When you twist western and eastern styles, with essence of south and smell of north… you wear Harajuku Style!
Harajuku is a street in Tokyo famous for its street fashion. Every Sunday, young people in a variety of styles spend the day in Harajuku socializing with one another. Harajuku is known as the second fashion capital in the world. The style that people carry here is not one but a mash of different fashion styles, which is well encouraged around the world. Styles of harajuku have been integrated by numerous international designers in their fashion products.
The Harajuku fashion style fuses different styles and fashions with different trends. It is called to be a youth culture. Harajuku is a narrow street where youth gathers. It’s a street with café’s and boutiques around. It is a well worth visiting place. Tourists visiting this street plainly have no idea of what so ever is going on if they haven’t read about it in their travel book about Japan. Natives with harajuku style are often found funny by many, where as others are found to be astonishing and stunning. Most of them come out of the house hopping to get photographed by a national or international publication.
Harajuku style could not be defined or explained by mere words. An image in support is always needed while discussing it. “Japanese harajuku girls” is what the media calls them! These girls are dressed in Gothic, Lolita, Visual Kei, Ganguro, Gyar and Kogal styles.
If you’re looking for formal dresses for an exclusive evening dinner, then look no further than Omotesando. This place has it all; high class fashion, hundreds of stores in easy walking distance to each other, and Kiddy Land, a six story complex that sells products for big and little kids alike. However, the main selling point for Omotesando is the formal dresses.
For tourists, the first place you will want to stop is the Oriental Bazaar. This is a three story complex, and it has been called the best place for visitors to start their Japanese journey. Make sure the conversion rate is in your favour, because you will be spending a lot of money here. Get your gifts for the friends and family back home when you buy them teddy bears made out of wonderfully colourful fabrics. Traditional teddy’s only come in plain colours and you will feel wonderfully Japanese when you purchase a white bear with a large number of multicoloured flowers all over it. To complete your formal attire, it is here that you can purchase a kanzashi (hairpin), a corsages, or a traditionally styles hair clip. You can also great a traditional Japanese fabric bag in a range of colours and prints, but you might want to do that after you’ve settled on the dress.
And getting the dress might take some time, with hundreds of high quality stores lining the streets. You won’t find a rip off here; these are all the real deal. Louis Vuitton opened in August of 2002 with a whopping 5-story complex. Hundreds of designer clothes are just waiting for you to try on, without having to worry about the cost. With the exchange rate, you will be able to find a bargain on clothing that you would normally have to spend twice as much on. Ralph Lauren also has a store here, and the clothing is to die for. Less upscale than Louis Vuitton, it is here where you can buy formal dresses that can also be worn during the day or to work. Ralph Lauren also has a wide range of men’s and children’s wear, so you can outfit the entire family.
But the best place to spend a day shopping in Omotesando is Omotesando Hills. Six floors including such shops as Dolce & Gabbana, Porsche Design, Yves Saint Laurent, Jimmy Choo, Dunhill, and Adore, you would think the only reason to leave would be to find somewhere to eat, but that’s all taken care of. On almost every floor you will find a little restaurant or cafe ready to serve up traditional Japanese meals or foreign exports like pizza. These shops also include men’s and children’s wear, so you can keep them busy while you’re shopping for your perfect dress.
For the adults, there’s the lovely Condomania, full of humorous prophylactics. Get some gifts to send back home, or pick something exotic to try out with your partner; it’s all here.
While you’re vacationing in Japan, bypass Tokyo for a day or two (or three) and spend some time in lovely Omotesando. You won’t regret it.
The use of Twitter has increased manifold in Japan with an average of more than three thousand tweets per second during the recent Japanese-Danish games in last year’s world cup! Twitter is a hot selling item with Japanese people, most of whom prefer it to the Japanese rival of Twitter, known as Mixi, in Japanese, because Mixi demands a high level of conversation etiquette from its loggers. So, many Japanese feel happy that they are good to go with the much more informal Twitter and communicate informally and comfortably.
Also, the Japanese feel at liberty using Twitter because it allows a higher number of characters per message: one hundred and forty, instead of the lesser amount of alphabets permitted by Mixi in Japanese. A major reason for the popularity of Twitter in Japan was the availability of Twitter in Japanese language when it started its operations in Japan. Coupled with the high number of characters allowed per message, Twitter was an instant success!
Twitter has already reached a record level of twenty billion tweets! Twitter announced that Japanese users alone make up about twelve e percent of total global tweets! This figure makes the Japanese second only to the population in the United States. It is estimated that about eight million Japanese tweets are written each day and increasing.
Hundreds of books titled Twitter have been published in Japan. In the December of last year, Twitter surpassed Mixi to become the most visited site in Japan with a record 14.6 million visitors, an increase of about 176% from last year’s stats.
Another reason of Twitter’s enormous popularity in Japan is that unlike Mixi, people do not create anonymous profiles on Twitter; instead they create profiles with their real names on it and communicate as such.
Also, on midnight of 31 December last year, Twitter fans in Japan created another world record by sending almost seven thousand tweets per second!
Also contributing to the success of Twitter was the cell phone version which jumped the number of visits to the website enormously because the total number of cell phones in Japan is greater than the strength of the entire population there with many people owning and using more than one cell phone!
However, recently, Twitter has started charging customers in Japan for access to their tweets as well as to send them. Other services such as Mixi have been doing so for a long time as customers in Japan are used to paying for online services. It will have to be seen however how the introduction of the “pay-for-tweet” system affects the number of users of Twitter in Japan.
This is in no way fully comprehensive, it might perhaps be 34/123ths comprehensive, I am still crunching the numbers.
So in absolutely no particular order…(apart from the order in which I thought of them, which might perhaps say something about me, but ignore those thoughts and move along)
I’m fairly sure anyone with even a sparse interest in bloggers in Japan (which is of course different from Japanese bloggers) will have heard of Danny Choo or has at least seen him dance around Shibuya dressed as a stormtrooper. I think one of the most interesting things about Danny’s website is the huge number of pictures he takes for his blog. His posts are usually bursting with them, which I enjoying, being somewhat of a visual fellow. I am not really into the anime figures that Danny has a huge love for, but some of the shots of a tiny anime girl trying to lift a biscuit or some such thing are pretty funny.
Hikosaemon is an expert from New Zealand who has lived and worked in Japan for quite a number of years (not a great answer I know but I couldn’t find a number and I’m trying to get on here). He is bilingual in his blogs and often pushes for Japanese bloggers to cross over more into the mainstream interwebs. Hiko also makes videos on Youtube, and he is a prominent member of the JVlogging community. I find him to be a sane voice in a sea of madness quite often. On his blog you’ll find a nice mix of Japan themed posts and posts about various tech related subjects. Highly recommended.
Arisha in Tokyo. A girl from small town Oregon talks about her adventures in Tokyo and shares some of the amusing tales that pop up teaching kids in an English language school. It would appear that she possesses some kind of inhuman typing skillz because some of these posts are looooong. I am too lazy as a reader to full delve into those particular posts. But she has a cool kooky sense of humor and she is hot, which is really all anyone cares about right?…no?…just me?…hmmmm…moving on.