No Maps for These Territories

Today we head out to check out Yoyogi park, right next to Harajuku, which is infamous for having greasers dancing, and people dressing up and having a blast, every Sunday.   People come out and picnic, dance around, get drunk, and people watch.  I’ve seen videos of the guys dressing as 50′s greasers for years, and I always wanted to see it in person.  I wasn’t disappointed!

We accidentally headed into the shrine section of the park first, which was a lucky accident.  There’s all sorts of gorgeous stuff in there, including a massive wall of sake casks.

We should have known we were in the wrong place, this park was far too quiet!

Ah, now there’s the crazy stuff.  Under a bridge, a whole bunch of guys were playing music and doing choreographed drum playing.

Also, it just happened to be Earth Day.  Whoops.  We looked at the fairgrounds, but decided we could get enough of that back in San Francisco, and headed back in search of greasers.

Found them!

These guys were heroes, it was a hot day, and half of them were wearing leather pants.  If you want to see some videos of them in action, we did a Noobtoob video about it.

I think this guy was the king of the greasers, he had by far the largest hair.

These guys had a different take on the 1950′s, they had poodle skirts and colored jackets, and they were doing the Hop, and lots of other group dances.  This circle was really fun to watch.

We started calling this look “host hair”.  It’s like emo on crack.  All the guys who work at host bars, which means that they entertain women and con them into buying overpriced drinks in exchange for company, have this hair.  It’s surprisingly popular, despite its silliness.

Some of the people dressed up on the bridge in Harajuku went all out.

Including this guy.  I have NO idea what he was supposed to be, but he still haunts my dreams.

Next, off to Ikebukero for italian food.  We were a bit skeptical, but Toshi promised us that it would be delicious.  And it was really quite awesome.