A day in Ginza

My mother and I had a long walk and some fine window-shopping in Tokyo's Ginza neighborhood last week. Ginza is often compared to Madison Avenue around E. 57th Street. It's a mix of designer boutiques, galleries, and shops that sell jewelry, the finest Japanese classics like kimono and geta (wooden sandals), expensive crafts and other items that are coveted in Japan, like handmade paper. Here are several images from the day:

A top-drawer kimono shop.


A flower shop, presumably for weddings or high-end events...


...with sequins on this orchid and (gilded) lily!


The Ito-ya stationery and office-gadget store, which had a gazillion fancy fountain pens on the second floor. Check out the giant paper clip outside!


This shop sold modern wood-block prints and also had originals and reproductions of ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") woodblock prints) from masters like Ando Hiroshige.


Takumi, which had carved wooden items and woven tatami mats.


In Ando, a cloisonne mecca, we liked the "green tea and tea whisk" pin on the right (but didn't care for the endless collection of boring vases).



We loved the Kyukyodo stationery shop, an apparent favorite with flocks of aging housewives who clustered outside the front door. Inside, there are rolls of gorgeous handmade washi paper for giftwrapping and craftwork, and all sort of neat paper-y items.




Here's Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton.




A stunning teal gown and matching ostrich-feather bag at Valentino... and then some gray Armani.



The Rolls-Royce at the top was very appropriate, neh?

Music town

Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood has lots of music stores and record stores - there's still a Tower Records there (even though it's gone out of business in NYC) and lots of small shops selling vinyl records.

I went there this weekend to buy Lucinda a music stand for her new violin lessons and checked out a few stores. This one looks like guitar heaven.


I found the music stand in this store.


It also had dozens of guitars, including a shiny "Hello Kitty" number.

The thrill of the new

We had a busy weekend last week (blog on that is not finished yet), so we had a quiet Saturday and Sunday this time around.

The highlight was a purchase of new obento lunchboxes for both children. Blaine and I took them to Loft, an excellent find-everything-well-designed store in Shibuya.

Here is Lucinda's lunchbox (and fabric lunch sack) and its components.



And Arno's blue one, with a top that locks onto the sides.



I wish more of these well-designed kids' items were available in the US. Each lunchbox costs about $20 and holds enough for a good, but not obesity-inspiring, lunch. Also, these mostly eliminate the need for Ziploc baggies because each lunchbox is airtight, saving space in the landfill. Very Japanese.

Walking around

After our Peking-duck dinner on Saturday, Blaine and I wandered around the Roppongi neighborhood for a little while. We spotted a curious display of fish tanks at Roppongi Hills (Roppongi Hiruzu, in japanese).

Funny yellow horned fish.


Rotund designer goldfish.


A modern-art fish.



Then in Roppongi, a neighborhood that is filled with bars and nightclubs that are often described as "foreigner friendly" (and a fave nabe for US military men decades ago), we saw a kimono store and "my" nail salon...



...and at the discount store Don Quixote, a wall of outfits for dogs, including Batman and soccer costumes...


... and my future Halloween costume? (Um, no.)


From designer fish to "cosplay" (costume play) Lolita outfits, this life has an endless variety of things to see.

Pass the butter

While poorer nations around the world are struggling with food shortages and steep price increases for food, I've only noticed one oddity in our food supply: a sudden butter shortage.

This Asahi newspaper story says there's been a decrease in raw milk production in Japan and an increase in the use of available milk for drink and cheese production.

Butter was relatively expensive here anyway - typically $6 for a half pound. But a month ago, I started to notice empty shelves in the butter section, even in the big grocery store Nissin, which never runs out of anything.


You could still find some butter - French butter - priced at an astonishing $20 per pound!


I shopped around and nabbed six packages of Hokkaido butter from a local convenience store, which should be enough for several weeks. I think the price increases are here to stay, up to about $15 a pound for domestic butter.

Sunday in the park

Blaine left today for Seoul for the week, and I stirred myself to get the kids out of the house by 10 a.m. I sometimes find this hard to do, especially if I allow myself to get sucked into reading newspaper websites or start to answer overdue email - and then I start to resent that I'm supposed to entertain the children. Better to face up to it and get on with it!

