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| SS girl |
When you exit the Yamanote line at Harajuku-eki, you will first be overwhelmed by the crowd in this much too small station. Outside you can cross the street and enter Takeshita-dōri, a narrow street full of small fancy shops and restaurants. There you can get a good impression of japanese youth culture. Even though it takes a while to pass the overcrowded street, especially at the weekend. Maybe during the week it's better.
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| Hand |
Following the Yamanote to the south you will come to Shibuya. Beside Ikebukero or Shinjuku this the part of Tokyo which comes closets to what I have described in the beginning. The neon lights and the jungle of shops and department stores. And that's the place where trends are created which spread first around Japan and then often around the whole world.
On the west side of the station is the Yoyogi park, which you enter through a huge wooden torii. Inside the park the is the Meiji-jingu, one of the main Shinto shrines in Tokyo. It's dedicated to emperor Meiji with the rising of modern Japan at the end of the 19th century is closely connected. If you are lucky you can watch a traditional japanese wedding inside the shrine. If you pass the shrine and leave the park on the north side, you're in Shinjuku, where on the one hand you have Tokyos most impressive skyscrapers and on the other side of the railway tracks you find one of Tokyo's traditional red light areas.
The girl with the purple paras…
Going back to Harajuku, just in the center, next to the station on a bridge over the railway tracks of the Yamanote line, which everyone who wants to enter the Yoyogi park has to enter, you find the cosplayer. Especially on Sundays you can find dozens of them on the bridge. Sitting around and chatting with each other, taking pictures and being photographed by the people passing the bridge, posing for them or with them. For most tourists it's an attraction itself, others are distracted by them on their way to the Meiji-jingu.
Harajuku couple
Most of the cosplayers are young girls, teenagers wearing costumes of their favorite heroes from mangas, anime, movies or music. You can find everything, traditional yukatas, gothic outfits and science fiction stuff; extraordinary make-ups and hairstyles or masks hiding parts or the whole face. It's an exciting and cool place at the same time. And if you like to take pictures, it's a perfect place. They like to pose and they can pose perfectly. No one with the stereotype image of the emotionless, every time controlled Japanese, no one who sees the uniformed children going to school and knows about the military like discipline in japanese schools mith imagine that this is also genuine behavior of young Japanese. And I guess most of them you wouldn't recognize as cosplayers during the week.
Harajuku girl
I really liked that place. Taking pictures (and there was no other place in Japan I was more satisfied with the pictures I took than here in Harajuku) or just sitting their and looking what's going on. Looking at the tourists, trying to take a picture of them or Mum and Dad taking a picture of their child in group of cosplayers. The old Japanese lurking around and taking pictures, and the young cosplayer taking pictures of their older idols. I had always the impression of a somehow friendly place, having in mind how a place in Germany full of gothic style young people would look alike...
Cosplayer
Meanwhile cosplay is not only a Japanese thing. On the Japanese day in Dusseldorf their were a lot of German cosplayers, I saw them in Cologne and even here in Bonn I saw some. But, it's definitely not the same. It's not only that the costumes are not nearly as perfect as in Harajuku, it's the people themselves, somehow they are not cool enough and it doesn't look genuine. It's a copy, and not a good one. They cannot pose like them, they have not the same look and the behavior doesn't fit. It's not enough to wear the costumes, you most have the same cultural background. Maybe in a society where you are always free to express yourself, it's nothing special to wear a curious costume, it's more like carnival then a break out of the boundaries of society. I don't know, but some difference must exist.
Cosplay profile
No emeotions?
@Jan says:
manganite replies:
ypell says:
Btw, try going to a Western TV exec to sell him/her a show about a double-amputee alchemist and his brother (a soul caught in an empty suit of armor). Yeah, they live under a military dictatorship and they join the military in order to pursue the Philosopher's Stone...
manganite replies:
And there are many other things giving you the impression of rather emotionless people on the first glance. Digging deeper, you will find them, but that's not easy...
ypell says:
manganite replies:
HarryBo73 says:
manganite replies: