You Can't Beat Christmas in Tokyo

The Christmas windows at Isetan's flagship Shinjuku store are remarkably awful this year. The displays are 99% bling free and seem pieced together from stuff they had lying around, like big sheets of cardboard, tufts of cotton wool, old cake models, balls of yarn. Maybe they were going for a retro 1970's JC Penney's kind of look. The theme is Christmas A to Z and "M" is for "muffler" - the scarf kind - while "W" is for "waffle." In less troubled economic times those letters would likely have been represented by Missoni and Vera Wang. The entry for "F" caught our eye: it stands for "fork," "flower" and an activity one would not generally associate with the spirit of Christmas.


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