Day 3 – Ginza
Ginza is the shopping mecca of Tokyo. This is where the locals go to spend their money and name brands are omnipresent. Like much of the city it is absolutely amazing the morphology that the urban fabric takes. Everything it vertical, usually from small sites that began as a single residence or shop, and now tower half a dozen stories. All the big retail players are here, and even some you rarely find outside their home coutries (i.e. Printemps). As with most of Tokyo, Ginza is a cacauphony of design aesthetic, quality, and materials. There are very beautiful and contemporary facades and very sophisticated traditional facades whith an intermingling of the old and run down. Because it was the weekend, the police had closed off Chuo-Dori and turned the whole street into a pedestrian plaza. Mr. Miyama quipped that the table at which we ate lunch was contiguous with a piece of land on the main street worth $1,000,000. I am consitently amazed at how retail works above grade, because that it just something that hasn’t caught on in the states. We went to a department store that carried everything from kitchenware to home imporovement supplies to halloween decorations and it was entirely located on the top 3 floors of one of the office buildings.
