journal features

shopping in Japan

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2005.07.29

Today I was shopping for souvenirs in Shibuya for the gang back home, and wandered into a department store. If this one is any indication of how they are over here, I suspect that Japanese department stores are the most useful anywhere.

Not only was I able to find postcards & souvenirs for a fraction of tourist costs, but I was able to get my camera fixed. I discovered that my camera's batteries were dead and that the likely cause was that a tiny screw had falled out of the camera's base plate. I was able to get not only a new set of batteries but a new screw to hold the whole thing together again.

All told, I loaded down with trinkets and got the camera fixed for less than $CAD 100. The name of the store was "Tokyo Hands".

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)