FICTION: SPEEDBUMP

Once upon a time, there was a king who wanted to check up on the public spiritedness of his people so he placed a large rock in the mid...

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Norihiko Dan: Liquid Architecture

 It Never Rains But It Pours Imagine: Five years from today, you’re cycling through the Japanese countryside. Dappled sunlight cour...

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FICTION: PHIRIP MALROWE - PRIVATE ENGLISH TEACHER

It was a hot night in the city. I sat in my office on the 9th floor of the "Let's Building" looking out over the neon ...

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Exhibition: The Dutch in Dejima

A peep into Tokugawa Japan During the almost two and a half centuries when Japan shunned the rest of the World, the one Western country tha...

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Ozone: Hanging with the homeboys

"MY GAS MY LIFE": Tokyo Gas (TG) has come a long way since Charlie Sheen mouthed that unfortunate slogan with its flatulent conno...

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Exhibition: Zenga from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

Art that makes it all look easy Art unfortunately shares its etymology with words like artifice and artificial, and all too often that is j...

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Exhibition: Nishiki–e Outshine Chinese Prints

Plum Garden at Kameido by Hiroshige Utagawa "The Birth of Nishiki–e," the current exhibition at the Ota Memorial Museum of...

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What's in a Name?

Roppongi had a very big effect on me. It was the first kanji place name I understood literally. A few days after I started studying kanji, ...

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Ero Manga

Dennis the Menace, Casper, Richie Rich, Calvin and Hobbes - comics are forever associated in the Western mind with the innocence of...

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Simple Tea, the Soul Soother

Japan, a hectic, densely-populated country, has always been guilty of overloading the senses. It is only natural that here too an ameliora...

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Issey Miyake Profile

Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Issey Miyake, Mao Zedong - spot the odd one out. "Easy," you might think, but actually there’s no odd one o...

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