7 Minutes in Heaven or How Halloween Came Early This Year

(dedicated to citizen Alexandros K of  Athens and Peloponnese, currently exiled in Switzerland)

The ‘clairvoyant’ capabilities of my friend Alexandre are truly astounding. He called me prosaic on the very same day I spent half of it rummaging through racks of used Chanel clothing.

What injustice by the hand of a friend!

The blog will go on strike!

The blog will join the Greek civil servants in protest!

Oh Karali, Karali, can you think of a more poetic activity? Shopping for vintage Chanel is like witnessing the nativity scene in Bethlehem with the real baby Jesus instead of a plastic baby Jesus in a school play. It is like watching kittens playing with dolphins. It is like the sun rise over the Himalayas but in a freak store basement.

 (Those of you expecting to read about the freak stores as in the commonly accepted definition of what is freakish in Tokyo come back tomorrow when I will report on the FCS, Fetish Circus Show, one event from‘Arts and Culture’ pages you dont want to miss)

So wipe off your naughty grins, this blog post is purely girlie, and the word in Japanese is gyaru.

Just about now, all the boys are closing the page and going back to internet porn. I assume Karalis has stopped reading after the first paragraph and has gone out.

For the remaining one reader I will illustrate my absurd love of vintage Chanel (correct terminology for when something is used, often times useless, and invariably overpriced). When I was 18 and living off my student allowance and father’s money on Rue Villa Laugier in Paris I considered vintage Chanel cardigans (fit for walking with a walking stick) a shrewd investment. Some magazine used the word ‘investment piece’ for a coat and I thought they meant literally. I cant imagine what my father must have thought, but I always knew the day would come when I'd pull off that look with effortless style. 
That was in 1997.

To make up for the gaping hole in the budget created by buying useless knits I had to drink less and babysit more but that is when I began to view favorably all of sorts of capricious and eccentric behaviors. I had good training for what’s to come- Tokyo (and subsequent financial ruin).

Between the 23 city wards you can chart a map of vintage stores by neighborhood (but in this fabulously vast city that is too broad a category), designer, decade and finally budget. With prices that range from comfortably numbing to violently expensive I find solace in window shopping. And just like the Blues Brothers before me, I am on a mission, not putting the band together like Belushi and Ackroyd, but finding the Holy Grail, motherload of vintage, the elusive, under-appreciated, discarded by a woman who wasn’t thinking straight- orphaned Chanel bag in mint condition at a decent price.

After lunch with friends, strolling from Asakusa Mitsuke down to Aoyama (gibberish) and in  terrible discomfort brought on by a sushi binge (again!) I was about to venture underground to go home when a sliding door across the Kotto street caught my eye.

Such is life.

What made me go through the nondescript door I haven’t a clue. It could have been anything, a news agent, a vet, a Sony dealership, but no, it turned out to be the gates of heaven.

And just like what you’d expect from heaven, the place was half empty.

Rows upon rows, endless, interminable rows of Chanel bags, sequined shoes, sequined dresses, delicate silks, ancient travel trunks, finest boudoir lingerie, and then, even more Chanel bags and Miriam Haskell costume jewelry  had my head spinning like I had just fallen down the rabbit-hole.
This place is the size of an industrial warehouse; it could house a small Ikea (since the Ikea Kokohu fiasco trip I see dangers of Ikea everywhere) but strangely enough there were no crowds.

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

I thought I did.

The clueless, misguided, alien visitor on planet Tokyo that I am, I take a pretty lambskin quilted Chanel bag, look at the price tag, 6000 yen, and instantly grab another three because at roughly 60 euro a piece, I’m thinking, if I buy 10 to resell in Europe I have made my year’s salary today and I can continue with this early retirement scheme. My impoverished heart was beating furiously and my thinking was certainly muddled! Slowly regaining my senses I take another bag (so now I am holding four) and head to the cashier.

