Lights in the night.
Tokyo, from the sky, offers a kind of aesthetic unity you can feel only by night. Unity in shadows, unity in light.

Wonderland again.
If you have a walk in Shinjuku-ku, betwwen Takadanobaba and Toyama Campus, you may find the "cosmic street" and what seem to be the clues of a giant cluedo, spread all around on the street. I still have no idea of the meaning of all this, but it's part of the magic of daily enchanted Tokyo !

Shiny shoes required


Practice painting


or maths


or drawing


Go to the pool


Be nice to the froggies


No music, no life

Arrival in Tokyo : check
Catching up with boyfriend : check
Phone Rebirth : check
Contact with future employer : check
First appartment visites : check
Catching up with old friends : work in progress
Housing : work in progress
Working : work in progress
Banking : work in progress
Enjoying life : work in progress

東京に到着　- OK
彼氏と再会　- OK
携帯電話リバイバル　- OK
雇用者に連絡　- OK
アパート案内　- OK
昔の友達と再開　- 進行中の仕事
住居の話　- 進行中の仕事
職の話　- 進行中の仕事
銀行の話　- 進行中の仕事
生活　- 進行中の仕事

Tokyo, I'm coming again !
In a few hours I will land at Narita Airport and start a new Japanese round.
Good bye sweet France, I will be back soon !
Love.

Noemie

Tomorrow, I fly back to Paris. But Japan is my destiny, and I will be back soon. It has to be like this.
It's written in the air, in the stars, in my DNA.

Tokyo is saying good bye to me offering some unexpected pieces of street-art.

Wall-art (Laforet)

Arashi gentlemen (Shinbashi)

"Tu m'as saoulé" (Harajuku)

Ninja show (Asakusa)

Roller-coaster telekinesie (Yokohama)

Jingle bells (Yokohama)

Orange vitamins (Omotesando)

Guitar Hero (Yokohama)

This is the first open-cemetery I have seen in my life : no gate, no fence around the grave-yard; the normal street just becomes the Aoyama cemetery street and that's it, you walking into the "garden of souls"... It's green, a bit wilder than the city around you can visit from dawn to sunset. Some people do their jogging around the graves, some other do pic-nics during the summer. It's actually a lively place...
I was looking for the grave of François Bonne, a little priest from my aunt/uncle/cousins' region, la Chartreuse (France) who became bishop of Tokyo around 1911, but I couldn't find it i the Gaijin-bochi. It was one century ago...

It's not far away from my dear Shinjuku 3chome : here is my new playground, between Iidabashi and Ichigaya. I spend the last days in Japan at a friend's place, two minutes by foot from the very beginning of Kagurazaka-dori. The area is trendy, full of bakeries, French restaurants and cosmopolitan stores. Not bad for a second Japanese home...

Some new riversides...

People... fishing...


Conscience matters

Tokyo is full of confidential resources... At the end of Omotesando, behind Prada, there is a an oasis called Nezu Museum. Not only you can enjoy artworks and exhibitions there, not only you can have a nice bowl of macha but you can also have the most restful, peaceful walk after your frantic Harajuku shopping... Judge by yourself.

Tokyo is a poetic city. No matter what the shrine-addict and golden-age nostalgic people can say. Its true that Tokyo doesn't look like a European city: there are multiple centers, which means no real center to balance the city map; you can't find old stones on the streets, and you can't imagine that these are the walls where the poets of the past centuries stood right by, because everything is new in this megapole. No harmony of the architecture, no respect of the perspective, no esthetic rules... But Tokyo is the most poetic city I know. Because, when you have a look at it by night and you watch the insanely high buildings, and all this light in the darkness, you can see the Phoenix in the urban landscape. Tokyo has been destroyed by earthquakes, fires and bombs, hundred of times, but always reappeared because it's pure energy. Tokyo will be destroyed again, and will come back again, because it's made of people and will, not of stones.

So beautiful I could have cried... Flying blossoms above our heads, fresh ume-shu in our hands, barefoot on the vegetal carpet of Shinjuku-gyoen... 天国の感じでした。