Sensory Overload Day

(Warning! This post is high in text, pictures, and emotions! Also, it was written yesterday, about yesterday.)

Today was an interesting day. We woke up this morning to find a festival of sorts was happening right behind our dorm in the cherry blossom-lined walkway right behind DK House! We had been seeing tarps laid out there all week, but we weren't sure what they were for. Turns out, it's how people stake out their spot for hanami (flower viewing), where they bring lots of food, and even cook some there, to have a big picnic and enjoy the flowers! As if that wasn't neat enough to see, the entire pathway (a good two or three blocks long) had food vendors set up along the left side! It was so interesting yesterday morning hearing the sounds and smelling the smells of the festival.

We decided we definitely had to go check it out, and walked the length of the vendors first to see what they had to offer. On our way back, Greg and Jen picked up some food items that I still have no idea what they were, but they were kind of a batter with a bunch of items like roasted corn and other vegetables, fried into a mini pancake-like thing with sauce. I had a bite and it was pretty good! I absolutely had to have some candy from the candy stall. For some reason, I didn't take a picture of that one, but I think maybe Greg or Jen has one. The main item was little star-shaped candy called konpeito. I had seen konpeito in anime and such before and I've always wanted to try it because it looks so sweet and delicious! It's basically like America's rock candy, only in tiny clusters that are a lot easier to eat. They had a few different sizes but I mostly stuck to tiny and small. You could put any candy you wanted in the bag, but it was all 100 yen per gram, so that wasn't exactly the best deal.. I ended up with a tiny tiny bag of candy for 250 yen, after a discount from the nice candy vendor =) It was totally worth it though, I'm enjoying it so much!

Next, we split the cost for 6 takoyaki. Tako is Japanese for octopus, and takoyaki is octopus dumplings. They fill up a half-sphere frying pan thing with a batter and put in the octopus and other items, and then roll the mix as it fries to make the round shape. I don't think anyone at home would believe that I would ever eat anything like this, so Greg filmed it for me =)
The taste was pretty good, although there is some spice I kept tasting in the festival food that was new to me and I'm not sure I liked or not. The octopus was interesting, it was very tough and chewy. Overall it was a nice and filling snack. We picked up some vending machine drinks to go with our meals. I opted for some cute Natchan apple juice which was very appley and good. After that was the best part.... ChocoBananas! We scouted out all of the chocobanana stands and decided the first one was best. It's basically just a peeled banana on a stick, dipped in either chocolate, strawberry chocolate, or green tea chocolate, and then decorated with sprinkles (and in our case, topped with a koala cookie!). The chocolate wasn't quite as chocolatey as I was expecting, but it was still delicious and fun to eat!After we were all festival'd out, we took the train to Shinjuku to shop and meet up with Teresa. Downtown Shinjuku is another Times Square-esque location, with tall buildings and flashy ads. First we ventured into a gigantic multistory store called Don Quixote. I'd never seen anything like it! Everything was just completely packed to the walls and ceilings, and the aisles were really only big enough for one person, and yet the place was still crammed with young people shopping.

We still had some hyaku-en (100 yen store) shopping to do, so we went to one at the top of the Prince Hotel and picked up some random needed items. After that, we got completely distracted at a 5-story arcade across the street. Greg rocked some Taiko Drum Master, while Jen and I were overjoyed to find an old neglected Typing of the Dead game! We got pretty far until a boss monster asked us questions in Japanese and we had to type in the correct answer. Totally lame. Before we knew it, it was time to meet Teresa! We ended up just taking her straight back to the arcade though, so nothing really changed. We all went up to the purikura (photo stickers) floor and had a blast taking awesome photos! If I get access to a scanner sometime I might scan and post them.Once we were tired of spending too much money on video games (which didn't take long), we ventured out to see more of Shinjuku. We did a lot of wandering around, browsed a few more hyaku-en shops, and eventually decided to eat at the Yoshinoya. I tried the butadori this time (pork over rice) and it was delicious! Japanese portions are kind of nice for me because I can get the cheap small version and still eat enough, since I usually don't finish meals at home. I tried to order miso soup as well, but the waiter heard mizu instead, so I got water. I wouldn't have been able to finish the miso though, and the water was a really nice change from tea, so I guess that waiter knew what he was doing better than I did.

