Ginza - July 2006
Ginza was
the premier classy shopping area in Tokyo for about a hundred years,
but over the past few decades, there has been relentless new
construction all over Tokyo of new office towers, new shopping areas,
etc., and now Ginza is... historically
famous.
While
Ginza isn't as big a deal as it once was, it's still an interesting
area and I enjoy walking through it from time to time. You can
have dinner and shop all over Tokyo, but Ginza still has name value.
Particularly
popular with women, it's a happier thing to say "I had dinner last
night in Ginza" than "I had dinner last night in Ikebukuro".
Ikebukuro has plenty of good shopping and nice enough restaurants, but
it's still not a name said with much pride....
(Left
below) - The building with the clock tower is one of the few pre-WW-II
buildings in Ginza (or in all of Tokyo for that matter - reconstruction
of everything is relentless!). It was an upscale store before,
then the PX for a while in the immediate post-war years, and now it's
an upscale store, making the most of its now rare architecture (inside
and out).
(Right
below) - Trees... Ginza has had more of them than most areas of Tokyo,
which has always been one of its attractions, and - fortunately - with
new development everywhere in Tokyo, there is more evidence of green
living things between buildings than in the bad days of putting up
square boxes with almost no green.
(Bottom three) - The
borderline area between Yurakucho and Ginza. Actually, one
popular way of getting to Ginza is to get off at Yurakucho Station
(Yamanote Line) and walk there, so in a sense, Ginza extends to
Yurakucho Station. (Bottom left) - The building across the street
with the multicolored wall is the Sony Building.
Copyright 2006 by Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo
|
