Tokyo Permission

In Harajuku, the animals dress better than Berlin’s entire fashion scene. Machi the fox and Neko the cat are there listening to MUCC, existing in a reality the rest of us barely touch. It’s the first thing that hits you about Japan—everything there seems to know something we haven’t figured out yet.

Shirobako is just about making anime. Rooms full of people drawing frame by frame, the impossible labor of it, and somehow you end up caring about every single decision. You sit down for one episode and wake up at 3 AM having forgotten about anything else. I’ve been caught on BOMI lately too, some track with a title my browser won’t translate, but it gets in your head and stays there.

I found Sailor Moon for the Super Nintendo in a bargain bin years ago, hours from anywhere, and I played it until someone actually screamed at me to stop. You run left and right and hit things and it’s perfect. Plastic Little by Satoshi Urushihara has that same pull—manga about a girl catching whales in space, and he loves drawing breasts exactly as much as I do. No apology, no irony. The sexuality just exists, matter-of-fact and unapologetic.

Michael Rougier’s photographs of Tokyo in 1964—teenagers in full rebellion, pure otherness in black and white—those images stay with me more than anything recent. That’s the Japan that gets under your skin. Then there’s Hikari Shiina, who knows exactly what men want and builds her work around it without any distance or apology. Just the thing itself, direct and honest.

What Japan has that Europe can’t manage is permission. Garlic cola exists—Jat’s Takko, actual garlic flavor, no explanation. The Tokyo Fetish Festival happens. Everything coexists without the need for irony-coating or apology. You see a fox in Harajuku dressed better than you and nobody’s trying to make it a joke. It just is.