harajuku lovers

check out gwen and her hybrid..i mean harajuku girls at harajuku lovers

some sites and sounds of the city included
for a laugh go to the 'harajuku girls' link

A view from the Chuo Line - Donald Richie

"Are you going to read books with your friends tonight?" Zume asked, probably lounging in his car. "No, I am not going to read the book, the author is." And then a long pause, quite obviously Zume was not picturing the event. "I'm going to a book reading. You know how Carrie on Sex and the City goes and reads her books in front of people? Well that's kind of what tonight will be like...I think." Now tuning in, "Oh wow that's really cool. Make sure you wear a jacket"

To be honest I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I had missed Donald Richie's previous reading at Ben's cafe in Takadonobaba so I was delighted when a friend invited me to another of Sir Donald's (I am quite sure he has not been knighted but I like the sound of it) reading at the cosy Sun and Moon Yoga Studio in Meguro.

The reading was far greater than I had imagined. Donald Richie, author of Ozu, The Inland Sea, Tokyo Nights and countless other books from over 50 years of writing in and on Japan, gave much more that an animated reading from his latest 'A View from the Chuo Line'. The 81 year old, with the vigor of someone decades his junior, spoke of life as an outsider in Japan and his undying attention to all things. I scrawled these quotes in the back of his book moments before he scrawled his signature in the front.

"A life properly lived is the ability to pay attention to everything"
"People all over the world think differently, but they all feel the same" (Offered when asked how he considers his audience.

yahoo i love george

For the longest time I have been meaning to boycott yahoo. There is no oveewhelming reason to do so, except for the fact that everytime I type in yahoo.com, the menu page comes up and I am confronted with some ridiculous celeb goss. I will admit that sometimes I am sucked in, but generally speaking I don't give a fuck about what Jen, Brad, Carmen, Paris or any of those crazy nobody/ somebodys are doing, marrying or abusing. So for that I have been wanting to give Yahoo the flick.
But today I found this...

"The adventures of Curious George, the inquisitive little guy with an insatiable taste for adventure. George's spunky and fun-loving nature endears him to new friends, but also lands him in a series of (mis-)adventures. Featuring the voice talents of Eugene Levy, Drew Barrymore, and Will Ferrell as the Man in the Yellow Hat."

Curious George by H. A. Rey (Hans Augusto and his wife Margret - the books were published in a time when a man's name on the cover was more accepted than a woman's) , is in my opinion, one of the coolest and most timeless children's series. I particularly love the book where George ends up in hospital and gets stuck into the ether, the nurses fix him up with a good cold shower. (Curious George goes to hospital was actually created at the request of Boston Children's Hospital, who wanted a book to prepare children for a hospital stay. {and the joys of accidental drug abuse??} ) I think the thing I love most about the series is that it is not always 'PC' but who cares when you get to ride the streets on top of a double decker bus with a naughty monkey?!

Curious George, first published way back in 1941, had finally been picked up by universal.
With an original Jack Johnson soundtrack and voices by Will Ferrell and Drew Barrymore.

ninja training camp

geez i had no idea that the ninja that served us the other night at the ninja restaurant, had to go through all of this training...

ps the soundtrack on this is friggin shockin' - turn your sound down

everything old is new (and totally screwed up) again

Realising that Tokyo happening may be lost forever, I backed up and dragged everything to Blogger in the most archaic of ways.
While it seems now that I have achives dating back to Jan 2005, a whole year of posting needs to be tweaked. Pictures are too big, words all over the shop. As if I didn't spend enough of my life perched infront of this little white box...seems I have alot of blog cleaning to do!

dog goods

Takeshita Dori
Harajuku

kitty carbs

Hello Kitty can be such a pea head
Hello Kitty pasta from the Lawson 100 store

ninja toilet

oh...there was even a shishi odishi in the bathroom - perhaps to scare of any deer that may wander into the ladies toilets of the restaurant.

tokyo plastic - little fella

yer yer I know, slow as a wet week I am.
Seems tokyo plastic had been hard at work and it has taken me a good coupla weeks to discover their new lil buddy - The Little Fella
Go check him out for yourself

ninja restaurant tokyo

Yes, we did spend part of our Valentine's evening in a game centre in Shibuya, pouring our 100yen coins into the purikura machines

But we kicked off the evening in the company of Ninja.
At the Ninja restaurant in Akasaka Mitsuke.

This was a surprise I had been planning for a long time.
So I was super excited when we reached the Ninja lair.

Deciphering the menu scroll presented to us by a 'real' ninja, we decided upon two different courses.
Could not resist the urge to take photos of all the mouth watering morsels served to us by the ninja. At one point 'our' ninja set one of my dishes on fire and presented zume with a smoking box, containing an egg. Gently cracking the egg onto a bed of multicoloured seaweed, a scrumptious looking mixed salad appeared.
Ninja really are MAGIC!

street scrawl - ekys

from there to here
from here to there
the ekys tag is everywhere

one of these days i am going to prove that the ekys crew gets around...this simple four letter black tag is scrawled all over tokyo, from my home in okubo to my work place in hiroo. i spotted the above one just outside of shinjuku station. i found another in ebisu, ekys obviously frequent nakameguro. these guys have been everywhere. for the longest time i have wanted to know the crew behind the scrawl. if anyone knows who does this tag...e me!