A BATHING APE & HELLO KITTY IN HARAJUKU SHIBUYA TOKYO 2000
Shortly after the Arvika Festival, I traveled to Tokyo, Japan. The idea came from Danielle Del Gaiso—an involuntary and unexpected Mormon fugitive from Chile—who suggested we hunt down the mysterious and notoriously expensive A Bathing Ape stores in Harajuku and Shibuya.
Danielle had also been the one to introduce me to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Karin Boye’s Kallocain, and David Lynch’s Lost Highway—works that would profoundly shape my imagination. When my art director, Jörgen, heard about our plans, he immediately insisted on coming along, probably convinced we wouldn’t survive the futuristic confusion of Japan on our own.
We stayed at a small Kimi Ryokan and spent our days exploring Tokyo. We filled our bags with IDEA design magazines, FRUiTS street-fashion chronicles, a Japanese edition of Monopoly, the enormous Akira manga volumes, and wonderfully absurd children’s books—including one devoted entirely to the life cycle of conscious poop.
At the enormous Hello Kitty department store, we bought a few BEMANI games, and I managed to get hold of a PlayStation 2 months before its release in Sweden. Evenings usually ended in the ryokan’s common area, where I became hopelessly addicted to Tekken 3. An elderly Japanese woman regularly stopped to watch me play, pointed at me while laughing, and exclaimed,
“Big baby! Big baby! Ha ha ha!”
It became one of those moments my travelling companions never let me forget.
The group consisted of Jörgen, lead art director at Lightyears Integral Communications, later featured on the cover of Cap & Design magazine for his pioneering web design work and his Pixy Books series; David Lindberg, today an architect but then dividing his time between Acne, Game Boy development, and experimental sound synthesis; and Danielle Del Gaiso—the unlikely Chilean Mormon fugitive, relentless reader, film enthusiast, cultural obsessive, and one of the warmest people I’ve ever known.
Before leaving Stockholm, two art directors had given me a stack of ASINC (AttitudeWhore Sthlm Inc.) stickers and asked me to spread them around Tokyo.
Around 3:30 one morning, I climbed onto the roof of our building just as the first light appeared over the city. Smoke drifted upward from the surrounding rooftops as I placed one of the stickers on a large metal ventilation cover and photographed it with my father’s Canon SLR camera. Standing there above the waking city, I briefly felt like one of the kids from Tekkon Kinkreet—a small act of creative rebellion inside a futuristic anime.
At Narita Airport on the journey home, the other David noticed a large airline advertisement carrying the slogan:
“We Support Your Dream.”
He smiled and simply said,
“Chill.”
The phrase stayed with me.
Shortly afterwards, I designed my very first business cards for my own company:
Monster New Media
We Support Your Dream.
