Alex Cornell

Japan Day Eight

Today I had to wake up early to go to the embassy to get my new passport. By this point I was kind of a pro at the whole process, so it wasn’t too bad. This time I realized I could access the US Citizen line and probably avoided what looked like a two hour wait. I was in an out in probably ten minutes, now with two passports (though one has four giant holes through it and the word ‘cancelled’ on my photo). Interpol apparently decided to leave me alone for the time being. I am writing this on the plane right now, so we’ll see if can actually make it into the country. 

I went to Aoyama afterwards to take pictures of the Prada building and do some shopping. I found the coolest shop in all of Tokyo, called Undercover. Basically it’s a clothing store, but with just about everything Dieter Rams ever designed adoring the shelves. Really crazy amazing. And not just any shelves — of course everything was Vitsoe. I pleaded with the shop owners to let me take pictures of the interior and they finally agreed. I think it helped that I bought a hoodie. I’ll post on the store on ISO50 later in the week probably. I tried pretty hard to track down their lookbook that afternoon but had no luck. They sell it on Amazon.jp if you’re interested (though shipping costs double the book). 

I went in search of cool shops and found Commes deu Garcons, Issey Miyake, Raf Simons, Helmut Lang, Loveless, and Y-3. My favorite interior was Commes deu Garcons because it felt like some bizarre minimalist maze built by kindergarden student. I bought nothing but took lots of pictures. 

I literally had to walk out of Sempre because I wanted to buy everything. It is basically a housewares store, but everything was incredible. I am one to get very excited about things like flatware and clocks, so this was potentially going to be a finance trouble if I stuck around. On my way to see if I could sneak in to the Ferrari showroom, I passed Blue Note Tokyo and saw that Mike Stern was playing tonight with Richard Bona. I had seen that show at Blues Alley in DC and it was incredible. How on earth there were still tickets I don’t know, but I grabbed two, having no idea whether or not we were even going to be free. Mike Stern is good enough to trump any existing plan. 

We ended up going to the show which was completely mind blowing. First of all, seeing a jazz act in Tokyo was a trip. The crowd was waay into it — much more so than any jazz crowd I’ve been in in the States. The set was crazy good too; the solo portions with just Mike on the guitar or Richard on bass/vocals were my favorite. Richard Bona probably has one of the purest voices in the world. I really can’t describe how amazing the show was. I think I almost cried at one point. Kind of just overwhelmed at how awesome it all was — the music of course, but also the whole experience. Tokyo. Jazz club. Youth. I got a little heavy for a sec but it was awesome.