David Plotz, from Japan. (3) - By David Plotz

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Entry 3

Updated Wednesday, April 10, 2002, at 12:03 PM ET

David Plotz, Slate's Washington bureau chief, is currently on a Japan Society media fellowship in Tokyo.

Today is my wife Hanna's birthday, so in between appointments this afternoon (before: an ad agency think tank; after: a historian who studies Japanese yakuza), I go shopping at the Mitsukoshi department store in Ginza. Ginza is the world's swankest shopping district, and Mitsukoshi is its epicenter. Mitsukoshi, I suppose, is the Bloomingdale's of Tokyo, but it's really more Bloomingdale's crossed with the Louvre or the Cathedral of St. Peter's. Shopping is the national pastime (and perhaps religion) of Japan, and there is a holiness to grand department stores like Mitsukoshi or Takashimaya.

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Goods are treated like treasures. Shoes are showcased like objets d'art. In the ceramic section, you must slip on a pair of white gloves before you can handle anything. Hanna went shopping at another swank store yesterday and was dismayed to discover that she wasn't allowed to try on most of the clothes. When she was allowed to try them on, she had to wear a face mask so she wouldn't contaminate them with her germs or makeup.

To be honest, I went to Mitsukoshi less to find a birthday gift than to wander around the food floor, which is, in my book, Tokyo's greatest tourist attraction. Imagine a Tiffany's for food. It makes Dean & DeLuca look like Kmart. The room, about the size of a basketball court, is packed with 40-odd boutiques, each selling the most exquisite delicacies (and occasionally grotesqueries) you can imagine. The world's rosiest strawberries are on display in a small fruit market. One store offers nothing but golden candied potato chips and french fries; another, only extremely tall cakes, like top hats. There are acres of chocolate truffles, arrayed in silver boxes; gummy Japanese sweets in impossible shapes, wrapped in emerald leaves; boxes of rice crackers, each tiny piece enclosed in its own plastic envelope. (I buy a box for Hanna, who loves these.) There are tins of green tea at $100 a pop, and a bustling counter that specializes in pressed dried fish: boxes upon boxes of tiny, perfectly shaped, paper-thin shrimp, and squid, and crabs. The Japanese mania for wrapping and packaging is in full evidence here. Any piece of anything is sealed individually, then packed in a gorgeous box. A clerk, using some exacting technique that must have been developed by the Prussian army, then wraps it in snazzy paper with six swift strokes. She then escorts this treasure gently into a beautiful bag—all this, just for a three-buck slice of cake.

And best of all: free samples galore. I make out with four chocolate truffles, taking them from the relentlessly chipper 24-year-old women at the candy counter. I never knew there were so many 24-year-old women in the world till I came to Tokyo. Sometimes it seems that everyone in the city is a 24-year-old woman. If the 24-year-old women went on strike, restaurants would collapse, retail stores would go bankrupt, government offices would fall into squalor. Perky workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your dark-blue aprons with matching hats!

A Japanese French pastry shop A French pastry shop in JapanI find a little birthday cake for Hanna at one of Mitsukoshi's several darling French pastry shops. French bakeries, which are everywhere and are supercheap, are one of the unexpected glories of Japan. Japan, when you think about it, is actually the perfect home for French baking. Japanese love sugar, but Japanese sweets occupy the dismal Glutinous Leaden Ball backwater of dessert world, and Japanese bread is nonexistent. A Japanese acquaintance offers the most compelling explanation: Pastry-making, she says, requires immense precision and infinite repetition, two particular gifts of the Japanese.

After the food court, I try to buy Hanna some schmancy Japanese stockings. This is a sock and stocking culture. Japanese women are obsessed with their legs. They live in fear of "daikon calves"—a term for stubby, muscled limbs that look like enormous daikon radishes. This is a misplaced anxiety, I think. Still, torrents of cash are spent to (depending on your point of view) either distract from or draw attention to the calf. Patterned stockings, knee-high socks, garters, leg warmers (yes, leg warmers), tights, and fishnets—the Mitsukoshi selection is endless. It's like cereal shopping at Safeway. After a few minutes of furtive poking around—observed by the smirking 24-year-olds at the counter—I screw up my courage and lay down some yen for a pair of fishnets of the kind Hanna admired on the subway yesterday. The 24-year-old cashier asks me if it's a gift, or if it's for me.

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