Posted by Bone at February 21st, 2007

Over the past couple of days I`ve spent a lot of time on the streets of Tokyo shopping for clothes, electronics, and just random stuff I`ve found. In a strange way I found it as culturally rewarding as visitng shrines, museums and other things of a more traditionally touristy nature, possibly because you can easily make comparisons to the experience at home on a more level playing field than comparing a church to a shrine.

Clothes shopping in Tokyo would be amazing if I were thinner, I seriously would have maxed out my credit card, but most shops don`t sell anything above a size large, which I can understand since most people around here are short (by my standards) and thin.

Shoe shopping was a bit of a nightmare too, I must have been in 15-20 shoe shops before I managed to find a pair that I both liked and fit me. They do have some really great shoes though, and they were well priced too, although I`m sure that prices get pretty high in the places where they keep the rare shoes in refrigerators.

The Japanese do seem to have a penchant for hats. I saw quite a few stores that only sold hats, and strangely they mostly carried the same stock. Actually a lot of the cheaper stores seemed to carry a lot of identical stock. Also, in the shop where I bought a hat, neither of the staff were wearing hats, you`d think　that their days would be filled with endless　montages of trying on various hats… One other thing I`ve noticed about Japanese beanie style hats is that they`re very tall, so that you end up with a silly flap on fabirc at the top, or you have to roll the hat underneath, meaning you lose the design. Perhaps I was just wearing it wrong.

One place where I did have plenty of options for clothes was the many hip hop clothing stores (their description not mine) which people would incariably try and navigate me into. I actually sought one of them out in Shibuya because a few days earlier when Tiggy and I were on a walk about I noticed a very rare hoodie (LRG`s Skeleton hoodie which was popularised by Kanye West then majorly hyped on blogs and forums) in their window and wanted to see if it was worth all the fuss. They`d sold out, naturally, but the guy in the store pushed me towards a number of different hoodies, so I eventually told him that it was number of different hoodies, so I eventually told him that it was my job to write about hoodies (it kinda is..) and he laid off giving me the hard sell. One interesting thing to note about the hip hop One interesting thing to note about the hip hop stores is that their prices are very similar and they all want to give you a special discount of 30-40%, even though I don`t think that any of them were affiliated to each other, you`d think that one would buck the trend and actually label their clothes with the actual price it would be sold at.

Oh, in store music. If it`s the aforementioned hip hop in store music. If it`s the aforementioned hip hop stores it`s Jay-Z, ａｎｄ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｐｕｎｋ／ｓｋａｔｅ　ｓｔｏｒｅｓ　ｙｏｕ　can almost guarantee Rage Against the Machine.

I`d write more but its my last night and I wanna go around the Shiodome complex doing some night photography.