Kawaii Japan Magazine
Look at a photo of Japanese kakigori (かき氷) and it's easy to file it away as "Japan's version of a snow cone." It isn't. A snow cone is crushed ice with syrup poured over it. ...
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Ask a visitor where Japanese people buy the best local food and you'll hear the usual answers: a department store ...
Japan's department store food halls sell the finest sweets in the country, discount them after 7pm, and will pack your cake with an ice pack if you ask. A Tokyo team on how the depachika really works - and why the best of it can never come home with you.
A souvenir is a memory you buy for yourself. An omiyage is a debt you owe your office. A Tokyo guide to the obligation that quietly dictated Japan's packaging, portion sizes and 47 prefectures of regional sweets — and where Japanese people really buy them.
Japan turned station food into a reason to take the train. A Tokyo guide to ekiben: the contested 1885 origin, the regional boxes worth a detour, the four parts every box is built from — and why a DIY candy kit is really a bento you assemble yourself.
Japanese has 445 words for how food feels; English has 77. A Tokyo guide to shokkan, the sound-symbolic logic behind mochi-mochi and saku-saku, and the nine texture words worth knowing before you eat in Japan.
Neon, geisha, endless bowing - Western films picture a Japan that people living here barely recognise. A Tokyo-based look at what Blade Runner, Memoirs of a Geisha, Ghost in the Shell and Tokyo Drift get wrong, what Shogun and Tokyo Vice get right, and what films always leave out.
Goldfish scooping (kingyo-sukui) is a beloved Japanese summer festival game played with a fragile paper poi. Here's how it works, how to scoop like a pro, and why it's a childhood rite of passage — written from Tokyo.
On a warm summer night in Japan, follow the glow of paper lanterns and the smell of sizzling sauce, and you'll fin...