"Ginza & Yurakucho Excursion (+Rain) - May 2009"

[sankerrreimi]

what year was this? what was that cool, old building with the beautiful elevator?? neat! ;) I like walking around too -- look at the city, the people, ~~ haven't been to Japan before -- Thanks for taking me there

[lylehsaxon]

I took this in May of this year (2009). The old building is the Okuno Building, which began life as an apartment building, and the former living spaces are now used for office space and art galleries. Thanks for the comment! I've been putting up a lot of simple one-clip videos lately, but multi-cut videos like this are what I prefer to do - when I have time.... - LHS

[muchagecko]

I really look forward to your videos.

My daughter and I were surprised that the streets are hardly different from ours in Seattle.

Seeing the food stalls in the alley had me longing for Taiwan. What kind of food can you get on the street there?

[lylehsaxon]

Tokyo's unofficial and unspoken motto is "New! Only new! Anything old? Destroy it! New-New-New!!!" So old traditional type things have been nearly eradicated here. That bit of half-sarcasm/half-truth out of the way, Ginza was Tokyo's first wholly western-modeled section of city, priding itself on being modern, so it's been built on a western template for about 125 years now, to the point where its old buildings (what's left of them) are similar to western old buildings. - LHS

[lylehsaxon]

I forgot to mention the food. Those are izakayas, but since I've never been to an izakaya outside Japan, I don't know if the food is the same or not; Yakitori, grilled fish, sashimi, tofu, salad, etc. ... - LHS

[UpsidedownVieweing]

The lady in kimono was a surprise, or she works in that flowershop and that's their uniform? I liked that antique elevator, been a while since I last seen one. And that alley with the food stalls looks like a good idea.. :p

[lylehsaxon]

Yeah, I was surprised by her too! But there are areas of Ginza where there a lot of women in kimono. I'd love to take video of this one area in particular, but many of the women work at expensive (very expensive!) clubs and have rich (very rich!) customers who don't like having their picture taken. There are club men and drivers standing around in the street looking after their bosses, so it really doesn't seem like a good idea to take out the video camera there! - LHS

[UpsidedownVieweing]

Oooh... I can just imagine what you mean, how do you say that.... ちょっと危ないかも～ no maybe that's an understatement... XD