The last couple of days I’ve been really missing Tokyo. When I miss it, I get little flecks of Tokyo street scenes passing through my head. I miss its urbanism, its eclectic clutter, its overload of culture and surprise. Tokyo is a fertile imagination of neverending variegation and intrigue. Its interest is inexhaustible. I crave [...]
I’ve just spent the last week in Japan. I’m sitting in Narita Airport waiting for my SwissAir flight to Barcelona via Zurich. I’ll spare you the banalities, it’s on the record that I’m an inveterate and unreformable Japanophile, so I had a good time. I ate lots of Japanese food, bought high-quality, good-fitting, inexpensive clothes, [...]
So by this stage, you’ve probably worked out that Tokyo locals are seriously wacky. so it’s probably with scarcely a ruffle of your much-practiced ennui that you receive the knowledge that Tokyo contains an ice cream “museum.” OK, so it is in fact a shop, part of the completely-indecipherable (for illiterate gaijin, anyway) indoor “themepark” [...]
Today saw the realisation of the long-held desire to try shojin ryori. Shojin-ryori (actually shoujin ryouri しょうじんりょうり) is a kind of elaborate vegetarian cuisine, Buddhist in origin. My vegetarian friend Zilla and I chose Bon, a fucha-ryori (普茶料理: ふちゃりょうり） restaurant near Iriya, in the northeast of Tokyo. (Fucha is a cuisine tradition within shojin.) It’s [...]
Japan is sometimes spoken of as the world’s most developed consumer culture. Certainly, in Tokyo at least, the extent of differentiation in goods and services is fascinating, mesmerising, and frequently baffling. If an idea can make money, chances are someone is making money from it in Tokyo.
Recently I read in the Metropolis magazine of a [...]
