Sitting on the side of the Jingu-bashi bridge, just outside Harajuku JR station, methodically applying makeup as the first step of her transformation from a teenage girl into a Harajuku Girl.
Update: I found another photo of her taken the same day, but once her makeup was complete and she was posing for the cameras. And I wasn’t even looking for that – I simply followed some links and found the photo by chance.
On the wall of a building right next to the entrance to the Omote-Sando metro station was a mosaic. The photo is but a small part of it, but it does give a flavour of the whole thing. Capturing it all would have been difficult.
So, this time in Japan I needed to have text message capabilities in order to keep in touch with my girlfriend who was also travelling in Asia (and not able to get to landline phones or a computer with internet access to check email very easily). With a little help from my friends in our Japan office, we discovered that NTT DoCoMo rents 3G GSM handsets that will work with the SIM card from my Cingular GSM phone, and they are pretty reasonable price-wise too, especially if you can book in advance using their online form.
The phone that they have is a Motorola A835. On the positive side, it worked in Japan, the screen is really good (and large) and the predictive text learns the words you use and auto-completes them in future. On the negative side, it is huge, has a really poor quality camera (well, two of them actually) and perhaps the world’s second worst user interface (e.g. the key to confirm an action will change from one confirmation to the next, even within the same application). It also kept dropping off of the NTT DoCoMo and either telling me it was on Vodafone or that it was in emergency call only mode (I don’t know how that came about since I assume it needs a network for that still). In many cases it would splash the list of networks on the screen and wait until I picked the one I wanted. Not useful when it was sitting in my pocket so I didn’t know it was needing my help. I am still not clear whether it was offline while this screen was displayed, or whether it auto-connected in the background and just didn’t have the smarts to take the question screen away.
That said, both calls and text messages worked to and from the phone using my US number while I was in Tokyo. Hopefully the next phone I get will be 3G capable (assuming the US networks get their act together sometime soon), then I won’t need to rent a brick to do this.
Walking around outside my hotel in Tokyo on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving looking for a Starbucks that was open (the one right next door to the hotel was closed), I walked past this building. I think it is probably the most unusual building I’ve seen in Tokyo, and I cannot fathom why anybody would build anything like it. Still, it makes for a fine photo opportunity so I can’t complain 🙂
Another shot from the Shibuya district of Tokyo, this one a simple reflection shot showing some of the modern stores in the district reflected in the windows of one of their neighbours.
Another of the cast of characters outside Bic Camera for the November 23 release of the episode 3 DVD in Japan.
An interesting contrast here I felt with the autumn tree, the modern reflective glass building and caught in the reflection an older building’s rooftop hut (presumably an elevator covering). The building was on the edge of the Shibuya district, and was one of the images I captured on my walk from Harajuku to Shibuya on Sunday morning a week ago.
An autumn leaf taken just outside the Canon S Tower building near Shinagawa station. You can see this photo and two full resolution segments from it (one, two) in my Flickr set.
Went over to the Bic Camera store just outside Yurakucho station to see if they had CF wireless cards and a SIM card reader for work. At the main entrance there was a huge crowd gathered, and a collection of storm troopers, Darth Vader and others from Star Wars (no R2-D2 or C3PO though). Seems that today (November 23, 2005) is the launch date for the episode III DVD here in Japan. It seems to be somewhat pricey too at ¥3,800 (around US$35).
Walking in the Ginza I was snapping street shots “from the hip” and somehow caught this image which normally I would just delete. For some reason though it caught my attention as I skimmed through the thumbnails. It was slightly larger pre-processing, catching more of the pavement either side, so I cropped it down to this size and then removed the colour from everywhere except the orange stitching (and all of that was done using the Gimp on the Linux laptop since I don’t have the PowerBook with me).