Punk Tokyo

On Sunday night, a few of the other visiting faculty and I attended a show of live music at a small, basement-level punk club called 'Statto' in the Musashi-Sakai neighborhood.  One of our Technos faculty hosts plays in a band that appeared on the bill's showcase of locals.  All the bands were fantastic and the company was great.  More than anything, though, I was just so delighted to find myself within a Tokyo scene so completely off the tourist grid. 

My counter-cultural explorations of the city continued the following day as Monday I headed into the bohemian Kōenji neighborhood, considered to be the birthplace of the Tokyo punk scene, where I had lunch with a musician/translator/filmmaker (a friend of a friend) who lives and works in Tokyo.  Later that day, I explored the more upscale Shibuya area neighborhoods of Ebisu and Daikanyama, whose sloping hillside back-alleys are particularly charming and full of marvelous discoveries. The only downside to an overall fabulous day was that the constant rainfall kept me from pulling out my camera to capture the splendor and quirky charms of these little neighborhoods and that the route of my perigrinations required a lot of train time, much of it spent waiting for transfers.