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...

Someone asks you to picture Japan, and your mind likely conjures up a familiar highlight reel: the electric scramble of Shibuya Crossing, the serene bamboo groves of Arashiyama, the neon-drenched alleys of Shinjuku. It’s a vision of inte...

Walk into any convenience store in Japan, or konbini as they’re universally known, and you’ll be met with a familiar, orderly glow. The air hums with the soft chime of the automatic door and the quiet whir of refrigerators. You can find ...

Picture a Japanese high school girl on a packed commuter train in, say, 2005. She’s staring intently at her brightly colored flip phone, one of those beautiful, clamshell devices we now see with a tinge of retro nostalgia. Her thumbs are...

If you’ve spent any time in Japan, you know the comforting embrace of chuka ryori. It’s that familiar, Japan-ified version of Chinese food found in every neighborhood: the savory gyoza, the gentle mapo tofu, the sweet-and-sour pork. It’s...

There’s a word in Japanese that doesn’t have a clean English equivalent. It’s a term born from a specific kind of tragedy, a word that sits heavy in the air when spoken. The word is karōshi. It translates, quite literally, to “death from...

If you’ve ever channel-surfed late at night in Japan, you’ve probably stumbled upon it: a lone samurai standing perfectly still in a bamboo grove, the wind rustling the leaves, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. There’s no music,...

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...

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 up to any major temple or shrine in Japan, and you’ll likely see it. Someone, often a young woman but just as easily a middle-aged man or a visiting couple, stands patiently at a small windowed office. They hand over a beautiful, br...

Ask most people to picture Japan, and their mind probably jumps to one of two extremes. On one end, you have the Blade Runner-esque cityscape: Tokyo or Osaka, a dense vertical forest of concrete and glass, pulsating with neon and crisscr...

Walk into a certain kind of cafe in Tokyo, and you might feel a strange sense of dislocation. The tables and chairs are ordinary enough. The low hum of conversation is familiar. But the walls are plastered with floor-to-ceiling images of...