This past weekend, Odaiba was experienced.
Many girls in my Japanese class had often spoke of "going to Odaiba" over the weekend, and up until now, I had been incredibly confused about what they were speaking of. I thought they were saying "O Dive Bar," due to the way Japanese language intonations work, and I wondered why they found it necessary to make "dive bar" into an honorable thing.
Odaiba, obviously, is the name of an area of Tokyo. It's a modern, man-made, island-ish area, and cruising through it is like being in a sci-fi and surrealistic world all at once. You can't reach Odaiba by a regular subway line -- you must ride a monorail, piloted by hidden robots, instead.
Lining the Tokyo Bay are giant, insect-like structures. A humongous Ferris wheel sits idly among giant, geometrically shaped buildings. The new Fuji TV building, a giant box of metal beams, has a huge metal sphere built into it and all sorts of knobs and designs.
There is a mock Statue of Liberty on the water, followed by a mock Golden Gate Bridge (the "Rainbow Bridge"), followed by a mock Eiffel Tower (the "Tokyo Tower"). A shopping center called the Joyopolis is modeled after Ancient Greece. My friends and I concurred that this place was like Epcot Center and The Matrix rolled into one.
The purpose of our pilgrimage to Odaiba was the Tokyo Design Festa. I knew nothing about it except for a few comments from a friend of mine who has an internship at a hip magazine here and was preparing for this. Turns out, the absolute bizarre nature of this design show made Odaiba seem like Duluth, Minnesota
The second we entered the giant atrium where the artists and designers had set up row after row of booths, we felt extremely out of place. We were surrounded by men and women in full-blown costumes (think giant bees, flower people, and Goth-samurai), and others in very unique get-ups -- more unique than the attire that most young Japanese people strut around in on a daily basis.
There were hair colors of every shade, platform sneakers about one foot tall, leggings with every pattern imaginable, goggles with antennae attached to them, futuristic-looking skirts, anime-inspired T-shirts and face paintings, and the occasional nude. My friends and I were dressed to the nines in jeans, sweatpants, preppy sweaters, and sneakers of normal stature.
Anyone could have a booth at this expo, which meant that there was quite a range in the quality of artwork for sale. I met one elementary school boy who was selling his original crayon drawings for about a dollar apiece. His booth was next door to an elderly man who was a professional photographer, selling hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of photography. I bought both a crayon drawing from the little boy, and a photo postcard from the photographer.
Despite the fact that there were hundreds of artists present, there were a surprising amount of recurring themes. Professional and amateur photographers were a dime a dozen, artists with their own ideas of anime were showcasing postcards, buttons, and paintings of their characters, and there were several morbid and demented-looking baby dolls in suggestive positions that had been transformed into terrifying objects with blood splattered all over their bodies, safety pins stuck in random places, and eyes gutted out of their heads. It was unclear to me whether these dolls were for sale or for artistic display only.
I stumbled across one booth that featured two men, about college-aged, making very relaxing, ambient music with their Nintendo Game Boys. They had programmed the different sounds of Super Mario to be musical notes, so they just danced around, playing with their Game Boys, making some really interesting sounds.
A male duo of "dancers" were performing throughout the day, doing slow movements to traditional Japanese flute music. One was dressed as a giant samurai, and the other was completely naked, save for a loincloth, and his body was covered in dark grey paint. Once in a while they would stop the music, take deep breaths, stand completely still, and just scream for minutes on end. Outside, there was more screaming going on with a Japanese heavy metal band taking the stage.
The other interesting thing about this design show (as if there weren't a shortage of interesting things to begin with) was the amount of foreigners present. Never before have I seen so many of them rounded up in one space. Very few foreigners held actual booths there -- the majority of them were like my friends and me, wandering around in very inappropriate clothing for the occasion.
I wondered if the Tokyo Design Festa was a huge attraction for artists around the world, or if it was simply the anime that brought them out, as anime-themed events are notorious for attracting Tokyo's foreigners.
To my pleasure, for the majority of the foreigners I spoke with, it wasn't just the anime. I struggled through a conversation in German with Jens and Anna, a husband and wife team of professional photographers in Duesseldorf, Germany, who told me that they come here every year for the Japanese photography.
"Being in a place like Tokyo, [the photographers are] always finding objects, people, and places that contrast so harshly with their surroundings. If they start to describe their collections to you, they sound awful and ugly, when in fact they end up being absolutely mind-blowing. They just see these things and click! -- they've got something. Like something out of a fantasy film or a dream, you learn to appreciate it for what it is," Anna said.
I thought Anna's comment was right on the money, not only with regard to the photography, but with the entire environment of the Design Festa -- everything clashed, everything had its own degree of ugliness and splendor, but in the end, it just clicked.
