The Gonzo consumer guide to Japan

No, no.

The Jesus & Mary Chain song didn’t seep out of the stereos when I was walking around the Shibuya district in Tokyo. No Roxy Music either. All I heard was insanely cute pachinko music. The kind that makes you want to strut around that funky city.

Sony Philippines recently invited The Philippine STAR to cover the launch of its latest camera (more about that in a future article) in Tokyo (with a side trip to the Sony manufacturing plant in Nagoya), and I got the opportunity to visit one of my favorite cities in the world. The one where the lights never go out. The one straight out of Haruki Murakami’s mind-blowing novels.

My hotel this year was the Shibuya Excel Hotel Tokyu, just a throw of the pachinko ball away from Hachiko-Mae Square, with that statue of the eternally loyal dog Hachiko. You walk around a bit and you’ll end up at the HMV record store, which for a third-rate music writer like me (well according to my adoring enemies) is like entering the pearly gates of Asgard.

I bought the Raconteurs debut (featuring Jack White and a proper backing band) and the new Flaming Lips, as well as some old Kinks (the godfathers of Britpop). Tower Records, also near the hotel, offers CDs as well as books I have never seen in stores here in Manila – about Damien Hirst and Joseph Beuys, San Francisco psychedelic posters, serial killers, and other interesting curios. Even Beat spoken word albums from Rhino Records. Somebody from the press group quipped, "So much time, so little money." True, true.

Tokyu Hands – in that same area, in Udagawa-cho – offers a mind-numbing constellation of items – from ordinary household and workplace essentials to lava lamps to jigsaw puzzles to scarecrow supplies to chalices festooned with dragons and devils to wigs and schoolgirl uniforms (uh, for Halloween parties and not for anything else).

The Loft in Shibuya is a smaller, more upscale version of Tokyu Hands, but it was there that I found Skull Daddy pieces that make great house ornaments (that is, if you have this gnawing obsession about mortality and Iron Maiden). There were skull coin banks, skull candleholders, skull incense boats, skull jewel box and others "skullduggeries." Its variety goods section is one of the best I’ve seen in Tokyo. Imagine finding a Mona Lisa rubber mask right beside a posse of cutesy condom creatures. Wigs were also everywhere.

At Don Quixote, which sells relatively cheap bric-a-brac, I was hell-bent on buying a pig snout (which I mistook for a cool rubber toy) until I started pressing it with my thumb and out came drops of grease that made my hand smell like chicaron.

The most rocking store of all is Blister.com, reportedly one of Michael Jackson’s favorite shops. You can’t blame MJ because Blister.com has this Peter Pan appeal: it makes you want to be a kid forever. This toy store display features a life-size Batman, which probably costs as much as a motorcycle or third-hand car in Manila. On the second floor is its "rock n’ roll" section. I saw a Lego version of the Sex Pistols (anarchy can be cutesy), a Slash figurine (no Axl Rose in sight), KISS action figures, the Iron Maiden mascot, and an Alien toy (hats off to you Mr. Giger) in an intergalactic boxing match against a Predator toy, among others. There was also a collection of cartoonist Gerald Scarfe’s The Wall figurines – the face in The Wall, Judge Arse, Pink, the darkly sarcastic teacher, those evil flowers, and even the goose-stepping fascist hammers.

Factoid of the day: did you know that Bob Geldof (Live Aid promoter and Boomtown Rats singer) starred in the movie adaptation of The Wall?

What I really wanted to buy at Blister.com (but which was obscenely expensive) was the Alice Cooper action figure. Really, really creepy. Alice Cooper (with his snakes and his flirtations with the forces of evil) is the template by which Marilyn Manson built his career. The toy would make a great conversation piece: Alice Cooper in all his demonic glory, welcoming guests to his insane nightmares. The same guy who sang – dig the irony – I Never Cry. Take away, take away my eyes…

There were also Barbie-like dolls of artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. No, I didn’t spot a Keith Haring variant. The Warhol doll sported the trademark white mop-top of the pop art star, while the Basquiat doll sported a long black trench coat (like the black dude in The Matrix). It would have been better if the toys came with miniature artworks (such as Warhol’s cow wallpaper or Basquiat’s Charlie Parker paintings.) That would out-rock Barbie girl and her Barbie world, man.

