Cat Street

Cat Street

Harajuku is a famous center of fashion and youth culture. Now we're on Cat Street, a trendy pedestrian-only side street leading from Omotesandō toward Shibuya Station. This seemed to me like a section of Santa Monica, California, that somehow was two or three blocks off the side of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Visiting Cat Street

Here is a walk south on Cat Street from Omotesandō toward Shibuya on a cloudy afternoon.

The above embodies several forms of kawaii at once.

The golden egg (and not the Golden Poo) outside the Pink Dragon marks the south end of trendy Cat Street.

Returning to the North along Cat Street

Now let's go the other direction on a sunny day, north from Shibuya toward Omotesandō and Takeshita-dori.

We will take the right-hand path at this fork.

The Ralph Lauren store seen above may very well be an "antenna store" for that brand. In that case, it would offer prototype designs to measure interest and spot possibilities of new trends. The hope of obtaining otherwise unavailable items increases consumer interest in businesses in this area of Tōkyō.

American brands Oakley and Columbia have locations on Cat Street, as seen above.

This brightly colored shop sells takoyaki. Those are balls of minced octopus with pickled ginger and green onion, fried in a wheat-flour-based batter.

You can tell that's the specialty by the red cartoon cephalopods on the sign.