Day 6 - Cosplay

Sunday in Tokyo means the day off school for the overworked teenagers of the city. As a result it also means a chance to see their crazy self-expression in the form of cosplay (costume play). We met up with Becky and headed to Yoyogi Park, Harajuku: the focal point of the cosplay culture.

Somehow though, we had forgotten to factor in the fact that teenagers are...well...teenagers, and as such rarely surface before noon on a weekend. Rather than colourful and eccentrically dressed kids, we mostly found some sun-bathing old men, a few students sleeping off the previous night's party on a bench, and a group of guys with a video camera who seemed to be a performance group looking for material. Neither of us are entirely sure what they were getting us to say on camera, but we got to look at a cool book of monsters for a few minutes while they laughed at our japanese.

After a very tasty brunch we waved goodbye to Becky and headed to the Meiji shrine, famous for its massive wooden tori (temple gateway). There was some kind f procession going through the shrine with a bright red umbrella...a wedding maybe?....but we didn't really know what was going on so took a few photos and left. We walked back through Harajuku, at a more reasonable hour it seems, and spotted a few 'Gothic Lolita' girls, with brightly coloured hair and extravagant frilled dresses.


Next we visited Akihabara, Tokyo's Electric Town, for a taste of otaku (geek) culture. The streets here are filled with shops selling every kind of technology and people with megaphones shouting about the latest offers. We saw an action figure shop, went though a building entirely filled with arcade games, and passed by a group of Power Rangers doing their shopping. We got lost in a trinket shop near the station and ended up buying some more Studio Ghibli memorabilia, before wandering into a street filled with girls dressed as maids, and one lonely looking man in a Pikachu outfit.

In the evening we left Tokyo and went to the city of Yokohama to see a fireworks festival that Becky had told us about. We had seen fireworks going off on other nights, from different areas of Tokyo, so thought that this would be a cool show for us but fairly normal for everyone else. Walking out of the station we found quite a large crowd and followed it to a carpark area where a few hundred people were sat facing the bay. We grabbed some food and sat down on a curb nearby, thinking that this was where most people were. At 7:30 the show started, and we quickly realised that our view was entirely obscured by a large building . We could see reflections in another building's windows, but that was about it.

Again, we followed the crowd and soon realised that we had vastly underestimated the scale of the show. Their were literally thousands of people stood or sat watching the show, filling every street or bridge with a view. The police had blocked off most of the big roads and people were just sat in the middle of them looking up at the sky. We walked for about 15 minutes, until we were at the centre of a crowd that stretched as far as we could see, but we were still almost a kilometre from the best views. We eventually found a peice of road to sit on and took in the show. It lasted over an hour and was full of amazing fireworks like cat faces, heart shapes and butterflies that got much laughter and applause from the crowd.



Becky had managed to catch the end of the show after she finished work, and we were meant to meet up, but somehow got stuck going over three tiny bridges in the middle of a very large but slow moving crowd. It took us about an hour and a half to get to Yokohama station where she was waiting. By that point we were exhausted and ready to go back and pack up our room.

Tomorrow we move on to Kyoto.