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The above t-shirt, a present from Isato, was for the equivalent of UK’s Red Nose Day, a charity 24 hour tv marathon sponsored by BAPE. See if you can figure out how the second photo was taken.
Although BAPE has attempted to limit Internet resales by limiting all purchases to one item per customer, imitations are rife, and forever entertaining. The first is an actual product on sale somewhere on the net; the second I’m planning to release later this year, and the third, Adam being eaten alive by one of Rue St Denis' finest Le Bape Sportif efforts.
The creator of BAPE masterminded the simple idea of heavily limiting stock, whereby the shops only sell a small number of each item, never to be rereleased, encouraging continuous demand and inflating after-sale prices, all fueling knowledge of the now international brand. Go to one of the stores on the first day of a new release, and there’ll be queues out the door, with all the customers invariably dressed from head-to-toe in the multicoloured clothes. Two of my good mates Daiki and Isato in Tokyo were absolute ape maniacs - as you can see from the video. In any other country they probably would have been arrested. I borrowed the one I'm wearing - just doesn't look right on Westerners though...
As for other things multicolured in Japan, every humid summer hosts enormous fireworks displays, bringing in the crowds in their hundreds of thousands. Japanese fireworks are the most elaborate in the world, with generations of craftsmen having passed on their skills to create globe shaped explosions, that look perfectly round from any angle. Apparently there’s an absolute bad-ass of a firework launched in Nagoya every year which rises to 600m and explodes with a spread of 650m across the sky, blinding the audience, searing shadows into concrete and creating a 3 month nuclear winter.
Apart from if as a child, you picked up a lit sparkler from the wrong end, fireworks displays in the UK are pretty un-memorable experiences, but the main ones in Tokyo are actually quite impressive. The Japs have found a way to create pictures in the sky with the firework’s explosion, so you can have smiley faces, cartoon characters and penises.
The traditional dress for summer, and particularly for festivals and fireworks displays is the yukata, which is like a lighter and brighter version of the kimono, and worn by men and women alike. Whilst you can get 4 man-tent XXXL sized ones for foreigners, I think only the Japanese blokes can pull one off without looking like you’ve just stepped out of the bathroom in a fancy hotel, so I opted for a jinbe, the more casual alternative summer get-up, complete with posterior dragon motif, which is probably the equivalent of a Japanese tourist wearing one of those hats with corks hanging off it and a “G’day Mate!” t-shirt in Sydney.
Here’s a photo I took of a young Japanese mother at the Tokyo Bay fireworks display. It’s not unusual to see someone like this in Japan holding their baby, the Japanese diet keeping young mothers looking like twiglets and dressing like models. Incidentally, the same can also be said on the other side of the world for 15 year-old mothers in Bristol.
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