‘Of Geishas and Thugs’
The kimonos exited the subway.
They walked gingerly with wooden footsteps.
Mobility was not emphasized.
They had to be elegant, despite wearing the traditional clunky shoes not originally designed for ascending and descending subway platforms. They carried with them ceremonial umbrellas not designed to stop rain, or sun for that matter. Designed to be carried about and provide these cultured ladies yet another piece of culture to carry with them on their traditional goings on.
The men, or boys by their side were dressed like cheap, obvious LA rappers from a forgotten time. A time that had been forgotten in LA circa 1991, only to be suddenly remembered without the scent of irony, decades later, on the other side of the world in Harajuku, Tokyo.
And so these traditional/non-traditional couples cavort about the city. The women dressed as traditional Japanese, and the boys blinged out in traditional gangsta. And so the summer moves like this. With these couple sightings at firework displays, weddings in public shrines, baseball games. All someone has to do is declare a particular moment an occasion, and the ladies will start wrapping each other in traditional silk cloth. And the boys will start donning Oakland Athletic caps, with bills unbent, holograms still affixed to the underside, price tags dangling defiantly from the eye holes.
These hybrid cultural couples dominate Japan. In fact, the more rural areas you visit, the more the extremes of culture are pushed. It’s always the guys who neglect the cultural heritage of their home country. The women keep the culture in stride. The women preserve the unique DNA of this country.
