It's just an ordinary subway station, leading out onto an ordinary road in Tokyo... yet, something is different about this place, today.

That's because it's Sunday, and you know because from the corner of your eye you can just barely make out two young women in heavy makeup slouching near the entrance to a bathroom, small luggage cases at their feet. You crane your neck and peek over. Perhaps young women is the wrong word, these are girls, and they are preparing their first costume of the day in the quiet, secluded bowels of Meijijingu Station.

They change clothes in a bathroom three floor below the street, but after their detailed, mechanical, 30 minute preparations are complete, they ascend, via escalator, to the shrine entrance above.

They won't enter the shrine, though. They only hang out at the entrance, waiting and watching. Staying in character ...

Their clothing, as with all the clothing to be found in Harajuku, is different from anything that exists outside of Tokyo, and maybe that's why their faces, frozen against a rainy backdrop, symbolize so much about this place: a techno-mecca full of futuristic buildings and labyrinth alleyways teeming with the bizarre and the brazen, so many similar faces, yet all so different... they are part of a society that is accelerating into the future at light speed... and yet...

It's late, words fail me. Harajuku on Sundays just seems to consume my entire soul.