Saturday, August 1, 2009

An afternoon out in Japan



On one of my first days in Japan, I visited a popular shopping area called Osu Kannon. It was filled with touches of both traditional culture as well as Japanese pop culture. Gajillions of electronic stores. There was a store that we went in to that had all sorts of cameras and computers up front, but in the back room there was a ton of cool little robots. They could walk, talk, and karate kick. Some of them had remotes that you could control them with, others had cameras and talked to you (in Japanese, of course).


Above yet another electronics shop was a magical guitar store. I was shocked at how many unique guitars and bass guitars it had.


At the back of the guitar store was the most amazing drum set that had ever graced my vision. I gleamed with the holy light that Neil Pert gets any time he even thinks of drums. There were only 2 bad things about this sacred place: there was only one guitar that customers could play, and we were limited to only two minutes per person. The other is that I didn't have nearly enough money to buy a guitar.



Many of the clothing stores we passed sold shirts and other articles of clothing with really weird English on them. They said things like "Gentleness in the world to you DELIVERY," and there was a ape mannequin with a shirt that said something very explicit that I can't repeat here.


The whole area was filled with bizarre art

and other unforgettable images.








One of the last things we did was go to a shrine that was used in the Tom Selleck movie Mr. Baseball. I cleansed my hands there in the same place he did. What makes this one special was that it was the first shrine I had ever been to in my life.



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