Ginza

Today I decided to go to Ginza, Tokyo's Shopping District. Not to do any shopping, mind you, I'm on a budget. As soon as you come up from the station below you are slapped bang in the middle of a seemingly endless boulevard of department stores, restaurants and all sorts of expensive places.



At first I just walked in a straight line, ignoring most of the designer outlets, that not really being my scene. Then I came to the end of the road, so I turned back. It was exactly the same and I was just about to start getting bored when I decided to go up a side-road (Ginza's side-roads are what pass for High Streets in most English towns and cities) and I ended up on another eternal stretch of ridiculously priced shops.

But something was different. The road had been closed. Today is Kodomo no Hi or Children's Day. A very special public holiday in Japan. Though it might well also be Mercedes Day because lined up on display in the middle of the road were a host of classic Mercedes Models, I don't know their names or engine sizes so I'll just put a few photos here.




When I'd seen enough I carried on up this road and I was just in time to catch an amazing street act. Firstly, this girl comes out and starts contorting her body into all sorts of strange positions, feet over the head and all that. Then she does it all again but with a weird chandelier type thing balanced on her head. It was truly awesome. But it wasn't enough. She lay down on her back and put the weird object on her foot and the bloke comes out and puts another one on her other foot, then another one on each hand and one on her head. But she doesn't just lie there waiting for the applause she already deserves. No, she starts rolling around and making all sorts of elegant poses, without once even threatening to drop these things.



Incredible stuff. She goes off for a well deserved break while the guy comes out and does some pretty nifty things with a giant whip. But then the girl comes back and this time, she's got bowls. The guy begins picking her up, spinning her round and generally throwing her all over the place. All the while, she's balancing these bowls on her head, feet and any other limb you can think of.





Once they finish I move further up the street. This time there is a duo who call themselves "Funny Bones". They perform a sequence of hilarious and deliberately bad magic tricks. The twist is that the biggest laughs come when they actually show you how they did it, pretending to accidently drop the hat, or turning around at the wrong time to expose a dangling wire. They were pretty hilarious and I might track them down if I ever get married to perform at my wedding.

Next up was a guy dressed as some kind of hag, or witch who has just discovered she has some powers. She brings a bat back to life only to kill it again, and tries to get the broomstick to fly. Unfortunately, the music kept cutting out forcing him to the performance in total silence and it wasnt the best act of the day.

I caught the tail end of another act involving the spinning of balls, hoops, cups and even wooden boxes on umbrellas then I went in search of the holy golden twin-arches of Maccy D. It's not as hard to order a burger in a Japanese McD's as one might think. As soon as they see you are foreign they flip the menu over so you can read it in English. How Sweet.