Sapporo Cafes and Shops: D&D Department Project and Pippin.

I've been meaning to write about this place for so long. D&D Department Project is a fancy design goods/home wares/furniture/cafe place near Nishi 18 Chome on the Tozai line. It's pretty near one of the places I work so I've been there for lunch a few times, and it's a very cool, minimal, stylish place. For lunch, I'd say it's very nice, but a little expensive. Then again places like this are always good to have around so go take a look if you're in the area!

They actually repainted the exterior since I took this photo if you can believe it. That's how bloody long I've been meaning to do this post. The ground floor is all stylish, functional, minimal (expensive, but of course) stationery and home wares. It looks a little something like this:

No, wait. It looks exactly like that. Upstairs they sell furniture and all sorts of stylish made-in-Hokkaido goods. The cafe part is actually called Pippin, and is off to the left of the ground floor snap I took. They do a few lunch sets, all running to around a thousand yen. I got this type of thing a few times:

That was back when I took the photo of the building last year. And more recently:

An open-face sandwich thing and soup. It was very good but... yeah, I didn't really feel like I got a thousand yen worth of lunch there. Better was when I got the more standard lunch set.

Much more satisfying and also delicious. They have curry lunches as well that (unusually for me, coz I love Japanese curry) I haven't tried.

In case you don't know there's a nice Wallpaper City Guide to Sapporo that features D&D Department Project pretty prominently, along with an interview with Shin Sasaki of 3KG the design firm that runs D&D. Well worth picking that up, because I don't think think it's all that expensive and it's a nice alternative to the usual kind of guide book. No good for touristy sight-seeing, but I never care about that stuff anyway. I'd always much rather just see the city itself wherever I go.

Oh, I'll put this place on my map of course.

D&D Department Project
札幌市中央区大通西17丁目1-7
Odori (as in, it's on the street called Odori, North-South 0 as it were, not in the Odori area) West 17.
Open 12pm to 9pm Tuesday to Friday, 12pm to 8pm on Sundays.
Closed on Mondays.

Unfortunately Named Japanese Department Store Concessions #71

I don't know whether I should expect Japanese firms to check on the connotations of the English words they pick to name their businesses, but I do remember that car companies spend a lot of time now ensuring that their cars are dubbed with entirely fabricated names lest they accidentally call a car "shit-bucket" in Estonian or something. Perhaps these guys could have done a little more research...

Bad Boyz be Ambitious

"Boys be ambitious" is kind of the catchphrase of Sapporo. It was a phrase coined by Williams S. Clarke, one of the people who established Hokkaido College of Agriculture (now Hokkaido University) and thus made Sapporo into a notable city. It's an incredibly famous phrase throughout Japan too, I've seen it used in puns and on merchandise in Tokyo, and in national newspaper articles that had nothing to do with Hokkaido at all. It's a pretty great phrase too, the full paragraph running:

"Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money or for selfish aggrandizement, not for that evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for that attainment of all that a man ought to be."

That's pretty bloody good advice.

Anyway, with the opening of the new hip-hop clothing store Chill In Da House Sapporo's urban trendsetters show that they too, keep Clark's words close to their hearts.


Oh yeah.

Happy Father's Day Stephen!

I'm not being all that straight, I already sent this picture to my pa as an online Father's Day card. I snapped it in the window of United Arrows in Parco:


You can laugh, but I think they've really hit on something here. Even in Japan, the land of the beardless, a beard is still an integral part of the Father's role in their child's development. How many infants' growth have been stunted by a clean-shaven pater? Think on't recent fathers and fathers-to-be, do not deny your child the joy of a bearded dad.

Ooooh Stellar Place, you make me so mad!

Living here in Japan you mostly become innured to the bad English used in advertising copy. It's not (necessarily) bad because they can't speak English well (although at times it is), but because while English is a visually catchy hook for an advert, the message has to be conveyed in a way that is easy for non-English speakers to catch. Hence I reckon they use the transitive verb enjoy as an intransitive one because the Japanese verb equivalent is intransitive (you can just "enjoy" you don't have to say what).