Truth is, I am suddenly a bit apprehensive as I go looking for the cashier because during this out of body shopping extravaganza I haven’t registered another shopper, I have not seen a sales clerk, there appears to be no shop assistant or any human of any kind for that matter. And above all, most conspicuously, there seems to be no cashier!

What a bizarre place!

So holding the four bags and with a puzzled expression I walk the labyrinth of neatly stacked vintage treasures and come all the way back to the front where a neat man with glasses like John Lennon greets me with a smile and hands me a form to fill!

Great, these people really think I can fill customer satisfaction forms in Katakana! Mad day all around and no one is normal.

I say 'No thank you, I just wish to pay.

He goes ‘ No pay’

I go ‘ Yes, yes, I have not paid yet, I wish to pay’

He goes ‘ No buy, no pay, only fashion shoot rent. Fill form for company’

Inside my head there is an explosion of screams but I am so defeated I barely have the strength to utter a meek ‘W H A T’

Let me not waste any more of your time the way they’ve wasted mine with the mythical combo of cheap and genuine Chanel. What I thought bargain of the century is in fact the daily rental price a fashion magazine or stylist pays for the rights to shoot the bag!

These Japanese may be smiling but are no idiots.
Your name needs to be on a preapproved list, ID and all. They havent kicked me out because no one even dreams you would go in unless fashion is your business. Maybe at first I had been mistaken for a foreign fashion editor? Or a foreign designer? But dressed the way I was, probably just foreign.

I ask - where else could such a place exist without menacing guards and CCTV?  

A sliding door that opens for anyone off the street and takes you straight to Shangri-la is possible in Tokyo alone.

What seemed like heaven is now going to haunt me for days.


early Halloween at the haunted house



How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

After last night’s bar crawl in Shinjuku I was so financially ruined I barely had enough coins to take the subway back home. But it is true that poverty (granted, my poverty is not abject) stimulates creative thinking, not long ago I came across the review of Scott Fitzgerald’s short novel ‘On Booze’ and immediately remembered how even the review gave me a naughty smirk.

Perhaps if I started reading Burroughs, Marquis de Sade and Fitzgerald I could subside on a diet of literature and tea…I am hoping their wild stories of substance abuse, depravity and all day long cocktail hour will make my virginal nights at home more entertaining. Obviously I can’t watch Japanese TV and obviously I cant go gallivanting in Ginza every night. First would lead to a mental breakdown and the second to financial ruin of massive proportion.

So today I slummed it on the subway uptown to Marunuchi, a district around the central Tokyo station, high-rise buildings, 10 Bottega Veneta stores, shoe shiners diligently shining loafers worn by employees of the thousand and one investment banks found on this tiny plot of land across from where the Emperor and Empress of Japan live a good life. Slightly isolated but decent folk they are. 

Marunuchi is also home to Maruzen, the first bookstore in modern day Japan that also had the commendable role in bringing the Burberry rain coat to the Far East. It is a historical fact that until the bookstore owner started importing Burberry coats in 1914 all raincoats worn by the Japanese were made of rubber!

But I went looking for FS Fitzgerald.

Lost in the sea of odd English titles, Yoga Dogs, Margaret Thatcher: From Grocer’s Daughter to Prime Minister, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog and The End of Poverty (by that I was intrigued!) .... was the very thin F S Fitzgerald’s paperback’ On Booze’

I grabbed it and ran out….

Judging by the book titles and sales- apocalypse according to the Mayans will be a good thing!



because one is never enough



Post-colonial times in Yokohama or how you can end up in Ikea if you're not careful

If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

On Sunday I went to Yokohama after hearing Bill Granger’s Sydney based eponymous restaurant opened a branch and is serving delicious pancakes. Since returning to Japan I have been on a regimen of long walks and raw fish and figured I could do with a little beefing up for the winter.

The ways of reaching Yokohama from Tokyo are too many to mention, between the total of 303 Tokyo subway stations you need not change trains more than once regardless of where you’re departing from.
And if you aren’t coming to Tokyo any time in the foreseeable future but wish to get the vibe. - ‘Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction’

Lewis Carroll was genius and Japanese reality goes like the first pages of Alice in Wonderland.

