So.
Soiled schoolgirl panty vending machines.
Burusera in Japanese. The origins of the word being buru – bloomers, and sera – sailor.
The Japanese got the design for their school uniforms from British Royal Navy uniforms at the end of the 19th century, shortly after the Meiji Revolution.
Trying to get my mitts on some burusera had been a side project of mine the entire time I was in Japan; trying to discover the truth behind this mythical piece of perversion.
Soiled schoolgirl panty vending machines.
Surely not.
* * * * * * *
So my first night of serious research took me out through Tokyo’s night, to the crackling, burning neon pink pleasure district of Shinjuku and Kabuki-cho.
Globes of neon.
Blowfish restaurants.
Crows.
That unbelievable smoky clamour of pachinko that gathers up the neon cascades and joins with them into an unbearable, numbingly addictive cacophony, of thousands of tiny falling silver balls.
Globes of neon. Echoes of searing white melting neon shining from sunglasses, crystalline explosions reflected in the cinder-block walls. I panicked away from a wildly flapping crow.
Blinding neon, like a core of white heat etching indecipherable images onto my retinas.
And identical black and navy- besuited businessmen everywhere trying to catch a midnight neon suntan. Rivers of them, just mashed together and flowing. And from out of the seedy establishments, jabbering and music, and plasma screens advertising the latest frivolity, and photos of the scantily-moralled women you could meet up the dark stairs and behind the iron doors and big African security guards.
Those yamamba girls with the orange salon tans and the white makeup round the eyes, and the orange hair with feathers in it, and the white lipstick, and embossed fingernails and Louis Vuitton bags and Mickey Mouses and Eeyores dangling from keychains, and the jeans cut so low you can see the red pinpricks where they’ve had to pluck out their pubes, and “SPANKY FAVOUR” or some such incomprehensible English smeared across their tanktops.
Eyes the blue of glaciers or storm clouds, or golden drops of amber, giving them a kind of vacant, feline air. Flashing a bit of knickers.
I flinched away from that crow.
There’s no way I could ever get laid in Kabuki-cho, not without paying for it. If you are a pretty girl, the moment you exit the station you are pounced upon by those yakuza mafia guys with blonde mullets handing out leaflets, god knows what for exactly, but something dodgey, that is for certain; and ogrishly making the girls far too aware of how hot they are. Each compliment and solicitation is like a bid in the auction for their attention, thus slowly boosting the girls’ expectations and standards far above what I have to offer them, goddammit.
I wish I knew what was up with those leaflets. What is up with those fucking crows??
But there are no crows. They are merely patches of darkness between the scrolling Chinese characters in an otherwise all encompassing dazzling rainbow world, so replete with pitching light and colour that a rare patch of darkness or shadow actually take on a kind of hallucinatory weight and substance.
“PACHINKO AND SLOT
PASSAGE. Because the thing which appears most in Shinjuku
SUCH A THING IS.
Our supporter in this store. As for this store.
The way that a ball like the sun bursts open
is the order of this store.
Love a ball is,
ORIENTAL PASSAGE”
Um.
Right.
I hope this means something to someone.
I couldn’t write something that fucked up if I tried.
There`s every type of entertainment here. Restaurants, bars, hostess places, pachinko parlours, video game centres, prostitutes, wank booths, stalls selling legal hallucinogens, movie cinemas, love hotels.
The place is also peppered with florists, innocent little places, run by old ladies.
It`s nice to know that there are moments of gallantry within the jungle here.
And that shop on the corner that sells everything. Life-sized Winnie the Poohs. Mobile phones. Kneepads. I want to buy the red sofa just to see how the fuck they get it down from that top shelf.
Swallowed by a foggy path, down to my favourite Tokyo bar, in Golden Gai, run by this old mama-san. This place has been her dream since she was young – this cramped little pub. Funny the nature of people’s dreams. Above lives a retired prostitute, who catered to the American soldiers during the Occupation after WWII. Golden Gai - a little region tucked away, narrow streets of hundreds of tiny (as only Japan can do tiny) bars. Literally they are as small as bathrooms, to seat no more than four people. The place just sits there, as though forever, unaffected, immune to the world’s progress, like an old man drinking his sake.
Real Life is so thick in these tiny Golden Gai streets that you could mash it with a potato masher.
To be continued.