text: In 2001, I bought a bag of magic mushrooms in Shibuya. They were legal at the time and could either be bought at designated mushroom shops with big neon mushroom advertising, or on the street where they were displayed on top of makeshift wooden tables. Stringy shriveled dry things in transparent bags for 2000 yen. I bought a bag, put the contents in my mouth and chased them down with an Asahi beer to quash the taste, then walked up the hill to a free trance party in Yoyogi park to dance with the freaks. Mushroom drapes hung off a nearby pedestrian bridge and a small pop-up bar sold tequila. In amongst all the twisted and exalted faces that danced around was a fire-sprite named Kayo. She had frizzy dyed-brown mid-length hair that glowed in the sun and a mischievous pretty face. She lay under the sound system in Cleopatran gold attire, clothes that looked like she’d made them in art college, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The World Cup was fast approaching and the Mayor was beginning to sweat. Hordes of drunk football tourists and foreign media would soon arrive, and the whole planet would be watching. So the Mayor decided to clean the city in order to create a good impression. He closed down the trance parties in Yoyogi Park and got rid of the rock bands that played alongside the main park road every weekend. He outlawed magic mushrooms and painted over the street art. He banished the punks, rockers, metal heads, freaks and snuffed out all the colour. The World Cup arrived and the city was clean! Sparkling new concrete everywhere, but a few smudges remained. The Mayor hadn’t gotten the cleaning brush into all the corners. One evening, a buddy and I walked through one of said smudges - an ill-lit backstreet in Kabukicho district with rats scurrying around in it, and lined with yakuza-run strip joints and fuck parlours. A ponytailed man in his 30s with cheap sunglasses and alligator skin shoes stood in the dark behind a portable wooden table and ushered us over to inspect his wares. On the table were bags of different kinds of dried mushrooms, twisted and dry cunning things, and some little bottles and vials too. After some back-and-forth with the seller about what everything did, he sold us two little pipette bottles of 2-CI for 2000 yen each which we uncapped, swallowed and washed down with beer. The 2-CI had a battery-acid taste the beer couldn’t hide and it wasn’t long before we were bent and twisted. We slithered on foot from Shinjuku to Roppongi which is quite an odd thing to do if you know the layout of the Tokyo subway. On arrival in Roppongi, we were greeted by a large swaying green wall of horribly drunk Irish football fans in heavy song standing along the stairs of the Dubliners and facing off with a line of riot police. In the middle of that impenetrable green wall was a solitary round red and white thing that bounced around at a different pace to everything else around it. It looked like a rubber ball vibrating and fragmenting. Riding the 2-CI peak we were! Ireland won that night. England did too, 3-0 against Denmark, although you would never have known it looking at that speedy red and white ball-thing which I later came to realize, once the drugs had levelled off, was a solo Dane with his face painted with the Danish flag celebrating manically amongst the Irish. The 2002 WC circus came and went. Fast forward to 2020 and the current mayor is up to the same tricks.