Kawaii Japan Magazine
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.
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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...
There's a sound that means summer in Japan: the soft clink of a glass marble dropping into a bottle, followed by a...
It's on lunchboxes and bullet trains, on aeroplanes and police posters, in the round-cheeked mascots of entire cit...
Every July, streets and shopping arcades across Japan burst into colour as bamboo branches appear, hung with hundr...