Even so, the posters in the fancy central shopping mall Stellar Place are pissing me off more and more. Last season it was "Rhythm of Springs", which made me think of bed-springs rather than lambs a-gambollin', and this year:


Trip is an activity, not a place! The place is fancy! They must have an English speaker on staff somewhere, or be able to call someone who can speak English!

New Sapporo Bape Store!

I'm pretty far beyond defending my affection for the Bape brand at the moment, I dig what they do so I was pretty stoked that they were closing their small Sapporo Store and opening a big new shiny (very, very shiny) one right next to the TV Tower. As Bunny pointed out they could have done some kind of Terebi-tou San X Bape crossover, but perhaps that was too much to ask for.

Saturday was opening day, and around lunchtime we walked past and yes, there was a queue and ticketing system to get in:


But when we came back later on it had quietened down a bit so we could swan in, poke around, marvel at the brushed steel and ludicrous amounts of neon and... maybe I bought some clothes too. Ahem.

There was no need to take any snaps inside, Nigo already did it for me on his blog:


All the neons look good, but when you're standing right in front of that wall of flashing Bape logos it sure gives off a lot of heat. And I can't even imagine the utility bills for something like that, but I'm sure it's all costed out for maximum cool for yer buck. Anyway they have more stuff in there now, and a slightly strange "ticket window" thing to buy your good through. It's ridiculously cool, as demonstrated here by Verbal:


Verbal is a Japanese rapper, and my favourite member of the Bape-sponsored hip-hop group Teriyaki Boyz. He's a good rapper and some sort of half deranged street-wear fashion GOD. He was in town for the weekend to play the Bape store opening party the previous night (along with Nigo and Wise, I probably should have gone), to play the opening party for the Height store in Parco on Saturday night, and to appear at the Height store too:


I really wouldn't be surprised to see Verbal dressed like that walking down the street, he's almost unimpeachably cool.

Hanabatake Bokujo

People really love that nama caramel:


That's Hanabatake Bokujo (Flower Garden Farm or something like that?) who opened up a couple of stores in Sapporo last month. They're like a dairy farm that specialise in, amongst other things, that coveted commodity 生キャラメル - nama caramel - really soft fresh caramel. It's a bit like British fudge but softer.

And that queue is ALWAYS there.

At both stores, the one at Sapporo Station and the one in Odori, every single time I walk past there's a snaking line and security guards present to enforce it. The stuff is delicious, but I'm astonished at this bottomless appetite for it. I assume this one is also popular for tourists, this is where they would leave for the airport from, but the one in Odori they have to queue outside. This is Sapporo, so as you can imagine it is hardly queueing weather at this time of the year.

I'm sure they sell other stuff too, but I've never been able to get inside to check.

Friday via Sunday: New Year Shopping

Post New Year has been pretty hectic, so this Friday blog post is brought to you with the blessing of Sunday and the hindsight of two days. Let's begin:


Those are lucky bags - fukubukuro - that are sold on January 1st of every year from pretty much all the big stores and malls. The idea's pretty simple, you buy a bag filled with mystery contents (you can choose the size if it's clothes) worth a lot more than you pay. At the shit stores fukuburo stick around for days into the January sales, but at the popular places they go within minutes of the stores opening. In a couple of stores it was kinda like one of those speeded up shopping montages in a movie where hands a grabbing items off a table until the table is empty. Either that or there are security guard-enforced queues and massive crowds. We got into town just as the stores were opening (nine-fucking-thirty on New Years Day) and Yuki got four of those bags, I got the Adidas one on the far right, and when we opened them up...


Unsurprisingly the ones from the good stores, the busiest stores, were the best ones. One of them was almost a total write-off for Yuki, but one was almost all good and she was happy overall. I got two t-shirts and two hoodies in the Adidas bag, one of each of which is awesome, so I'm happy.

