I was looking forward to Harajuku. It’s meant to be the home of cosplay – dressing up as characters from anime and the like. We’d made sure we’d be in Tokyo on a Sunday, because that’s the day when the cosplayers come out in force. I think someone forgot to tell the cosplayers that.
We’d had a pretty slow start to the day, so it was after lunch by the time we jumped on a train to Harajuku. Leaving the station took forever – it was like after an Acer Arena gig, when everyone’s trying to get into Olympic Park Station, except with the same number of people trying to get out. Eventually we emerged onto the street, and followed the flow of people up the road. We weren’t sure where we headed, but we just followed the other tourists with their Lonely Planets in one hand and their cameras in the other.
The crowd thinned out a bit as it reached a bridge, and I remembered reading that it was on a bridge that the cosplayers hung out, posing for photographers. I saw three or four people in full costume, but thought perhaps we were in the wrong spot – surely there should be more to it than this. But after walking around for a bit, turns out no, that was it. The most interesting thing I saw was a guy dancing (as seen above) and he wasn’t really that interesting (nor, I suppose, was he really dancing).
The curious thing was that the Harajuku scene seems to have been hijacked by foreigners. There were a couple of Western girls hanging around dressed somewhat oddly, but it was pretty tame compared to what you’d see in Newtown. There were also a bunch of people with ‘Free Hugs’ signs, but when you’ve got the original thing in Sydney, seems like a long way to come for a hug.
We left pretty quickly, which wasn’t that quick given the station was still packed. As we walked past the people leaving the train with expectant looks in their eyes, I felt like telling them to turn around and save themselves the effort.
Perhaps if we’d gotten there earlier it might have been better. Perhaps if we weren’t here on a Sunday just before three public holidays it would have been different. Or perhaps the cosplayers decided that instead of dressing up, they’d have more fun watching all the tourists instead.
Yes, Harajuku was rubbish. If I’d wanted to travel somewhere inconvenient in the blazing heat and be jostled by massive crowds of sweaty tourists in order to look at a bunch of posers, I could have just gone to Bondi.