Imagine this. You’ve just spent a day out in the fabled Japanese powder, the snow so light and dry it feels like descending through clouds. Your muscles ache with a satisfying burn, your face is numb from the cold, and the sun is dipping...

You’ve asked me why Japanese food culture seems so obsessed with seasonality, with this concept of ‘shun’ (旬). It’s a great question, because it gets right to the heart of what makes eating in Japan feel so different. It’s not just abou...

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...

I was sitting on the polished wooden veranda of a temple in the hills of eastern Kyoto, the kind of place that doesn’t make it into the major guidebooks. It was late afternoon in autumn, and the air was crisp and smelled of damp earth an...

You’ve probably seen it in a movie. The CEO of a massive corporation makes a decision, but then glances nervously at a silent old man sitting in the corner of the room, sipping tea. That old man says nothing, perhaps just gives a slight,...

Step out of the electric chaos of a Tokyo street and into the hushed, wood-paneled interior of a classic jazz kissa. The air is thick with the faint, sweet smell of old paper and stale cigarette smoke, a ghost from a bygone era. No one i...

You’ve seen them. Of course, you have. Stroll down almost any commercial street in Japan, from a bustling Tokyo shotengai to a quiet side alley in Kyoto, and you’ll find yourself stopped in front of a restaurant window, staring. Not at t...

There’s a particular quiet that settles over a proper Japanese kissaten in the morning. It’s not silence, but something richer. It’s the gentle hiss of a coffee syphon, the muffled clink of a ceramic cup meeting its saucer, the soft rust...

Walk through a Japanese park around 6:30 in the morning, especially in the summer, and you’ll likely encounter a scene that’s both wonderfully mundane and quietly profound. You’ll hear a simple, slightly jaunty piano melody drifting thro...

Ask anyone about karaoke in Japan, and you'll get a familiar picture. You'll hear about teams of salarymen loosening their ties after work, belting out classic rock anthems. You'll hear about groups of friends sharing a tambourine, laugh...

Walk into any major city on the planet—Paris, New York, São Paulo, Madrid—and you’ll see them. You’ll see a kid with a Son Goku keychain dangling from their backpack, a teenager wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jo...