TOKYO POP.

"When we met 30 years ago, would you ever have thought we'd end up here?" Karl Lagerfeld screamed across the whirling masses of Japanese citizens who created a vortex around him as he arrived at the famous Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, on my first trip ever to Japan, a seven-day junket for the opening of a huge new Chanel store in the Ginza. The Shibuya crossing is where everything meets, where youthful, trendy Japanese fashion happens. It is a swirling, animated, five-pronged circular crossroads, and on this Sunday evening, at about 9:00 p.m., it made Times Square look calm. The young take over Shibuya crossing each weekend for their favorite sport: consumerism.

The look is hardly upscale. There appears to be a deliberate obsession with noncoordination, especially among women. Lagerfeld and I spotted every look from the Wicked Witch of the West (knee-high black-and-white striped stockings with pointy shoes) to Clueless (Vuitton-logo bags with superminis, stiletto boots, and the ubiquitous squirrel- or rabbit-fur jacket). Shibuya is the place where all the catalog-viewing and all the window-shopping culminates in a real-world fashion extravaganza. Punk is out. Goth is a forgotten dream. What's in? The Japanese Pricey Princess look. The JPP totally deconstructs her fashion: Young girls with perfectly pretty shoes wear them as mules, crushing the backs down, almost as if striving for a geisha-

like walk, tiptoeing through the onrush of people.

BIG IN JAPAN

Nothing can prepare you for Tokyo, except maybe Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. She got it: that sense of disconnect you feel in this city of neon lights, the alienation of standing alone in the throng.

We were whisked from A to Z in a fleet of sleek black Nissan vans that had originally been manufactured for Michael Jackson. Everywhere we went, the crowds circled ten-deep around Lagerfeld to touch his sleeves, to touch his clothes. Tokyo crowds move with little sound, as if they were in church. It is such a crowded place, but there is no noise or honky-tonk. Certainly this is so in the Ginza, the tony shopping area where Chanel just opened a ten-story tower topped by a roof garden (called the Tweed Garden) and a restaurant called Beige, designed by Peter Marino. The traffic droned far, far away as we sat down for a highly bourgeois Alain Ducasse menu of chestnut soup and venison. "The walls look like beige lame made from unsold Chanel suits," Lagerfeld cracked.

He had come to Japan with seventeen hard cases of Goyard luggage. Lagerfeld packs his own bags. Visualize that: The commercial jet waiting on the tarmac as he stuffs his trunks with stationery, cameras, crocodile boots, Hedi Slimane kilts in highland-fling plaid, cosmetics, his papaya enzymes and vitamins, and reading matter.