Somebody from the Sony press group quipped, "So much time, so little money." True, true.

Francis Bacon, James Brown, And Doraemon

After the Sony tour, I stayed at my sister Jelly’s house in Yokohama. Same as last year, my bedroom had a window with a sprawling view of Mount Fuji.

Since I got lost so many times in the labyrinthine series of Tokyo train stations, my sister kindly accompanied me to my personal mecca: the National Museum of Modern Art in Chiyoda-ku. The museum consists of the Museum and Crafts Gallery in Kitanomaru Koen and the National Film Center in Kyobashi. We checked out the permanent exhibition at the museum titled "Modern Japanese Art from the Museum Collection," which consists of paintings, sculptures, prints, and other works dating roughly from the beginning of the 20th century to the present and "provides an overview of the history of modern art." Pardon the geekish-ness. I know art doesn’t have to sound academic to make an impact in the life of an ordinary person. If it moves you, it’s art.

The most moving piece for me in the entire collection is Francis Bacon’s "Sphinx: Portrait of Muriel Belcher." Seeing one of Bacon’s artworks up close is like watching a David Lynch movie for the first time – you’re damn sure something wicked lurks in those white picket fences or the swathes of ecstatic orange. (Another factoid of the day: did you know that, just like Warhol, Bacon painted a portrait of Mick Jagger? Something about his Satanic Majesties that those artists found compelling.)

I had this dark fascination over this late great British artist ever since I saw his "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion," his screaming pope series, as well as his portraits of existential distortion – as if snails dragged their slimy bodies across the canvas. This is one man who found beauty in "ham, pig’s tongue, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, and all that death," and who considered painting as violent as copulating.

There were also cool insulation pieces by Japanese artists like Bushiro Mori, Yayoi Kusama, On Kawara (with his series of oracular dates), and Saburo Muraoka (with his piece called "Bent Oxygen") as part of the "Duration/Rupture" exhibition. Also on view at the exhibition was Jori Yoshihara’s centenary retrospective.

Great items also at the museum shop – from Taro Okamoto sculpture replicas to Wolfgang Tillmans shirts.

Art rocks.

Turn On, Tune In, Off-House

I went with my sister, her husband Masaaki, and her son Ken to the Off-House stores in Yokosuka.

The Off-House is a secondhand store that offers everything from the quirky to the kitschy to the can’t-live-without. I saw a stack of musical instruments, including three Gibson Les Paul guitars. The Les Paul is the preferred model of virtuosos such as Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Slash of Guns N’ Roses, and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, among other six-string slingers. I saw a sunburst Les Paul (the one that Page fingers in The Song Remains The Same) that went for about P60,000. Believe it or not. (A vintage Les Paul gold-top was double the price.) The secondhand guitars came in with a checklist of which parts were still working and which ones weren’t. In the case of the Les Paul, only the batteries (for the pickups) needed changing. It was in pretty good shape. You could practically plug it through a Marshall and play the opening riff of Welcome To The Jungle or Dazed and Confused.

I saw a couple of Fender, B.C. Rich, and Washburn guitars, and other instruments by noted Japanese brands. One Fernandez model had a built-in speaker that I think Dave Navarro played in the good, yet much-maligned, Red Hot Chili Peppers album "One Hot Minute."

There were a couple of made-in-the-USA Fender Precision basses, upright basses and Crossover models. There were 12-string guitars. There were Marshall and Pignose amplifiers. There were Boss stomp-boxes and effects boxes. Those were a few of my favorite things. Oh yeah, there was a cute Doraemon guitar. I wonder how a guitar player would look if he played a Slayer dirge on that Doraemon. Like Adam Sandler playing the role of Satan’s son, I suppose.

The Off-House also has quirky items like a two-foot James Brown doll that gyrates. Probably to the tune of I Feel Good or Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag. That, dear readers, was the funkiest doll I have ever seen in my life. The hardest working toy in show business. Gives shoppers the urge to shake their money holders.

Very appropriate. A tour of Japan – with its shops, its museums, and its promises of adventures in a hard-boiled wonderland – is like a delicious James Brown groove that ends too early.

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Special thanks to Sony Philippines, Butch Okada of the Press Office of The Embassy of Japan, as well as Jelly, Masaaki, Ken, and Shun Fujita. For comments, suggestions, curses, and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.