It took me 40 min. to reach Yokohama Bay but when the first foreigner Commodore Matthew Perry sailed to Japan in 1853, it took him 7 months at sea. He was 50 years old and troubled by arthritis; the voyage was financed by a small brokerage house Lehman Brothers (charming historical side note) and the Shogun ruled Japan with an iron fist.

Main purpose of Perry’s mission was to establish a coal station so that American steamships could travel the great Asian trade route and move ahead of their European rivals. He hoped to convince Shogun allowing trade would be beneficial to his rule. Also, it would be nice if the Japanese stopped killing foreigners on general principle.

Perry arrived in Yokohama Bay days after his 50^th birthday with a crew inexperienced in battle and not a word of Japanese spoken by anyone. The first words exchanged between his crew and the Japanese were shouted in French ‘Departez’ (leave!), language which neither Perry nor the Japanese understood well but the message was clear.

After a long and tedious game of cat and mouse, Japan allowed Perry ashore (alive). He  offered them soap and milk and even ceremoniously slaughtered a cow to promote the benefits of American beef! Yokohamans (Yokohamese, Yokohamians, Yokoh-amish, Yokohammsters, there is a lively debate on this…) offered seafood and showed how women and men bathe together, nude, in public baths. That is how Japan opened to the West and how West fell in love with Japan hook line and sinker.

I digress, remember I set out to have brunch at Bills ….and to find the restaurant I got off the train somewhere along the discontinued rail line close to the spot where Perry signed the Treaty of Kanagawa  (trade, cooperation and all good things) some 150 years ago.

Picture Yokohama- European style houses in all their colonial splendor next to Sumitomo Mitsui Bank branch offices and electro music blasting from cars at the light. In Tokyo you never really notice cars and you most certainly don’t ever forget you are very far from home. In Yokohama, after a few beers, you could easily be fooled (it was in fact the day of Octoberfest- sponsored by either a German brewery or the German Embassy? Same difference). The Germans had put up stalls all along the waterfront and proceeded to sell hotdogs inside the historical warehouses. Terrible yodeling could be heard from a marquee outside the Odabashi Pier (where you can board a ship to Borneo if you feel so inclined) and every 5 minutes it was ‘Danke Schoen’ from the loudspeaker! Until 1949 the US Navy had jurisdiction of the Odabashi Pier, the Pier was renovated by an Iranian- Spanish team of architects in 1992 but on Saturday it felt very much like Bavaria!

Colonization! Globalization! Pros and Cons! Pick your side now but the most shocking part of the day is yet to come.

I was desperate to avoid the drunken masses, it was a beautiful sunny day and looking at Japanese failed attempts to out do the expats in downing beer is a pointless activity. In the beer drinking competition- white man always wins!

There is a pretty hill in Yokohama with a large French settlement (France-yama) but it is up hill and I was already feeling rather worn out from traipsing across town. The Chinatown is at sea level and not far, so I quickly ventured in but was even more quick to get out! Being accosted by frauds in fake Buddhist robes selling ‘stones for happiness’ and being shouted at by an aggressive palm reader (no photos!) – not for me.

Ciao Chinatown Yokohama, I’m headed back to Tokyo on the first (fast) train.....

...or so I thought…..

For the story to continue to make sense (as much as my writing skill allow) I should mention I’ve been meaning to buy a new reading lamp, so when judging my moronic decisions of the afternoon keep in mind my bedside reading lamp gives poor light.

At the Sakuragiacho Station Yokohama tourist information booth they gave me an elaborate map of the ten trillion subway, metro and rail lines connecting Yokohama, Kawasaki and Tokyo with all their sprawling suburbs that form the biggest urban conglomeration in the world!

I asked for the quickest route back to Tokyo and in response the kind woman at the Information counter scribbled ten different solutions to the problem and sent me off.

