 Pic 1. Street goths on show in Harajuku [Pic GAB]  Pic 2. Straight from a comic book's pages [pic GAB] |
Harajuku, one of 29 stops on the above-ground Yamanote Line in Tokyo, boasts a street culture wildly flamboyant and imaginative. Not since San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district was in full flower forty years ago has there been anything to quite compare with it. The regular cadre of chameleons who gather on the bridge over the railway line each Sunday have made the suburb famous. The mostly middle-class high school students decorate themselves elaborately as Goths, Punks, Space Cadets, Little Misses Muffett and Bo Peep, Ghouls, Marie Antionette, belles of the ball, comic book heroines, rivals of Sherlock Holmes, parodies, carnival queens, lost prophets and patients escaped from care
Be it an elite social identification, a rebellion against schoolyard discipline, a protest against media-directed uniformity, or true artistic expression, there is an almost religious dedication to the whole process. Nothing about it is casual or half-hearted. As an observer you sometimes feel that you are in on a film shoot organised by a very avant garde European director. As one of travel's great passing parades, it can amuse and entertain even the most inured celebration seeker
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