Bashō and Fukurō – Japan in 84 Days of Haiku: 06/29

In the ritzy spots

where retail therapy rules,

have a robot chat

This afternoon I headed to Ginza to check out one of the more upscale areas of Tokyo. The area is known for its glamorous shopping and fancy restaurants. There are a lot of premium brand stores, pricey boutiques and fancy department stores. I wasn't planning on buying much considering the price tags are more Rodeo Drive than Seattle Premium Outlets. Instead I just wanted to walk around and see the kind of people around and the general atmosphere of the area. I was quite impressed with a lot of the buildings. There was some nice architecture and some nice old style buildings with large clocks on them and nice brickwork. There was also a very wide street that looked like it could handle a lot of traffic but is closed off so people can just leisurely walk on it every Saturday and Sunday. The buildings were quite tall and still featured many different things on different floors, as I've grown accustomed to in Tokyo. I found a twelve story Uniqlo so my plan not to buy anything quickly changed. It was a bit of an insanely laid-out Uniqlo considering they don't really have enough different products to warrant twelve floors. This meant that some floors repeated items, the twelfth floor was a bizarre mix-and-match of clothing and was called "Uniqlo's best hits" but didn't really offer anything I'd give that name to, and some floors were almost entirely displays showing off clothes on mannequins. The store is Uniqlo's flagship branch, so I guess this sort of makes sense. I picked up a shirt and a couple of interesting badges (more on those tomorrow).

As I left the store I realized the sunny day I had been walking around in had turned into one of all too familiar torrential rain. Many people were standing at the exit planning what their next move would be now that it was pouring, blocking the path of new customers, so some Uniqlo staff came out to help fix the situation. I was taking my rain jacket out of my backpack. Almost everybody around me was Japanese, yet the employee who told everyone they would have to move was yelling in English with a thick Italian accent. I'm pretty sure I was one of a very small percentage of people who understood any of what she was saying. It's not as much of a surprise now that I know the store has over 500 employees and offers services in many different languages. Still, maybe they could have made a more appropriate choice of staff member to do the crowd control.

More on the Uniqlo flagship store here.

Down the street from Uniqlo I got out of the rain and ducked into a SoftBank store. All the employees were wearing red versions of the SoftBank Hawks jersey, which I found funny since I'd watched the team the day before. Inside the store they have a display of their new robot, Pepper. You can't buy the robot yet, but you can already place orders for it. It wheels around and uses different body language and can also have a conversation with you, in Japanese. I watched a girl and her mom talk to the robot for a while before I shook its hand and said a couple phrases to it in Japanese. The idea behind the robot is that it can gather information about your emotions from what you say and then speak to you based on that information. So if you are sad it is supposed to be able to cheer you up. It was pretty cute and it's eyes change colour when it looks at you and talks to you. Definitely an interesting experience.

I thought Ginza was pretty cool overall and the people there were quite diverse. Many people told you will only see old rich women shopping there, but I saw lots of young people and some tourists too. It wouldn't be top of my list of places to hang out frequently but I definitely enjoyed spending my Sunday afternoon there.