Last night after dinner, our dining companion took us down the street and around the corner. "Here it is," he said.
We were standing in front of BoPeep, a tiny walk-in closet of a shop. With just room enough for a single file of customers, the store was crammed floor to ceiling with drug paraphenalia and lifestyle goods: pipes, paraphanalia, gardening books and pro-hemp stickers. What surprised me was the legal-in-Japan mood-altering drugs.
Along wih "herb joints," salvia extract, and morning glory seeds, magic mushrooms imported from Mexico, Thailand and Hawaii filled a display case. BoPeep's lone employee, a youthful man with clear, smooth skin embellished with a few sparse beard hairs, explained to us in a mix of Japanese and English that the Mexican and Thai mushrooms were for laughing fun and the Hawaiian ones were stronger, psychadelic.
The traffic in and out of the store was brisk in the ten minutes we were there. A pair of young women wearing the latest conservative fashions pored over the mushrooms. A couple wearing brand-new bell bottoms and knit rasta caps bought some, too. A burly African man came in, checked the prices, and left.
We weren't there very long but the place, like many Western shops in Tokyo, was a cute, clean and fun reproduction of its US counterpart. Completely charming.
Posted by kuri at January 06, 2001 07:38 AM