Our room at Sakura Hotel is nicely positioned around the fourth floor. You’ve probably seen buildings with chamfered balconies in anime (eg. Misato’s apartment in Eva), ours is one of those. I believe it’s to get more light into the building, which is necessary given the usual height and density of most buildings. The bunk-bed is in the full-height section of the room (which has a pretty high ceiling anyway), so we just use the opposite wall for out suitcases and other junk.
The windows (facing out at a 45-degree angle) have these fantastic light-blocking blinds. With them closed you could easily be forgiven for thinking it’s the wee hours of the morning when you wake up. It’s on account of these that we wake up around 11:00. Without any real plan we head over to Ginza.
The Sony store is there, along with a bunch of other upmarket brands. Visiting the Sony store makes me want to forgive them, for everything. It reminds me of a time when Sony weren’t evil. This roughly corresponds to when they used to have a showroom near my highschool…
These promise fantastic sound quality through a "Personal listening field" - for just shy of 35,000 yen I'd hope so. The downside? Jamming little metal loops in your ears.
The Sony store spans multiple levels, and makes it easy to lose yourself and forget which level you’re on, through creative use of stylish staircases and mezzanines. The first floor is all about personal audio.
Kinda wish I had an armband for my ipod, but it's a wee bit too heavy for arm-mounting. Now if I had a thigh holster...
As you can see below they have some serious hardware too. The Japanese have some sort of fetish for LPCM (see also: DVDs), maybe they’re just adamant on getting the best quality and to hell with the downsides. I just can’t think of a need for studio-ish standards for recording when you wouldn’t just use real studio gear. I’d hardly be waving one of these in a politician’s face as a journalist.
The one on the right is more than three times the price of its neighbour, I hope the mics and ADCs are that much better. It sure as hell isn't more linear.
I'm seeing some distinct design cues here from Apple. Not the last of them we'll see either.
Moving upstairs, we’re into the realm of cameras and phones proper. Some very slick stuff here, but it’s familiar territory – the “really crazy Japanese phones” with features up the wazoo tend to be sold under carrier brands, so you don’t see them as much here.
It's so tiny! Nanoha (my z610i) is about 25% longer, but I prefer the clamshell style more, so I don't feel too bad.
And on to cameras. There’s a fair lineup of point-and-shoots, along with the serious DSLRs. These are interesting because Sony aren’t trying to bootstrap themselves out of nothing – they picked up the Minolta brand a few years ago, giving them some cachet to capitalise on, which they’ve done with the alpha (α) series. My acquaintance icie, a Sony owner, seems generally happy aside from some niggles I detect in his comments.
The model Ast bought for last year's trip has had a refresh, sporting a slightly slimmer profile, smoother edges, and a bigger screen.
Now with chic little carrycases. Gone are the days of ugly polyester pouches and velcro strips! If there's one thing Sony does well, it's making products that you just want to buy on appearance alone.
Along with the usual security cords and cameras, a friendly sales assistant was on hand to keep an eye on things. That’s one thing I prefer about Japan, people are never in your face trying to sell you stuff, they’ll just happily sit back and wait for you.
The α900 is Sony's flagship model, and the display just begs you to pick it up and shoot stuff. Beautiful detail on that flower bouquet? Hell yes. Please.
One thing that really struck me about the Sony DSLRs was the sound the shutter and mirror makes. It’s chunky; serious business. Even if you’re just waving it around and pushing the button, it’s like firing a mounted machine gun, at five frames a second (let’s all agree that we’ve played some video games, and you know what I’m talking about). I like the subtlety of my D40, but the shutter sounds anaemic. I think this matters some if you’re a guy, you’ve got an e-peen to worry about.
I wasn't really paying attention, it took me a while to realise this wasn't an imac. Mmm, design cues.
Moving up to the top level, they’ve got home entertainment and gaming. Plenty to like here, and I got my first taste of Little Big Planet. Easy to mess around with, and you needn’t speak a word of Japanese to enjoy it.
This is one of their more curious products that I don't think we'll see in the Real World (nevermind the "Overseas models" markings). It's a little music player that rolls around and flashes lights while it plays music. It's actually pretty cute and addictive to watch.
Known as Eternal Sonata to the rest of the world, presumably because "Trusty Bell" would be too hard for stupid gaijin foreigners to get their dense heads around. You can play as Chopin. Seriously.
It's not evident here, but the TV's display panel is mind-bogglingly thin (they quote 3mm), and the image looks great.
Ginza is a very upmarket shopping district. Right across the alleyway from the Sony building is Hermes’ building. It’s huge! Just to rub it in, the entire facade is constructed from glass bricks.
I'm no architect, but I'm sure my ex could confirm my suspicions that the structural integrity is all internal.
Regular window displays would be out of place and ugly. This was cool and elegant.
Sony Street - yo ass belongs to Us now. Check out those funky streetlights in the background, too.
This colourful florist's display really brightened our day. The overcast sky threatened rain at any minute, but we managed to evade it for a while yet.
