All photos by Daren Epstein

arajuku is an idea. Certainly it is the neighborhood in Tokyo in which to be young and to be seen, but like all things or places or people in Japan, below the surface lies more.

On Sunday afternoons on a bridge adjacent to Harajuku Station on the Yamanote line, young people gather in groups to expose to each  other  to their  home-made or  store-bought finery, seeking refuge in companionship  and in  a place away  from   the  constrictions of home and parents.

The costumes they make or purchase can be anything from ornate antique traditional Japanese clothing, to an all-vinyl suit containing running electrical wires giving the impression that the wearer is some sort of robotic creature. Some costumes represent characters from Japanese manga (comics), anime, or costume play while others are the product of the wearer’s imagination.

All of this would mean nothing to the rest of us if it were not carried out in public. But it is and what these (mainly) teenagers attract to themselves in the form of tourists, photographers, cinematographers, societal dropouts and freaks, are decidedly as interesting as the young people on display.

For those who choose to dress up and put themselves on parade, the weekly gathering is more about friendship and “being out” than it is about “being seen” or being on display to passers by. In fact it is the thousands of gawkers that gather to watch these free youth that indeed make the whole experience voyeuristic. The costumed bunch would meet on this bridge on this day of the week even if all on-lookers failed to show, yet the voyeurs always flock to the flock on the bridge and take up their role in the dance that makes this an event.

This weekly scene which has played out for longer than I have been coming to Japan is more than what it appears to be even to the astute. As I sweated in the summer heat, jostling with the crowd of tourists trying to avoid them, confident in my malignant surety - not to be confused with - the pretension of the “well-traveled”, hoping to click off one or two photos, I was struck with the novelty of it all. A novelty that is not in anything that can be physically associated with this day but resides in the scene itself and is aligned with an idea that is lost on those of us living lives of democratic comfort.

As the world prepared to mark the five-year anniversary of the events of September 11th, 2001, my mind, rebelling against the inevitable flaccid forthcoming commemorations, turned instead to admiring those things that free societies produce, those things most of us in the big city take for granted - those very things that incur the wrath of those strange beasts among us who do not cherish such open expressions but rather revile them and seek to crush them beneath the weight of their holy books. Those strange fellows that would, given the opportunity, fly high-jacked planes into this place in Tokyo and then explain to the world that their god really did tell them to do it; for our own good of course.

This simple weekly gathering in Harajuku that many - even the gawkers - write off as a selfish gathering of wayward youth trapped by their own pre-teen angst, collected in a fish bowl and captured by a million photo sensors, is a dagger pointed at the very heart of those who would seek to snuff these lives out for their perverted ideas.

This scene, played out every Sunday in Tokyo is what makes Harajuku an idea; an idea of freedom.

What happens in Harajuku could not happen everywhere. It could not happen in the darkest corners of the world or in the majority of the world for that matter. It could not happen in states that starve their own people and threaten the security of others. It would not happen in states that suppress free thought. It could not or would not happen in any country where the masses would gather and react violently to the publishing of unacceptable images of their prophet in the free press of a Western democracy, or strap bombs on to themselves and detonate them on packed busses, or celebrate the flying of aircraft into high-rise buildings.

Harajuku is an idea of what Japan is now, a free and open society. Certainly a Sunday in Harajuku could not have happened in 1930’s Japan any more than it could have happened in 1930’s Germany or Spain. And for all of those who would ring their hands over Japanese leaders going to Yasakuni Shrine failing to atone for the sins of their grandfathers, while those doing the hand ringing continue to suppress or starve or directly contribute to the suffering of a large portion of their own populations perverting their own history in the process, we must ask them to take pause and look to the idea that Harajuku has become. This does not excuse the iniquities of the past, nor inoculate modern leaders from their obligations to explain their past excesses, it merely reminds of the burden to be even-handed and intellectually honest in our modern sensibilities.

The great modern polemicist Christopher Hitchens reminds us of a warning from a former age with a quote from Leon Trotsky in a 2004 book review that appeared in The Atlantic:

            Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city sky-scrapers,
            there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth.
            A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic
            power of signs and exorcism…What inexhaustible reserves they possess
            of darkness, ignorance and savagery.

Of course this quote from the noted Bolshevik was warning of the Nazi menace facing Europe in the 1930s that was about to consume the world, but it may have written today about those who in the name of their 7th century prophet, or twentieth century communist dictator, seek to give us the unasked-for fruits of their devotion.

Harajuku is now an antidote to those poisoned fruits. Yet let those who would lose their vigilance to protect that idea with their lives must take heed. Again Trotsky, the man from a vastly more dangerous age than our own fortifies us with the following idea:

The wiseacres who claim that they see no difference between Bruning (Heinrich – Chancellor of Germany prior to Hitler) and Hitler are in fact saying: it makes no difference whether our organizations exist or whether they are already destroyed. Beneath this pseudo-radical verbiage hides the most sordid passivity.

Harajuku, which might even house many believers in that sordid passivity or give refuge to those that believe in the trope of modern moral equivalence, represents the very opposite of such deceit. In fact a place like Harajuku, where a T-shirt saying “Bush is a Nazi” would not raise an eyebrow, is a constant reminder of the insanity of such banal self-delusion.
At the same time, those who would risk their lives to preserve this spectacle of freedom would certainly not come from within the ranks of those spending time on the bridge. The bridge crowd, during time of crisis, would continue to move about their domain, within their own world as if in a bubble like the cast of the Threepenny Opera of Weimer Germany, fiddling as Berlin headed toward the abyss.

The idea and the irony of Harajuku exist side by side as many ideas and ironies do, unnoticed by those who pass it off as something less, something physical, something temporal. But it is not. Harajuku is at the center of the issues we face today. Issues of freedom, of truth, of life and what we in free societies will or will not do to preserve them in the face of those who would seek to destroy that freedom and those who would equate our own, admittedly not perfect governments, with those of the truly insane. 

Harajuku is an idea; an idea of freedom.