“The whole countryside was full of snakes sunning themselves along the roads and swimming in the ditches and newly flooded rice-fields… Out in Sesshu’s old garden behind the temple, the pond was starred with tiny twinkling water-lilies.”     Japanese Scrapbook, Glenn Shaw As notorious for their eulogies of places as they are for dampening the…

Currently, it is estimated that there are 900 million Vegetarians (including Vegans) and about 1.8 billion Muslims (Halal) and Jews (Kosher) around the world. A lack of understanding of these people’s dietary restrictions and the delay in handling those restrictions have led to a significant loss of opportunities for consumption and reduced satisfaction with visits to Japan. In…

Tokyo is one of the most crowded cities in the world and also one of the shortest on available land area. So how might this megalopolis develop in the future? The Discovery Channel recently aired a solution, originally conceived by the innovative Shimizu Corporation, which looks to ancient Egypt for an answer that, should it…

A long string of wind chimes hanging from the wooden roof of Ken Yamashita’s old house in rural Tokorozawa competes with the chirping of cicadas to pierce the quiet of a lazy afternoon. Time might easily be mistaken for standing still here, but in just a few hours city dwellers will start packing themselves into…

It’s probably safe to assume Kaname Matsumoto had not seen the 1989 flick Field of Dreams when he nailed together his first wooden structures on the dusty parking lot of his refrigeration warehouse 16 years ago. Nevertheless, the energetic 64-year-old had decided to adopt a very similar mantra to the one followed by Kevin Costner’s…

It is often said that opposites attract, and nowhere does this aphorism hold truer than in the relationship between the land of the rising sun and the land of the tricolore. On the face of it, one would be hard-pressed to come up with two more starkly dissimilar cultures: the former is generally characterized as…

 It seems like It seems like yesterday that environmentalism was a fringe issue, dismissed by some and comfortably ignored by many. Ideas of sustainability and conservation were considered the stuff of radicals and bohemians – stuck on the periphery outside the consciousness of the mainstream. The ravaging effects of that inaction are starting to be…

Tokyo at night, seen from above, is an intoxicatingly beautiful expanse of sparkling light. Of course, the blanket of illumination represents much more than just urban sprawl. One could say the lights, in fact, symbolize the lives of the millions of people in the city – luck changing and destiny colliding with each passing second….

It’s almost midnight and by rights you should be curled up on the sofa in pre-bed chillout mode, watching nonsense on Fox. Instead you’re still at work. You’ve just got out of a weekly conference call with HQ in London and being that it’s HQ, GMT always trumps EST, as antisocial as this makes all…

Walking with Andrea Masse Tognetti through the grounds of Narita-san is an enriching cultural experience. The temple becomes more than just a brief stop before checking into the international airport. Tognetti possesses the awe of a typical tourist, snapping away photos of gardens, statues — everything colorful and brightly painted is religiously recorded. But then…