Someone asks you about Japan, and your mind likely conjures a highlight reel of hyper-efficiency. You see the Shinkansen, a white bullet slicing through the countryside at impossible speeds. You picture the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, a m...

Someone once asked me to describe the most quintessentially Japanese space I could think of. My mind didn't jump to a neon-drenched Tokyo crossing or a serene Kyoto temple. It went somewhere much quieter, somewhere humbler. I thought of ...

When you picture fireworks in Japan, you probably imagine something elegant and expansive. You see a thousand delicate chrysanthemums blooming against a velvet summer sky, their colors reflecting in the eyes of a crowd sighing in collect...

You’ve probably seen the pictures. Girls on the streets of Tokyo in the late 1990s, looking like they just stepped off a spaceship that crash-landed on a tropical beach. Skin tanned to a deep, almost impossible bronze. Hair bleached blon...

You asked me what detail of daily life in Japan really gets to the heart of the culture. It’s a great question, because it’s never the big, obvious things like temples or tea ceremonies. It’s the small, unspoken rituals that reveal the m...

There’s a particular kind of silence you find only in a place that was once deafeningly loud. Stand in the middle of a colossal, abandoned factory in provincial Japan, and you’ll feel it. It’s a silence thick with the ghosts of sound—the...

Walk away from the blindingly bright, impeccably clean main streets of any major Japanese city. Turn down a side road, then another. Sooner or later, you’ll feel it: a subtle shift in the atmosphere. The air grows thick with the scent of...

To the uninitiated, the concepts of tabehoudai (all-you-can-eat) and its thirsty cousin, nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink), seem like a straightforward proposition. A fixed price for limitless consumption. A glutton's paradise. A simple eco...

You’ve probably heard about them. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of the egg salad sandwiches that inspire near-religious devotion, or the endless walls of colorful, perplexing drinks. You think you know what a Japanese convenience store—a ko...

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 down almost any street in a Japanese city, from the neon-drenched canyons of Shinjuku to a sleepy suburban shopping arcade, and you will eventually hear it. It’s a sound that’s both mechanical and deeply human: a low, plastic rumble...

Imagine this. You’re in a room no bigger than a walk-in closet, bathed in the synthetic glow of a flatscreen TV and the faint, sticky-sweet smell of spilled melon soda. The air is thick with anticipation. In your hand is a hefty, slightl...