We did some more wandering after dinner and walked through some more....interesting parts of town. I won't say shady, because they looked mostly the same, just with fewer people and more ads for host bars (surprisingly few for hostess bars, or maybe they just don't advertise the hostesses the same way they do the hosts..). At this point, Shinjuku was starting to wear me a little thin. I think it was partly due to the fact that we had gone to Shibuya just a few days before, but I really didn't like being in or seeing so much of a city that was devoted entirely to entertainment and consumer culture. The only big city I've spent any time in in the U.S. is New York City, and the only real entertainment-focused area I really noticed was Times Square. Times Square, however, seems like more of a strip of entertainment with a few theaters and such off to the sides, while Shibuya and Shinjuku are entire cities with nothing but stores and pachinko parlors. If you walk long enough through Times Square, you eventually find a newspaper or TV company, or some other establishment whose presence isn't entirely devoted to instant consumption. If you walk long enough through Shinjuku, you eventually find a love hotel. I know there are cities in Tokyo more like New York, with different kinds of businesses and offices, I'm just not used to seeing an entire entertainment/shopping district the likes of Shinjuku or Shibuya.

I think just seeing so many indulging in the lifestyle of being serviced by these kinds of districts just really bothered me. Imagining girls who work in the office all week and then go to Don Quixote in search of the next accessories they can add to their collection, to wear out to a club or bar or karaoke in the city. I start to imagine this is the bulk of their existence, it's the meaning they're creating in their lives, and that's the extent of it: buying pretty things, having fun, looking good. I'm sure there's more to all of them, but somehow these cities just reek with that feeling. So friends, if I was a little quite last night, that's my explanation =)
And yet, in the middle of all this self-indulgent, consumerist bustle, something magical happened. When we got back to Shinjuku station, we noticed that there were musicians setting up and performing in a pavilion at the bottom of the stairs to the station. After watching a girl singing with guitar backups, we started to move along and saw a young Japanese man with some luggage, about to set up a performance area. First he put on some fast-paced music through a speaker and set down a black hat, a glass ball, and a drinking glass on the ground in front of him. Then he roped off the area with some thick rope, placing a diabolo at each corner. By the time he was all set up, we were really curious and interested in what his performance would be, so we were sitting pretty close to his stage. He began by changing the music to something dramatic and then did a routine with the glass ball, making it appear to be weightless or stationary in mid air, which was really entertaining. He fed off the applause of the audience and encouraged us to clap more whenever he felt it was needed. Even when part of a trick went wrong, he would quickly save it and request even more applause.

After a few hat-catching tricks, he did some fork-bending, including one trick where Jen had to hold the two middle prongs of the fork while he twisted the rest. Our favorite trick was when he started shaking the fork back and forth, and one of the prongs separated from the rest. Then, with some more shaking, all four prongs separated and fanned out, then he separated the top of the fork from the rest. His final act was diabolo! I was really excited because I've been interested in diabolo since I started watching Kaleido Star, and I've even tried to pick it up a few times on my own without much luck. He did some of the coolest tricks I've ever seen, including a lot I had never seen before, and his performance had so much energy. He knew how to play the crowd and it was mesmerizing to watch. At the end of the show, he gave a moving speech which seemed to be about how he had come this far just doing his best as one person, and he hoped to pass on those feelings, and if we felt those feelings too, to donate some money of course. I absolutely had to get a photo with him, so we took one of just me and him, and then a group photo. After that, he offered the bent pieces of fork to us, and I got the top part while Greg got the bottom.

Every now and then I see a performance like that that just blows me away and makes me very emotional. I remember how I, ridiculously, thought the musical Starlight Express was so cool and entertaining that I cried six times during the performance, I tear up most every time I watch Cirque du Soleil, Kaleido Star made me cry in the first episode, and I know the same thing has happened on several different occasions with different things. Last night's performance was one of those times. I don't think the rest of the group had quite the same reaction, but I just couldn't get over the energy he had, and how passionate he seemed to be about it. And it was a great performance on top of that. I definitely could've cried afterwards, and it made me all smiley for quite a while afterwards.

After that, we wandered some more through a store in the station and down to another district, and then back up into that store for sitting (I bought a $10 blowdryer somewhere in all that... it smells like burning when I use it, haha). We split up our purikura from earlier and just enjoyed having a seat. Then we went back down to the station and headed our separate ways. It was a looonng day and I think we all slept good! Sorry for the long and somewhat emotional/philosophical post... blame Shinjuku! Haha. I'm well aware that America is a highly consumer-oriented country, no doubt about it, I'm just not used to it being quite so concentrated and populated.