleach and Naruto. Full length movies: My Neighbor Totoro.

That is one of my boys favorites!

Sumo

I wanted to see the national sport of Nihon, Japanese stlye wrestling. It is a really big deal over here. But they only have 6 tournaments a year and the next one is in November. I will be out of there by then, but I thought that I would share what I found out.

Sumo wrestlers are usually between the ages of 20 to 35 and can be any size, small to super sized. There are no weight classes either. So a small guy could go up against a very big guy. So weight gain is an important part of their training. They also all live together in what is called a stable. They have a stable master that helps with training and weight gain and manages their lives.

This next photo is the inside of a sumo stadium in Tokyo.

The sumo wrestlers wear mawashi (the diaper looking thing) and they wrestle on a dohyo. The ring is made of clay and covered in a layer of sand.

Fights only last a few seconds so don't blink. I have been told that they could last up to a minute but it is extremely rare.

So what do they have to do to win?? Basically, the wrestler who first touches the ground with anything other than the soles of the feet or leaves the ring before their opponent, loses. Simple.

There is a whole ritual to the fighting as well. If you want to actually see it, try looking on youtube.com. I can't get it to work or I would link you there.

The highest rank for a sumo wrestler is yokozuma (grand champion). Once you reach this status, it can't be taken from you. But once you start performing badly, you are expected to retire.

There are two yokozuma right now...

Hakuho from Mongolia, China

and Asashorya also from Mongolia.

Would you go watch this in person? Who is the best wrestler in the U.S???

And guys what should I do next?