Step into any Japanese home, and the first thing you’ll notice isn’t the furniture or the art on the walls. It’s the floor. Or rather, the sudden lack of it. Before you is a small, lowered area of stone or tile, and beyond it, a single, ...

It’s a scene many travelers from the West find quietly unsettling. A bustling ramen shop, steam clouding the windows, the air thick with the scent of pork broth and toasted sesame. But inside, instead of boisterous groups, you see a row ...

It’s easy to think of hiking as a timeless, unchanging pursuit. You picture stoic figures in earth-toned gear, battling the elements with a quiet grit, their focus solely on the summit. For a long time in Japan, that picture was largely ...

At first glance, Japan’s regional mascots seem like a national fever dream rendered in brightly colored felt. You see them everywhere: a goofy, red-cheeked bear from Kumamoto Prefecture; a waddling, pear-shaped fairy from Funabashi city;...

Your first encounter is usually one of pleasant confusion. You step off the train in a small, provincial Japanese town, and there it is: a seven-foot-tall, vaguely pear-shaped creature with unnervingly wide eyes, flailing its limbs with ...

You feel it, don't you? That low-grade hum of digital exhaustion. The phantom buzz of a phone in your pocket, the relentless scroll, the tyranny of the blinking cursor. It’s the background radiation of modern life, a state of being so pe...

You’ve seen it, of course. In an anime, a late-night drama, or maybe even your own kitchen cabinet. The iconic cup, often white with bold red lettering, a promise of something hot, savory, and immediate. It’s the instant noodle, a food s...

The first time you feel it, it’s deeply unsettling. Not the violent, movie-style lurch, but the subtle, liquid roll of a minor earthquake. You’re in a Tokyo high-rise, and for a few seconds, the solid world beneath you becomes a fluid, u...

If you’ve spent any time on social media in the past couple of years, you’ve seen it. That inverted, downward-facing peace sign, flashed with a casual flick of the wrist. K-Pop idols perfected it, striking the pose in photo cards and liv...

You’ve probably seen them, even if you didn't know what you were looking at. Tucked into the nooks of a sprawling train station, spilling warm light onto a backstreet, or lined up under the brick arches of a railway line. They are small,...

Walk into any major Japanese department store—one of the grand dames like Mitsukoshi, Isetan, or Takashimaya—and you’ll be greeted by an atmosphere of serene, almost reverential calm. Polished floors gleam under soft lighting. Impeccably...

Every country has a sound that signals the start of the day. It might be the clang of a streetcar, the call to prayer, or the sizzle of breakfast in a pan. In Japan, for nearly a century, it has been the sound of a simple, unadorned pian...