I plotted out a simple itinerary: a visit to Isetan, a big department store that the "Kids in Tokyo" tour book credits with a rooftop pet store (sounded exciting), and then our first visit to Shinjuku Gyoen, a gorgeous park that friends have been raving about recently.

We made our way to the Shinjuku neighborhood in central Tokyo, home to several big dept stores, including Takashimaya, the elegant store with an outpost in Manhattan.

This was the outside of Isetan, which reminded me a lot of Bloomingdale's on Lex/59th St. Note the big red sign on the top right of this photo, because you will see it again.



We went straight to the 8th floor roof, in hopes of finding the pet shop. Out the elevator and door, and this is what we found: a pretty amazing rooftop garden. We'd come up to the red sign, on the right.




But there was no pet store - maybe it will re-open in the spring? We went down to the sixth floor - the kid and toy section! There was a fantastic collection of very expensive German (I think) wooden building toys - the sort of toys that Lucinda and Arno spend 2 minutes looking at before moving on, not worth considering. (Sorry, photographs not allowed.)

I told Lucinda and Arno they could each spend 1,000 yen (less than $10). Arno found a red Power Ranger doll that he and Lucinda pronounced "cool." Lucinda settled on a flower-girl doll; she has absorbed my refusal to buy her a Barbie, but this doll was at least more kid-like. (The doll cost 1500 yen, oh well.)

We made our purchases and walked a few blocks to Shinjuku Gyoen; the tiny entry fee of 200 yen ($1.75) for adults, free for kids under 6, keeps out the crowds. Today was chilly, probably in the high 40s in the shade and a cold breeze, not the best park weather, but the park was lovely - by far the best I've seen here, like Central Park with wide, soft, grassy fields to run on.



This is the map of the park.



We will definitely go back with a baseball, bat and soccer ball on a sunny day. Today, the children made do by running around with their new toys.

Yukata shopping

Lucinda was on vacation this week, so we hung out together while Arno was in school. Here's a report on our adventures on Monday, shopping day:

First Lucinda wanted to buy a "yukata," a cotton kimono, so we went to the Oriental Bazaar store on Omotesando (the major fashion street).



The store is tacky compared to neighbors like Bulgari, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, but it's an easy place to buy reasonably priced, decent-looking Japanese pottery, toys, chopsticks and kimonos.

A saleslady helped us find the proper size (Lucinda is 5 but her yukata would fit a Japanese 7-year-old) and we learned how to tie the sash. The sandals weren't very comfortable.




We brought home a pink one that I'm sure will turn up in a later post.

How much for an artichoke?

I didn't anticipate one of the biggest challenges to adapting U.S. family life to Tokyo.

In Seattle, we could find a broad selection of the best vegetables and fruits at prices we could handle, even at Whole Foods. But some produce that we loved to eat in Seattle, like grapes and blueberries, corn and artichokes, are a costly minefield here.

Today at one grocery store that had generally reasonable prices, even for imported goods, I saw a 1/2 pint box of blueberries for $6, a half-pint of raspberries for $10, and corn for $2/ear. And these artichokes.



That's right: one artichoke costs 1575 yen - about $14! And it wasn't even a great-looking artichoke.

We are adjusting our cooking and eating accordingly.

Found: local produce market

It is shockingly expensive here to buy fruits and veggies at supermarkets that cater to expats. As in, $8 for a small bunch of grapes or $1.50 for an ear of (admittedly delicious) corn.

So my big discovery this week, thanks to a friend in the neighborhood, was a produce market for locals.



All the signs are in Japanese, and the prices are incredibly cheap - easily half of what I'd spend elsewhere. Now I need to figure out how to cook all of the curious Japanese veggies, like that bumpy looking cucumber or that green, spiky thing (fruit? veggie?).

Fortunately, Blaine's WashPost colleague and translator, Ako, is taking me at a grocery store near her house for a full supermarket briefing. Photos and details to come...