Emily Johnson– Author –

You’ve probably seen them, even if you didn’t know what they were called. Those glossy little sticker photos spilling out of Japanese photo booths, featuring groups of friends with impossibly large eyes, flawless skin, and jawlines so sh...

Walk onto the rooftop of a major Tokyo department store today, and you’ll likely find one of two things: a chic beer garden with craft IPAs and artfully arranged string lights, or a serene, minimalist garden where people sit quietly on b...

Walk into almost any major train station in Japan, and you’ll eventually notice it. Tucked away near a ticket gate or information counter, there’s a small, often unassuming table. On it sits a rubber stamp attached to a chain, an ink pad...

I remember the first time I truly felt like an outsider in Japan. It wasn’t when I butchered the language or struggled with chopsticks. It was in a sterile, beige bank branch, trying to open a simple savings account. I’d filled out stack...

Walk up to the veranda of a Zen temple in Kyoto, and you might be confronted with a sight that feels like a quiet riddle. Before you stretches a walled enclosure, not filled with blooming flowers or lush greenery, but with a flat expanse...

You know the feeling, even if you can’t place it. It’s the sound of a summer night in a city you’ve never visited, in a decade you might not have lived through. It’s the glimmer of taillights on a rain-slicked highway, a lonely saxophone...

You've probably seen them if you've ever taken a train deep into the Japanese countryside. Tucked away in a mountain valley or looming over a forgotten stretch of coastline, you spot a massive, incongruous structure. It might look like a...

Push open a heavy wooden door, the kind with a small brass bell that announces your arrival with a gentle, unobtrusive jingle. The first thing that hits you isn't a sight, but a smell—a complex, layered aroma of dark roast coffee, the fa...

Ask most people outside Japan what they know about shinrin-yoku, and you’ll likely get a response that lands somewhere between a knowing nod and a gentle eye-roll. “Oh, right, ‘forest bathing,’” they’ll say. “It’s that Japanese thing abo...

Walk down almost any commercial street in Japan, and you'll hear it. A faint, rhythmic clatter. The sound of plastic spheres tumbling inside transparent boxes, accompanied by the satisfying gacha-gacha of a turning crank and the final, h...

There’s a specific kind of ghost story popular in post-industrial countries. It’s not about spirits in a cemetery, but about the specter of ambition left to rot. It’s the story of a factory that once employed a whole town, now a hollowed...

You see them in the glass cases of hobby shops in Akihabara, stacked to the ceiling in the electronics megastores of Shinjuku, and meticulously assembled on the desks of otherwise minimalist apartments. They are Gunpla—plastic model kits...