What I love about Tokyo is that on any day of the week, at any given time, you can happen across oddities such as this:

Yes, of course there’s a polar bear plushie outside of the Sony Building. Why wouldn’t there be?

Anyway, as funny as it looked, there is a reason (and it did make me laugh to watch the bear and its sidekick, who looks like he is trying to pretend that he is not on the same gig as the bear): they were out there to promote the Sony Building’s Opus High Vision Theatre and it’s showing of 「3D ハイビジョン旭山動物園」or “3D High Vision Asahiyama Zoo” (a 3D film of some animals at Asahiyama Zoo in Hokkaido).

In general, the Sony Building is always a good place to cruise by with your camera because you never know what you’ll find out front. They have a display area in front of the building called ソニースクエア (Sony Square) and they change the display quite often. For example, in the summer, I happened to be walking by and I snagged this photo:

You can visit the Sony Building website here (but, if you’re inclined to click on the “English here” link, don’t bother: they have not updated it for well over a year).

This made me laugh the other day as I was walking through Ginza:

If you look closely, you can see that it is a van belonging to a patisserie/boulangerie, so I am not sure if the name is meant to imply that they are “religiously devoted” to baking the best breads and pastries they can, or if it is named after a Monsieur Bigot, or if they are just a collective of intolerant bakers…

Hmmm…

Tuesday was a National Holiday here in Japan – it happened to be Culture Day, so I did my bit by eating sushi in Ginza.

(On a complete side note, I am starting to feel more and more that I should not eat sushi – especially after reading the recent article by Daniel Pauly in The New Republic – but I do eat it once a month or so. It wouldn’t be a huge dietary leap, as I don’t eat meat anyway; but there are certain times when it is almost impossible to escape fish when eating in Japan (and I do like the occasional bit of sushi while keeping the rest of my environmental footprint quite low…)

Anyway, walking back towards Harumi dori, there was a LOT of noise and a heavy police presence. I was expecting the usual display of black trucks with loudspeakers, but it turned out to be some kind of union march for laid off workers. There were WAY more police than marchers, and they were in their serious S.W.A.T. type gear. Got home for the 6 o’ clock news and flipped from station to station to see if there was any mention of it and, not surprisingly, there was no reporting on it at all….

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