Tokyo Hands

There was a sale at Tokyo Hands today. That might not seem blog-worthy to us Americans, but in Japan, things don't go on sale often. Long live the sale rack at the back of every store in the U.S.! You don't appreciate that until it's gone and everything is full price, except for a few fleeting times. So, when my friend Juro told me that there was a sale at Tokyo Hands, the only sale of the year, I cancelled my plans for the day (a beach party that I'd been anticipating for a while) and successfully convinced him to do the same, following me around translating tags and sale signs and explaining what purpose a memory stick in the shape of a piece of sashimi served. Before I wax poetic on my plethora of purchases, I should give a little background on Tokyo Hands. Retail here, like the landscape of the place with no zoning laws (think: a brothel besides a shrine), knows no bounds. Stores here sell everything--from clothes to kitchen supplies to dog food, and it's all mixed in tiny, crowded aisles. The theory is that the more time it takes you to wander around and find what you're actually looking for, the more likely you'll find things you want but weren't actually looking for. This makes sense, unless you're an American accustomed to classical music and the wide boulevard-esque aisles of a suburban Bed, Bath & Beyond. In which case you just want to shred your credit cards, run out of the store screaming and retreat to a padded room. There's a store here appropriately named Don Quixote at which a selection of state-of-the-art Cuisinarts are for sale right next to a rack of pornographic DVDs. Now that's a quixotic retail combo. Tokyo Hands isn't quite that extreme but it's close. Things at this six story behemoth are arranged by floor. Juro and I chose a battle plan of starting on the top floor and working our way down. Navigating the individual floors we found everything anyone could possibly want in life: leather couches, wedding invitations, bicycles, weird diet formulas, and all the things I desperately need to make my empty apartment a little more livable. And this stuff is never on sale, except for today, imagine the euphoria! Navigating through the crowd of bargain-hunting Tokyo-nites (some of the most zealous in the world) it dawned on me that I had, for the first time since I moved here, tuned out the ocean of people moving through the aisles. I had tuned out the Japanese language. I had tuned out the guttural shouts of shimasen ("welcome" in Japanese and something that is constantly yelled at customers as they walk through stores here), the bowing employees, the slow moving elderly shoppers, and the packs of meandering teenagers. I forgot for a brief second about all of this and I did perhaps what I do best: I shopped.