You Get All Dressed Up And Then Two Gaijin Steal Your Booth

We spent a large amount of time today wishing we had more money, more space, and fewer quibbles about spending oodles of cash on ridiculous things. Really, it was the high exchange rate that saved my suitcase from being stuffed with impulse buys like Goth-chick-meets-Geisha-girl-in-a-hitched-up=poodle-skirt-dress, green-lensed sunglasses shaped like hearts, or a skull ring. (Skulls are very in with youn Tokyo fashionistas, it seems. But Japanese people don't seem to be very big on earrings, so I couldn't find the pair of skull earrings I've been looking for for a while now. Arrrr!) We were in Harajuku, which is like a garment district on acid. Perhaps because it was a Saturday, most of the truly eye-popping fashions were on the racks, and fewer were on the shoppers. Also, it was difficult to even stand still, the crowds were so dense, so I got very few pictures of all the madness.

At one point we wandered into some kind of arcade store with a sign that said "girls only!" and milled about with the junior-high age gigglers, trying to figure out what was going on. We ducked into one of the hot-pinkcurtain-covered booths and saw a consol displaying two photos of Japanese schoolgirls in rather oddly, very mildly, suggestive poses. There was some kind of control mechanism, and with a little experimentation we saw that by tapping the photos they got covered in hearts, lightning strikes, kanji characters, different frames, all kinds of girly graphic elements. We were absorbed in figuring out what the hell we were supposed to do , and why. Was it a game? Would something be printed out? All of a sudden two squealing girls burst in on us. And wow, if they didn't look familiar! They were the girls in the photo, and I guess it was their photo, and they had left for a minute, and we had taken their booth. They kept squealing and pointing at us, and we simply got up and ran.