This, by the way, is not the actual January sale, that doesn't start until the 2nd and of course we were there for that too. The crowds were even bigger because some stores don't sell fukubukuro until the 2nd either. I thought it would be unbelievably awesome to get a Bape fukubukuro, but unfortunately so did about a hundred and fifty other people and they were more into waiting in the snow than I was:


They only had 30 fukubukuro which were being handed out in a lottery to some people out of the first hundred in line. After that people were just getting tickets to get in the store because the pre-release from the Spring/Summer 09 line dropped that day. Overall I guess I didn't buy too much which is probably a good thing, but I was fun just wandering around these stores while they verged on riots. My kinda fun.

Field Recordings 3 - Don Quixote

Don Quixote is a... goods store chain in Japan. It's pretty tricky to describe, it's not a department store, it's more like a general store on crack. They sell almost everything, and it's really hard to find anything, and it's crowded and noisy so I thought It'd be fun to wander around it with a microphone and record the sound.

I'm not sure whether I should use the correct spelling of Don Quixote by the way. It's always in katakana phonetics here, Don Kihote, so that seems more natural somehow.

Anyhow here's the sound of Don Quixote in Sapporo, five floors of joy:



And you can download the MP3, should you so wish, here.

Tokyo! The official recovery post... mostly about shopping.

So a week since I left for Tokyo I think I may be taking some tentative steps towards recovery.

That's kind of a joke, I was already getting sick by the time I went to Tokyo, and staying up all night, racing around like a crazy person, meeting friends, shopping and seeing Radiohead was just a silly idea all around. It did however mean I was walking through Shibuya at 7am to take photos like this, which was strange and fun:


So what can I tell you about Tokyo this time? I feel like every time I go to Tokyo I spend 50% of my time on trains getting from one place to another. And you can never sit down on the trains. Apart from that it's always really awesome to meet my friends in Tokyo, and if you ever go to eat Korean yaki-niku in a neon lit hole in darkest Kabuki-cho where the hot plates don't even sit straight on the tables, all the furniture looks to be made out of garbage bins and you seem to be leaning on a box of cabbages - the food will actually be really good. I guess the clue was in the fact it was wallpapered with celebrity autographs. Also I still hate Shinjuku Station. Fuck that place.

After the lack of sleep, the Radiohead and the kimchee and pork, I managed to get some shopping in too. I tried to go to the Original Fake store near Omotesando once before when it was closed, but this time I succeeded, and stepping inside was like breathing the kind of bottled air that is released in a limited edition, and reserved for the unbearably trendy. I really love Kaws' work and his all-round design and visual style, and the store did look incredible (photos would have felt like sacrelige so I refrained), but his current clothing line under the Original Fake label mostly leaves me cold. It's awesome, but it's not my style. It's filling an increasingly popular space in the street-wear scene for tailored, high-end, high-quality goods, but it's just way too muted for my tastes, especially since his splashy flair was what turned me on to him to begin with (and what he still seems to be doing in his painting and design elsewhere). There was one hoody I loved, but - of course - not in my size. I love seeing the old Kaws collaborations with BAPE because they're just so fucking gharish.

And speaking of BAPE:


The BAPEXCLUSIVE store in Minami-Aoyama (practically Omotesando) is just crazy. Adrienne was just reeling around the place getting lost in mirrors and colours. These two pictures of the BAPE stores are hers because I was too chicken to get my camera out. The downstairs is a super-fancy clothes boutique, but the upstairs is just a crazy shrine to a dazzling rainbow of patent-leather sneakers. They have shoes rotating inside glass cases, floor to ceiling displays of classic BAPESTAs, and a freakin' conveyor belt displaying shoes that haven't even been released yet. All this and still somehow it feels minimal. And the crazy thing is that you're surrounded by sneakers... so many sneakers, and you can only buy the 8 styles in a tiny area on the right. The others are only for show. So goddamn frustrating. That said... they had some good stuff in the back - if you know what I mean. I left there a happy man.

And then about three blocks away is the Harajuku BAPE store, which is also a trip into boutique wonderland. Their shoe floor isn't as spectacular, but they do display their shoes in a glass bar, which the assistants stand behind to serve you.


That's me emailing a picture of some shoes to Olivia to see if she wanted them, a terrifying piece of hi-tech shopping that for better or worse resulted in the following:


Zap!

