Amelia Brown– Author –

Before I lived in Japan, I never gave much thought to an entryway. It was just the bit of floor inside the front door. It’s where you’d find a crumpled takeaway menu, a stray dog lead, a pair of boots you meant to clean last autumn, and ...

You've probably seen pictures of them, even if you didn't know what you were looking at. A majestic, temple-like roofline tucked between modern apartment buildings. A plume of steam escaping from a high window on a cold night. The simple...

Walk down almost any bustling street in Japan, from a high-end Tokyo department store to a sleepy neighbourhood shopping arcade, and you’ll eventually be stopped in your tracks by a window display of food so perfect, so vibrant, it looks...

I once stood on a perfectly ordinary bridge in a quiet corner of Tokyo, watching a young man spend a full ten minutes photographing a specific metal railing. He wasn't a surveyor or an engineer. He held his smartphone in one hand and a l...

I still remember the meeting with painful clarity. It was early in my career in Tokyo, and I was proud of a proposal I’d spent weeks developing. I presented it to my boss, a kindly, silver-haired man named Tanaka-san. He listened patient...

Step out of the overwhelming, hyper-modern stream of a Japanese city street and into a kissaten. The air changes instantly. The frantic energy of the outside world is replaced by a hushed, reverent calm. The light is dimmer, filtered thr...

Spring in Japan is a season of profound contradictions. The entire world knows the sweet, impossibly gentle side of it. We see the photos of cherry blossoms, those pale pink clouds that drift through parks and line riverbanks, consumed w...

I remember the first time a friend in Tokyo told me she was going “forest bathing” for the weekend. My Australian brain immediately pictured something slightly eccentric, perhaps involving a secluded hot spring and a lot of leaves. I pic...

If you spend any time in modern Japan, you'll eventually encounter its artifacts. You might see a woman in a cafe carefully arranging a small acrylic figure of an anime character next to her latte for a photo. Or you might spot a commute...

Walk into any decent-sized arcade in Japan, push past the clatter of pachinko machines and the frantic beeps of rhythm games, and you’ll find it. A brightly lit corner of the floor, pulsating with J-pop and partitioned into a maze of ela...

The first time you see it, you’ll probably do a double-take. Strolling down a Japanese street, you peer into a restaurant window, and there it is: a perfect, glistening bowl of ramen, its broth seemingly frozen mid-ripple. A plate of gyo...

You asked me why on earth someone would go camping by themselves. It’s a fair question, especially from a Western perspective where camping is almost synonymous with a car full of friends, a cooler packed for a dozen people, and someone ...