How long would you wait for your loved one?

10 years is how long Hachiko waited for his master at Shibuya station. Every day from 1925 to 1935, the dog would go to the station and wait for the afternoon train, the train that his master used to take home from work. Only he wasn’t coming because he was dead and so Hachiko waited [...]

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How to modernize your kimono

Last night Roland brought me along to his friend’s kimono Party. Yes, you guessed it, a kimono party is a party with people dressed in kimonos. Of course it was somewhat tongue in cheek, but as most Japanese these people were dead serious about their hobby. There was a one hour presentation on ways to [...]

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Post-Tokyo high

Last night I visited the new highrise called Tokyo Midtown, which is the tallest building in the city and on its lower floors contains — thanks to vast swaths of wood, elaborate lighting, and other beyond-the-call-of-duty architectural and furnishing details — the most convincingly, tastefully luxurious shopping mall I’ve ever experienced.
And the luxury extended from [...]

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Design for the (Japanese) World: Vol. 2

More great design solutions that I wish we could bring back with us to the US:

ITEM 1:
Say you’re shopping in a department store with your toddler and you need to go to the bathroom… where do you stick the kid? TOTO, maker of the world’s most amazing (and complex) toilets offers another great product, [...]

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Name that building: revealed!

This afternoon, Leital and I were hitting up some souvenir shops when we spotted this building across the river.  We were just as surprised when we found out what company it represents.
Any guesses?
===============
THE ANSWER:
Indeed, it is the Asahi Breweries HQ.
Our pal here says that the French architect actually planned 3 gold flames, all sticking straight [...]

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New Amsterdam, New Paris

I will probably never be an expatriate. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize in every foreign city I visit about which neighborhood I’d live in. In Tokyo, I think it’d probably be on the Naka-meguro canal, a quiet, Amsterdamish stretch of just-hip-enough gentility only two subway stops from the high-rise neon clangor of Shibuya.
And [...]

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Bad Fortune Lack

While the Japanese are known to be secular or atheist, at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples you’ll often see people dropping coins in an offering box and praying (albeit briefly). Another ritual at these sites is to get a fortune, or omikuji. At the Akasuka Temple in Tokyo, you deposit 100 yen in [...]

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Pachinko wizard

I was alone in Kyoto part of last week getting tape for a story.  One night after doing an interview, I was looking for something to do… and I stumbled into one of the city’s gigantic pachinko parlors.  The sliding doors opened to a wall of sound — a cacophony of pop music and high-pitched [...]

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Tokyo Confidential

As we walked down one of the narrow side streets of the Times Square-ish entertainment district around the Shibuya train station, past swank rock clubs and “love hotels,” we came upon an unlit, grimy, highly decorative stone-and-stucco facade that looked to be from the first third of the 20th century – an anomaly in a city where [...]

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Be here now

Buddhist word of the day: On the overview map of Kyoto train station I noticed this funny thing, instead of saying “You are here” it simply said “Now”. I guess it comes to the same, except “Now” would be true not just for the Kyoto train station map, but for most places you go, if [...]

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