I’ve never read ‘the world is yours‘ on a blimp, but I have read ‘Tokyo is yours’ on a steel shutter. That was in Shimo Kitazawa, and it was true- Tokyo is mine, but that’s only because I’m Tokyo’s too. You give yourself to the city and the favour is returned, but it might not let you go.
You give yourself to vintage clothes shopping, however, and you can quit any time you want, particularly if you’re in Shimo-Kitazawa, whose many coffee shops, cafes and drinking dens are ever ready to shelter you from the dusty clutch of the thrift shop.
Shimo Kitazawa is a bohemian, thespy type of district, and crams a disorienting, chromatic abundance of vintage goods shops into its vague boundaries.
Here are some of its more interesting, peculiar, and curious corners.
Near the station is America-Ya. A left over post-war construction of falling down corrugated iron and furred over, taped up cooling ducts, where a handful of shops refuse to budge. You’ll find dried cooking ingredients, American military wear, grizzled old blokes, and a lively bar knocking out draft beer, quality sake and hot stew. Let’s hope the looming, thin-fingered developers don’t get their scratchy, grasping mitts on this piece of prime real estate anytime soon- it’s literally and figuratively unreconstructed and all the better for it.
Around the corner from America-Ya and the North Exit is a place which I think may be called Dream Diva, but it’s difficult to know because it has no sign. You’ll recognise it though – it looks like a condemned outbuilding hosting a car boot sale.
Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to find an ideal retirement present for the outgoing billionaire country club chief executive here. You won’t necessarily stumble across a smart new outfit to wear for that job ‘interview’ at your dad’s best friends’ accountancy firm. But you might, just possibly, be fortuitously graced with a statuette of the Virgin Mary, a broken Kodak, and some Minnie Mouse clip-on earrings.
Keep walking along from Dream Diva, and you’ll come to a cavernous, psychedelically painted building called Shimo Kita Garage Department. As soon as you set foot through its gaping entrance you’ll be subsumed into its ramshackle alternative atmosphere. Kind of like a weird, off-script shopping mall which has forgotten to pay the bills because it was too busy experimenting with psilocybin augmented organic smoothies, this place is an expanded secret backroom, where they’ve done away with the shiny front altogether. You’ll find trinkets, obscurities, desirable vintage imports, cool stuff, weird stuff, and friendly shop staff in stores with names like Tipl, Absolutely Unique and, um, Like.
Haight & Ashbury is a famous Shimo Kitazawa establishment to be found some way further down the same road as Shimo Kita Garage Department. It’s up on the first floor of a building it shares with another vintage clothes shop called Flamingo, so you may as well check out both.
Haight & Ashbury is, basically, cool. It has a lot of well priced, attractive items for men and women. It stays firmly in the territory of being fashionably thoughtful and not full-blown doolally, perhaps just pushing the box slightly when you go into the ‘Antique’ signed back room, which goes a little more black lace and goth but remains at the emotionally balanced end of the eccentricity spectrum.
Just before you reach Haight & Ashbury there is a crossroads, and if you turn right here, down a hill, you’ll find a strikingly chaotic and colourful old building irreverently hacking up kaleidoscopic DIY vigour on to the streets and passers-by in its vicinity. It looks worn and strafed, in places splintering apart, but it’s still intact and resistant, and its bleached concrete is covered in layers of graffiti, stickers, street art and modifications, faded and fresh to varying degrees. The building houses shops, boutiques and places to eat and drink, some accessible from the street, others by the rattly iron staircase to the side.
On then, to 45 Revolution ! Not strictly (at all) a thrift shop, as much of what it sells is new, but among the stacks of punk T-shirts, you’ll also find some hard-as-nails, up-yours used items to chuck in your big, saucy dressing up box. Many of these items are black. Some have studs. Most definitely all are good to go for that big night out with the leftover bag of speed from the olden days and a pint of snakebite and black. Punks never die, but they might stumble in here and buy a pair of shoes.
Which reminds me- you remember that time you really, really needed a My Little Pony? You know- it was the time you said you needed a Simpsons T-shirt too, and a Ninja Turtles figure… right? You were like, I need all the Ninja Turtles figures, NOW! GET THEM FOR ME!
Oh no… wait, that wasn’t you… sorry- that was my ex-wife. Fuck. But, if you ever do feel that way, and you might do one day, then you absolutely have to go to Juxtaposition, because they sell all those things, as in the original vintage ones, and pretty much anything else which comes in pastels or candy pink, except actual pastels and pink candy.