A Bagful of Sticks and Carrots

I figure that, being pragmatic, one of the main uses of this blog should be to give people an inside view of what living in Japan is like. I mean, coz clearly there's not enough blogs and sites doing that already.

Ahem.

(The ahem is meant to indicate that the preceding statement was sarcast... oh never mind)

So here's something you get from day to day life in Japan: shop assistants love bagging and wrapping things up for you. I'm pretty sure I've gone into this before, but my mind is fried this week, so humour me. Seriously, much more than in the UK, and to a farcically impractical degree. I have a pretty good understanding with the donut shop I buy coffee at now, whereby they know me and just give me the coffee, in my hand, and I walk out the door. At first though it was coffee, in a paper bag, in a plastic bag, and then it tips over as soon as you pick the plastic bag up. I like the new deal.

This can be tied into Japan's phenomenal service culture of course, but it's really, really wasteful when the supermarkets are always giving you more plastic bags than you need, or bagging your groceries for you into far too many bags. Wasteful... until yesterday that is!

As of October 1st, both of the Supermarkets I go to regularly have stopped giving out free plastic bags! Not only that, they are using both the stick (5 yen per bag) and the carrot (1 yen off your shopping if you bring your own bag) to incentivise their customers. Seriously, I'm astonished and delighted, but now I have no idea what I'm going to use as bin bags at home coz those medium sized Daiei bags were just the beans.

I guess I'll take one for Mother Earth.

The Inevitable Japanese Vending Machines Post

Yes, Japan has a lot of vending machines. They line every street, making sure that no matter what time of the night it is you always have their friendly white glow to light your way home. Of course it's a sign of Japan's rampant consumer culture, but it's also pretty goddamn convenient and pretty vital for surviving the strength-sapping summer, or warming up in the freezing winter. Also the colours are so pretty! And the contents of each machine vary ever so slightly, so that I've started running over to check out unusual looking vending machines incase they have a can of Nectar of the Gods or something.

Anyway, here's a pretty perfunctory post about the joys of Japanese vending machines. Let's start off with a photo I took after the snow hit Sapporo this year. Everyone seems to love this photo so let's look at it again:


It's actually a comment on the ritual of... something... or... yeah. I got lucky with that shot.

I have never seen the used-underwear vending machine of legend. If they ever existed, I doubt they do now. Although apparently this is the chief point of reference for Japan, for those who live on the internet. Which of course tells you a lot more about the internet than it does about Japan etc. etc.

One huge difference is that in the UK we have so many chocolate and sweets vending machines, whereas in Japan they have almost none. The one time I did find chocolate in a vending machine, quite awesomely it came in a glass jar, I assume so that it could be slotted into the machine where a can should go. I kept the jar of course, it looked more valuable than the chocolate, and I like shiny things:


Here's a blog by a guy in my city who takes a photo almost every day (Monday to Friday) of the Coca-Cola vending machine opposite his appartment: http://jihan.sblo.jp/ It's a wonderful idea, and he's something of a hero to me, but that doesn't stop his blog being pretty soul-smashingly boring after a few minutes. Also: Coca-Cola? It's a shame it isn't a Suntory or Sapporo vending machine, I like those a lot more. His blog name apparently translates as "I take a picture of a vending machine everyday (or so.) I am sorry." It's nice that he apologises for doing it.


And here's a Sapporo Ramen vending machine that I found hidden away in the backstreets of Fukuoka. I have now found one of these in Sapporo too, but for a while it felt like this was the bastion of Sapporo-style ramen in Fukuoka - Tonkotsu Ramen City.


There's a good post about the Vending Machine expo in Tokyo here. Loads of really cool machines that I'm sure I'll never see.

And of course, another interesting thing about the vending machines in Japan is that if they were on the streets like this in the UK, they'd all be tipped over or smashed. No-one thinks to do that in Japan.

Used Clothing Coward

Dammit. Yet another name I can't use when I open my emporium of joy. I guess Electronics Moron is still free. And Shoes Pervert.