I remember my first few months living in Japan, standing baffled in the fruit and vegetable aisle of a local supermarket. Back home in Australia, the produce section is a vast, unchanging landscape. You want strawberries in July? You can...

Walk down almost any busy street in a Japanese city, past the serene temples and meticulously organized convenience stores, and you will inevitably hear it. First, it’s a faint, distant rattle, a strange electronic shimmering. As you get...

If you spend any amount of time in modern Japan, you'll start noticing it. Maybe it’s a woman on the train whose tote bag is meticulously decorated with dozens of identical anime character keychains. Perhaps you’ll see a group of friends...

You see them sometimes in the quiet corners of temple grounds, away from the main crush of tourists and worshipers. Someone will be standing before a small, wood-framed window, clutching a brightly colored, accordion-fold book. They slid...

You’ve finally found it. Tucked down a narrow side street, marked only by a steamed-up window and a short, dark blue curtain, or noren, hanging over the door. The moment you duck inside, the world outside vanishes, replaced by a humid, f...

Before I lived in Japan, I never gave much thought to an entryway. It was just the bit of floor inside the front door. It’s where you’d find a crumpled takeaway menu, a stray dog lead, a pair of boots you meant to clean last autumn, and ...

You see them along the concrete-banked rivers that slice through Tokyo, Osaka, and a hundred other Japanese cities. A lone figure, often an older man but sometimes a younger office worker, still in his slacks, staring intently at a slive...

You’ve seen it in movies, in anime, and if you’ve spent any time in Japan, you’ve heard it before every single meal. A quiet moment of pause, hands sometimes pressed together, followed by a simple, unified phrase: “Itadakimasu.” Ask for ...

Someone once asked me what the most “Japanese” thing I’d ever seen was. They were probably expecting an answer about a Kyoto temple, a perfectly plated kaiseki meal, or maybe some obscure village festival. I told them it was a grainy, bl...

You’ve probably heard about Japan’s convenience stores, the legendary konbini. Maybe a friend told you about the shockingly good egg salad sandwiches or the onigiri rice balls that taste like they were made moments ago. They were right. ...

I once ate a single strawberry in the dead of Japanese winter that ruined all other strawberries for me. It was in a small town in Tochigi Prefecture, a place famous for them, and it wasn’t some genetically engineered behemoth. It was a ...

Ask anyone to picture a classic Japanese night out, and they’ll likely describe an izakaya. You can probably conjure the image yourself: the warm glow of a red lantern outside, the rush of savory air as you slide open the door, the energ...