Walking Around Our ‘Hood(s)

Since this posting will involve some geography, here is a link to a map of the area we are describing.  (Sorry, Google maps now makes it virtually impossible to add pins for the places we are talking about.)

We knew from our last trip that the Aoyama area is quite funky, with dozens of little shops and restaurants and pocket shrines.  And so it proved when we set out yesterday for a stroll around our neighborhood.  We wandered down our street, Gaien-Nishi-Dori  (外苑西通り) – one of very few streets in Tokyo with an actual name, window shopped in several small stores and browsed the offerings at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (terrific collection of vintage postcards).  Then, we did some heavy duty shopping (batteries, some face cloths and tickets to Studio Ghibli in April) at a Lawson market, one of innumerable convenience stores in Tokyo コンビニ or kon-bi-ni, as they are known).  7-11 is big here too.

Then we turned the corner and found ourselves heading into Harujuku.  A turn or two later and it was a different world.  Numerous clothing stores, restaurants and gift shops, almost all Japanese businesses but with English or European names, patronized mostly by large numbers of young people, many funky, many fashionable and some both. There is more than one street answering to this description and innumerable side streets with much smaller businesses, including tiny beauty parlors, jewelry stores, and numerous hole in the wall restaurants, the kind that can be found everywhere in Tokyo (Trip Advisor lists nearly 83,000 restaurants in Tokyo, and it can’t be capturing most of these places).

On we went, and by the end of the street, we were in Omotesando and things had taken a turn for the fancy.  Famous Western fashion brands began to appear everywhere – YSL, Hugo Boss (fantastical building recently featured in the New York Times) Michael Kors, a huge Apple Store, and on and on.

We turned onto a huge street – no name as far as I could tell, but it runs over the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line, if you are following us on a map – with great numbers of people.  On this street, we ran across a huge shopping mall, Omotesando Hills.  We don’t care much about malls, but this one was pretty spectacular.  Its principal attraction, as far as we could tell, was the Max Brenner Chocolate Store, which had the most amazing line snaking its way around the entrance and then outside.  People must have been waiting (patiently, this is Japan) for half an hour or more to to get in.  We love chocolate – but not that much.  Sadly, we didn’t take a picture, but it was something to behold.

In short, multiple worlds in just a few blocks.  Our brains are on overload.