'Now come on, you'll ruin it!', Dad'd said as I gleefully splashed digital tropical fruits all over the image of us and the tall building in Tokyo we'd climbed. It didn't matter it seemed to me he'd missed the point about Purikura photo-taking- on a trip where I had mostly led the way, gabbling bad Japanese to anyone that would listen, here was a moment the Dad-Son axis righted itself and roles bobbed back round upright, to their established correctness, like a bucket in the sea.
It wouldn't be Japan if there wasn't a Purikura photo booth (that's Japanese English for 'Print Club'...'Purinto Kurab'...'Puri Kura'...get it??) on the 42nd floor of that particular Metropolitan Government Shinjuku building. Who wouldn't want to superimpose their face onto an image of the building before decorating with hearts, hats and cartoon beards?
Curiously enough, the 42nd floor of that building beats the 52nd of another famous Shinjuku skyscraper, in which Bill Murray and some others made a film a few years back. 'Lost in Translation': you might have seen it. I don't know how 42 tops 52, but I do know that sometimes there's an upside down or even kaleidoscopic logic to things in this land. Who knows, maybe that's spatial as well as Dad logic.
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