The Hermes building has this big… “installation” right over their main entrance, it’s like a large-scale child’s mobile that you’d hang in a bedroom.
You can't tell from the photo, but those vanes are actually spinning freely. It was a little bit surreal, like an urban wind turbine.
Into the sky. From this angle they look to me like strange quadriped aliens, climbing down the side of the building.
Ginza has it's fair share of interesting architecture, which is nice. I personally don't much mind "ugly" buildings, so long as they're *interesting*. My youngest brother is down with all the top-end brands, he'd love this place.
We weren’t really game to go into any of the high-end stores, so we settled on some lunch instead. It was blowing a gale on top of being cold, so we stopped in at the first noodle joint we could find in an alleyway. It’s strangely reassuring to find that you don’t get gouged exorbitant prices for food just because you’re in the ritzy part of town. It was a modest place with room for maybe a dozen customers, and our meals cost several hundred yen each, which is about standard. It’s hard not to think at the time, “but the exchange rate is about 60 yen to the AUD” – you learn to suppress that soon enough.
There was a Nikon store not far from the main drag in Ginza. I was really keen on the 18-200mm (which has had many mixed reviews), but the price just didn't stack up against buying it back home.
From Ginza we travelled on to Shibuya, which while still expensive and up-market, is a bit “younger” and trendier. We missed out last time, so what we’re really here for is the 109 building and The Crossing. These are featured pretty prominently in CHAOS;HEAD (Nitro+ game and anime).
B'z are a wildly popular rock duo. There's all sorts of interesting stuff like this around Shibuya station.
Hachikou is something of a national symbol of loyalty for the Japanese. He waited patiently at Shibuya station for his master to return, every day for a decade, after his master's unfortunate demise. The Hachikou statue is now a popular meeting place.
The Crossing. Traffic stops in all directions for pedestrians to cross however they damn well please. The closest Sydney has to this is on George street next to the QVB, but it's lame in comparison.
You can see the 109 building on the left in the photo above, a terrible pun on the owners’ name (“Tokyu” sounds like “ten”-”nine”). It’s suitably decorated for christmas. Those of you less inclined towards mousou than us probably know it from TWEWY and various other games. More normal people might recognise its appearance in Lost In Translation (2003 film).
As well as being a youth hotspot, it gets its fair share of weirdos and nuisances by virtue of having lots of people around. While we were there, there was a large van parked near the crossing with four big speaker horns blaring out something or other about god and/or jesus.
Don't look too hard because the photo is blurry, but this place is called Purikura Mecca. Enough said. One of many stores inside 109.
Aww yeah, baby! Hello Kitty just got pimped out!
Night falls early in the middle of winter, ridiculously so. The weather wasn’t helping, but it was barely past 17:00 and already it was quite dark. Clouds had definitely set in, and it was drizzling rain. With no further business in Shibuya, we pressed northwards to Shinjuku. Shinjuku has the Tokyo Metropolitan Govt. Building, a grand bastion of bureaucracy for the city, which we were keen on seeing. While it’s not particularly noteworthy (though it’s pretty tall at 243m), it’s pretty important. I suspect it may one day supplant Tokyo Tower as a manga trope (eg. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles).
Sounds boring? Well, yeah. The sixth instalment of Kara no Kyoukai is playing, so we need to swing by the Shinjuku theatre and check out their screening times.
We passed this curious structure on the way, it turns out it's the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, an educational facility.
Remember what I said about interesting buildings earlier? It was hard to make out under the cover of darkness, wind and rain, but even from a distance I could tell that this was something worth looking at. and it stayed in my view all the time we walked from Shibuya to Shinjuku. I don’t really give a damn if you think it’s ugly, lacks elegance, is misproportioned, or whatever. It’s an interesting building. The Cocoon Tower schools n00bs in Fashion, Tech, and Med. It was apparently only finished in October, so they probably hadn’t even taken all the shrinkwrapping off yet.
Mmm, converging verticals. From the ground you can make out where the tower splits into two at the 33rd floor.
It’s just past 17:30 by now, and the rain is well and truly coming down. It’s dark, it’s damp, and by golly we’re cold – far from ideal shooting conditions. I can shoot okay in my thick leather gloves, but the camera is struggling to bag enough photons, firing with the lens wide open and pushing the ISO to 1600 (that’s one stop below the D40′s “excrement overdrive” setting).
The Met. building is faced by a courtyard of sorts across the road, with covered walkways and whatnot, which is a welcome respite from the rain while we try to keep things dry and warm ourselves up.
That sweet-ass flare? Just as planned.
This curved building is on the far side of the "courtyard" facing the Met. building. It's shaped a bit like a parabola, presumably to focus the massive defence-lasers that are deployed from the main building in the event of an attack.
The building is apparently open for tourist-y purposes, but we’re really not in the mood by this time, even if it’s true. Luckily for us, they built a series of underground moving walkways to expedite the journey for the numerous bureaucrats that work here. A little while later we’re at the Metro station and on our way to Teatoru Shinjuku.