Day 161: Final Wander

I braved the rain today to spend my last day in Japan revisiting some favourite areas and checking out a few new ones. I spent the majority of the day hanging out on the west side of town around Shibuya, Harajuku and Omotesando. This is one of the big style and art areas of the city, and I spent a lot of time wandering through back streets looking through small clothing shops. I had a bit of money left that I wanted to spend since otherwise I'd have to go convert it in Korea, and I find Tokyo suits my fashion tastes more than what I can find at home. This isn't so much because I love Japanese fashion, but there are so many subcultures and styles in Tokyo that I find there's a lot more diversity in what's around. In the end, I didn't buy any clothes because the things I really liked were more than what I was looking to spend, but I did use up the money on a music CD and a few little gadgets.

Along the way there was also a good amount of street art, but almost entirely limited to stickers. I'd say the mix was about 50/50 on local and foreign artists, although with the ones I don't recognize it's sometimes hard to know for sure where they are from by style alone. I'm going to do a quick spotlight on one of the Japanese artists after. In regards to visiting artists, in one of my Berlin posts I included a random sticker of an animalish boy that I just happened to like and didn't know anything else about. In Tokyo I found a few more by the same artist, and that gave me enough information to track down the creator as a Melbourne-based artist called ghostpatrol - should be something to look for when I'm in Australia later. Also a sticker by The London Police stuck in there, who also got mentioned in Berlin.

I next took the metro across town to Akihabara, still looking for any final purchases. Ultimately all I bought in Akihabara was a nice meal, but it's always an interesting place to spend a few hours. My last major stop was at Ueno station, which is a fairly central hub of metro and train lines that I've passed through numerous times, but that I had never really stopped at. I took a stroll through the adjacent park which contains a few museums and a zoo apparently, but nothing I was interested enough in to pay for. I worked my way to a large pond with a temple in the middle next to the park. It seems a bit random to have this body of water full of lilies just sitting in the center of Tokyo, but there's a lot of random here.

I have to get up around 4:30am tomorrow for my flight to Korea, so I'm debating if I should go to sleep at all or just stay up until then. Since I'm getting into Seoul early in the day, and my time there is shorter than I'd hoped now, I want to squeeze in as much as I can, so I should probably at least have a nap for a few hours.