Culture & Mindset– category –

Walk into the grounds of a major Japanese temple or shrine, and you’ll inevitably see it. Past the towering gates and stone lanterns, beyond the clouds of incense and the quiet shuffling of feet on gravel, there’s often a small, unassumi...

Walk with me for a moment. We’ve just left the last house of a small Japanese village tucked into a valley. The paved road has given way to a gravel track, and the neatly manicured gardens have been replaced by the slightly shaggier edge...

Ask anyone who's spent time in Japan about cherry blossom season, and you'll likely get a familiar picture. Blue tarps spread under trees bursting with pale pink flowers. The happy chatter of friends and coworkers. The clinking of beer c...

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...

Spend enough time in Japan, and you start to feel it. It’s not something you see, exactly, but a certain pressure in the air, a quality of intense, focused gravity. You feel it in the way a chef presents a single, perfect piece of sushi,...

Walk into a Japanese convenience store—a konbini—and you’ll be hit by a symphony of carefully orchestrated sounds. The cheerful irasshaimase! welcome chime, the whir of the coffee machine, the crinkle of onigiri wrappers. For decades, an...

When you picture Japan, your mind probably jumps to the neon-drenched canyons of Shinjuku, the disciplined chaos of the Shibuya Scramble crossing, or perhaps a serene temple garden, meticulously raked and silent. You might think of cutti...

Every now and then, a Japanese concept drifts into the global consciousness, gets filtered through the wellness industry, and lands on a list of life hacks somewhere between intermittent fasting and bulletproof coffee. A few years ago, t...

Ask anyone to picture Japan, and you’ll likely get a split-screen image. On one side, there’s the neon-drenched, hyper-modern cityscape: bullet trains slicing through the night, Shibuya Crossing’s human tide, robots serving drinks. It’s ...

Someone once asked me to explain the shain ryoko, the traditional Japanese company trip. They’d heard stories—of mandatory weekend getaways with colleagues, of forced fun and late-night karaoke sessions with the CEO. “It sounds like a ni...

The first time you hike a popular trail in Japan, the silence might be the most surprising thing. It’s not the dead silence of an empty wilderness, but a living quiet, punctuated by birdsong, the rustle of leaves, and a steady stream of ...

You’ve probably seen the pictures, even if you don’t know the name. A giant, yellow pumpkin covered in black polka dots, sitting alone at the end of a pier, the calm sea stretching out behind it. That pumpkin, a creation by Yayoi Kusama,...