Oct 19 - Japanese Hipsters in a Paris Garden

All week I've gone for an hour-long morning walk in Luxembourg Gardens. Amazing! I feel great the rest of the day. It sounds so basic, but somehow this was never obvious to me before! Wow.....next thing I'm going to discover is the wonders of sliced bread.

Anyway here's my story for the day. Luxembourg Gardens is probably Paris' prettiest and surely most striking gardens. In the center there's a huge reflective pool where kids play with colorful toy sailboats. There are palm trees and flowers. There are also pony rides and petanque players (a game like bocce ball) and tennis courts and ice cream stands and a spot where grizzly old men play chess and even bee hives with apple and pear trees tucked away in a far hidden corner. This is the place where floods of high schoolers bask on the sunny lawns during lunch break, and where you find classic Paris scenes of couples kissing. It's the Mount Everest, the mighty Mecca of people-watching.

But one of the MOST amusing things that I like to see here are the busloads of Japanese tourists.

This morning was quiet -- a pretty fall day that switched from misty to sunny every fifteen minutes and made me think of apple cider and pumpkins. Most chairs were empty and had dried leaves swirling around the legs. Only one sailboat drifted aimlessly across the reflective pond, put there by the toy-boat rental guy to catch the eyes of youngsters and make them beg their parents to rent them one.

But breaking the silence a mass of bodies arrived. They must have come in a fleet of tour busses! About two hundred young hip super-trendy Japanese guys and girls roamed into the gardens and began lining up with for photos in front of the fountain. And judging by their clothes they could come from nowhere else but Tokyo.

It was amazing. It made my day.

They were dressed in the most elaborate, theatrical clothes on the face of this planet, and seeing as how it was 10am, I think these were just their regular clothes.

One girl combined a lollipop-licking Lolita look with 18th-century petticoats and top hat reminiscent of industrial England. She smiled for pictures with a punk girl with ripped fishnets under huge furry wooly mammoth boots and a necktie over a black heavy metal t-shirt. The guys are even better. They all have long rock-star hair dyed blond, and half seemed to be going for the Don Johnson - Miami Vice look. Huge sunglasses, steel-tipped alligator boots. Others had dandy tweed coats with massively furry collars, and a walking cane like they were going to show their friends around their English manor! Beautiful! Flabbergasting!

For those completely unfamiliar with the phenomena of Tokyo fashion, one guy made a whole photo book of it (Called Fruits by Shoichi Aoki). It's filled with hundreds of images of average young Tokyo hipsters on the street. Here's some of the outfits he captured:

Someday I'll get to Japan............Gotta love em'