Transcreating Tokyo

Famous British novelist T.S. Eliot may have written that 'April is the cruellest month', but besides literary interpretation, I think the instability...

January 1 is the day of the year when Tokyo feels the most ‘Japanese’. It all starts on New Year’s Eve. Families gather at home for the...

November and December are not a natural season, but a human season. If you go by temperatures, these two months correspond to early winter, but they’re...

September and October, Tokyo’s autumn months, are characterised by blue skies and a cool climate. The air clears up, clouds float by high in the sky and...

Instead of the usual four, it’s more accurate to say that Tokyo actually has six seasons. That’s because both the weather and people’s...

As I mentioned in the first column of this three-part series, kabuki languished on a path of deep decline in the first few decades of the postwar era. But as...

Described as having a ‘dreary past’ and being ‘inevitably on the decline’ in my previous column, kabuki is now constantly drawing...

As I wrote in a previous ‘Transcreating Tokyo’ column, the city of Edo-Tokyo has given birth to three main forms of bodily entertainment: kabuki...

When visiting Tokyo, it’s best not to expect being invited to a Japanese home. This isn’t because Japanese people lack a sense of hospitality:...

When we talk about Japan, it isn’t necessarily wrong to use familiar concepts like wabi-sabi and ‘fusion of tradition and modernity’ –...

Recently – say over the last 15 years – when staying at hotels abroad, I occasionally come across entire families casually riding the elevator...

I’ve managed to shed light on some of the mysteries of sushi in the past two instalments of this series (here and here), but a few questions still remain. Why...

In the first part of this article, I wrote that ‘sushi, which can be referred to as “B-grade gourmet”, lives and dies by its ingredients. My hope is that both...

My foreign friends often ask me to name the very best sushi shop in Tokyo, so that they can go there and taste the delicacies. My habitual answer is that they...

In part one of this article, I looked at three big mysteries surrounding the kimono. I also hinted at a fourth mystery, which is perhaps the biggest one of...

In Japan, the essentials for living are described with three characters: 衣 (i), 食 (shoku), and 住 (ju), which stand for, respectively, clothing, food and...

In the previous five parts of this series, I have attempted to explain the central aspects of Edo/Tokyo, covering topics such as the terrain, the Imperial...

In part two of this series, I wrote about Tokyo’s three levels of terrain, namely the plateau, the lowlands and the landfill, which are in turn encompassed by...

It is perhaps only in Japan that the nightly TV news can open with a story declaring the start of the cherry blossom season before moving on to Putin's...

In the Edo era, three forms of bodily entertainment were born: kabuki theatre, which has been designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations...

Tokyo's basic topography has not changed much over the last 400 years. In order to understand it, you need only know that Tokyo is built on three main types of...

To know the history of Tokyo, you only need to remember two particular years: 1600 and 1868. 1600 was the year in which Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rival...