DAIGO

DAIGO is a new celebrity in Japan. (His official blog is here (Japanese only)).
His grandfather was a former Prime Minister of Japan (竹下登 (Takeshita Noboru)).

DAIGO is the singer of a rock band called “Breakerz“, and he often appears on TV and says funny things and does his trademark pose.

Also, his band’s song appears in the Japan showings of the Hollywood movie “Wanted” and DAIGO dubs in Japanese for the lines of James McAvoy in that movie.

Recently, James McAvoy was in Tokyo to promote the movie “Wanted“, and he met DAIGO.
James McAvoy is 29 years old and DAIGO is 30. When James was told DAIGO’s age, he said “I thought he was nineteen!”

Here’s a picture of DAIGO and James McAvoy promoting “Wanted” in Tokyo. They are both doing DAIGO’s trademark pose:

Last week, we found out that DAIGO would be appearing at a shopping mall on the outskirts of Tokyo on September 21 (yesterday).

So we went there yesterday to see him. And it seemed that every other person in Tokyo had the same idea!
It was really crowded!

Here’s the crowd that gathered to see him:

All the girls in the crowd starting screaming once he appeared. Like a rock concert!

We got there too late to get a good spot…we could only hear him. We couldn’t see him past the crowd. But we didn’t really mind…we still had a good time at the mall.

Here are four videos I took (only the immense crowd can be seen):

After DAIGO finished and left, the crowd disappeared and the shopping mall was much more normal:

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At the mall, we went to many stores of course…one of them was the game center (arcade).

Here’s a short video I took in there. At the end of the video, you can see a UFO catcher (crane game) with ice cream in it:

The World’s Busiest Train Station

新宿駅 (Shinjuku Station), in Tokyo, Japan, is the busiest train station in the world.

Shinjuku Train Station was built in 1885 and currently services over 3.5 million commuters daily!

For comparison, there are about 3 million people in the U.S. city of Chicago, and the entire population of the country of Singapore is about 4 million.

Japan’s population is 120 million…and 10% of the country’s population lives in Tokyo.

Shinjuku Station is huge. Besides all of the train and subway lines, it also has bus and taxi stops and it’s own shopping center (of course, alot of train stations in Japan have shopping centers, though).

To help you understand how large it is…Shinjuku Station has over 200 exits!

The area called 新宿 (Shinjuku) is a large, popular section of Tokyo. It is said that Shinjuku was the inspiration for the ’80s Hollywood movie “Blade Runner” (Starring Harrison Ford).

It’s a huge town full of skyscrapers and neon. I like it!

Here’s a video I took of one of the exits of Shinjuku Station on a weekday morning recently: