Quirky Harajuku Street

Osaka, Tokyo
You Harajuku girls
Damn, you’ve got some wicked style…

Sings Gwen Stefani in probably her best song, What you waiting for? many, many years ago.

One of the things I was most looking forward to in Tokyo was the famous Harajuku shopping street, spotting funkily dressed, stylish, fashionable Japanese people and, well, maybe be able to become funkily dressed and fashionable myself, through a few Harajuku street purchases…

As usual, I began the day by getting lost. I got off a metro stop too early, and failed to walk in the right direction to get to the stop I wanted to go to. Oh well, at least I had the joy of multiple mini-breakfasts from each corner shop I stumbled upon. I LOVE SUSHI. 

As you can see, all shops were full of the greatest variety of sushi snacks and lunches, which were affordable and DELICIOUS.

My main challenge was understanding how you unroll the separately packed seaweed packaging and roll it around your bare sushi. Of course the method was highly logical, quick and painless, but it did require a few less-than-perfect attempts, trying not to look too touristy and stupid whilst scrabbling with the sushi packaging in the middle of a street (where it was completely bizarre to be eating anyways, as I later learnt,so forget any embarrassment purely because of failure to open wrapper).

Anyways, after the breakfast multitude, I finally found Harajuku street. First I decided to first pop into the super-welcoming, super-friendly tourist info where every single member of the super-welcoming, super-friendly staff eagerly offered me free coffee, free tea and free biscuits. I politely refused the first coffee I was offered, but a few moments later a different staff member had already begun the process of coffee making without asking me… so, well, you can’t really say no to coffee.

I asked the super-welcoming, super-friendly lady at the desk about where I should go around this area, since there seemed to be lots of other interesting attractions and shops too.

“This street is for high-schoolers, teenagers…” the lady pointed at Harajuku Street on the map, then looked at me, adding quickly: “But if you want something more mature…”

I told myself not to be offended, and waltzed off to the street for high-schoolers and teenagers.

And had a whale of a time. Or should I say a dinosaur of a time. BECAUSE OF MY NEW AWESOME DINOSAUR JUMPERRRRRRRR. (And also not necessarily completely a whale-sized time because I was slightly disappointed I never saw ‘proper’ Harajuku girls that posed with you.)

Harajuku Street is packed with cute shops and boutiques full of quirky, Japanese-style clothes, be it of a funky, COOL style of neon colours, chains and spikes…

or over-cute fluffy girly fashion… (btw! got my AWESOME white fluffy gloves from this street too, though not from this high-quality, high-price shop)

or over-cute kiddy fashion.

Often accompanied with loud music, you get some serious atmosphere feels here.

I also had my own traditional crepe, well traditional and traditional, it was filled with blueberry cheesecake. YES OM NOM. Though I do think Japan do savoury better.

Also, just after Harajuku Street I found one of my favourite ever shops. I know Japanese people love Finland… And here’s proof. A shop called ‘ehkä söpö’, which means ‘maybe cute’ in Finnish. I advertised my Finnishness (insert pun here…) to the shop assistants, who smiled at me sweetly and compliantly discussed random Finnish words (they knew ‘kiitos’ and some other random phrase), but didn’t offer me discount to their pricey, high-quality, unattainable-for-unemployed-foreign-tourists garments.

After strolling the streets of kawaii mammon, I went to purify my materialistic soul at the nearby Meiji Jingu, an impressive Shinto shrine and one of the most famous sites for tourists, located in pretty Yoyogi park.

It was gradually getting dark, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the shops at Harajuku I’d bypassed because of lack of time, so I guess I didn’t focus 100% on this nice cultural experience. The best bit was watching little Japanese kids in traditional costumes posing for pics or, better yet, kicking up a fuss about posing for pics.

A bit more night-time sightseeing of Harajuku/Takeshita Street…

The evening I spent with what came to be our hostel-gang – yesterday’s Gaz and Anna, a Thai girl, and a pair of Ozzie brothers and Canadian sisters, who endearingly referred to me as ‘Hyphen’ (we’d met the previous night, and the only thing they’d remembered about my name was that).

We’d decided we’d go out so we went to wander the dark, empty streets of Shibuya and wondered where that famous nightlife was located.

Well, the Shibuya crossing was crowded as ever, but the back streets were slightly emptier…

Our first attempt of a find was a club where you had to take your shoes off to get in. I didn’t even get in before the mutual decision was we’d try somewhere else. K…

Somehow, luckily, we did manage to find a ‘real’ club, which ended up being one of the best nights out of my life, which was 90% dancing on a nearby stage to epic music, great company, so much fun. Controversially, I felt we got special treatment as we were foreign – whenever we left the cool stage, some official-looking, club responsible posh lady came out to find us and friendlily yet firmly invite us back onto stage. But this treatment was reserved for foreign women, I must say – once one of the boys in our group tried to get up onto the stage, and was promptly escorted down by one of the sleek and silent bouncers. This was as well as most of the club tables being reserved for ‘women only’.

Anyways, an excellent day all in all – quirky shopping, delicious food, cultural experiences, lots of new friends and so much dancing.

High five Tokyo!

Emzy

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