One change at the Yokohama Station.

Second change at the Shin Yokohama Station.

And whilst looking for the right platform and corresponding gate I saw a poster that said IKEA KOHOKU free shuttle bus!

The lamp, the lamp, the lamp!

I decide it is marvelous to profit from the free shuttle bus option and I leave the safety of the sign-posted train station and exit the Shin Yokohama station somewhere in Shin Yokohama. Today I know Shin Yokohama is somewhere north west of Yokohama, but this information was unavailable to me on Sunday.

Once outside the station the neat signs for Ikea Kohoku shuttle were nowhere to be seen. I asked taxi drivers, they spoke no English. I asked a US military guy who was clueless. I asked two Japanese ladies, they seemed to be going in a different direction but knew where it was! Bless the kindest nation, not speaking a word of English they walked me straight to the bus stop. A good 10 min walk!

Sunday nights are an eerie time everywhere in the world, and even with all big stores open daily, 7 days a week, I was trying to gauge the magnitude of my mistake. Was I just being silly or was I a complete moron looking for Ikea between Yokohama and Tokyo on a Sunday night.

As the first clue- the bus stop was empty.

At last a man in a light green uniform and cap shows up and starts talking to me. I have no idea what uniform that is ( military? sanitation? park ranger?) and even less what he is trying to communicate?  Luckily another person enters this surrealist nightmarish parking lot/bus stop scene; he speaks English and is also waiting for the Ikea shuttle bus which should be arriving in 5 minutes he says.

And it does.

The man in uniform climbs in to drive, the previous driver gets off and thank God this is all going well.

Or so I think until we take a long narrow road going parallel to a bigger broader road which turns to be a major ‘Expressway’ and soon we are speeding towards Ikea (wherever it may be) and I see Mt Fuji majestic in the distance.

This is a really bad sign.

Last time I saw Mt Fuji was from a Kyoto bound train! Two possibilities here, you can either see Fuji from all over Japan (Earth is round, so probably not the case) or we are headed South in the opposite direction of Tokyo! Does Ikea have an Ikea style hotel where lost people can sleep until morning when visibility and conditions are more favorable for finding the way back?

It now becomes very clear, it was not silly getting off at Shin Yokohama looking for Ikea, it was idiotic.

But eventually we do get to Ikea.

I buy a lamp 10 minutes before closing time.

The same damned shuttle takes me back to Shin Yokohama very late on Sunday night and even I know trains run on a different schedule Sunday nights. Some run every 20 min instead of every 5, some only go to big hubs and some don’t run at all. Especially confusing are the commuter trains and I was deep in the commuter land!

Back at the informations counter my suspicions are confirmed, I can not go back the same way I arrived.

Alice : I simply must go through!

Doorknob: Sorry, you are much too big, simply impassible.

Alice: You mean impossible.

Doorknob: No. Impassible. Nothing’s impossible.

And so I am told I must head back in direction of Yokohama, get off at Higashi Kanagawa and from there onwards to Naka Nobu (think I can remember that) and through to Ookayama to catch the rapid train on the Shonan Shinjuku line to Gotanda- home.

However I’ve now got the bulky Ikea lamp to deal with….

At Higashi Kanagawa station I get off as told but discover the last train to Naka Nobu has departed, the next train is the express and wont make the Naka Nobu stop. Typically, at Higashi Kanagawa I can not find the tourist info booth and none of the locals speak foreign languages. It is no longer Higashi Whatever Station it is a Monty Pythons special.

Hating myself, hating Ikea even more, lamp may give decent light but if I am going  to charter a plane to get back home it would’ve been more economical to get a little something crystal from Baccarat!

What started as a day of luxury, brunch and stroll by the sea, is now a disaster with Ikea furniture to be assembled at midnight.

Colonization, globalization, lost in translation and now Ikea!

Tomorrow I am going to Milkfed, boutique and clothing line designed by Sophia Coppola. That’s the program and I’m sticking to it!