Right in front of Hibiya Park, where you can also look out over the Imperial Palace, Tokyo Midtown Hibiya is finally open to the public. Enjoy the greenery of the Park View Terrace on the 6th floor or take in the largest cinema complex in the city, TOHO cinemas, located on the 5th and…

As the former imperial capital of Japan, Kyoto holds a special place in Japanese history and architecture. It was one of the few cities in Japan spared from the intense firebombing during WWII since it was deemed an important cultural asset.  Because of this, numerous old-fashioned temples and shrines, raked pebble gardens and private teahouses…

There aren’t that many neighborhoods of Tokyo that bring to mind the image of a single person as much as the Shibamata neighborhood. The working-class folk from Adachi, Sumida, Edogawa, and Arakawa go so far as to refer to this area in Tokyo’s extreme northeast as “downtown” – their own status in the eyes of…

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has been quite vocal about his party’s pledge to cut carbon emissions in Japan by 25 percent over the next ten years. Offering tax breaks for eco-friendly companies, households and cars are amongst his policies to achieve this. However, it would appear the PM has neglected one sure-fire way to achieve…

Japanese society is in a constant state of flux, riding the peaks and troughs of the economic wave, and taking cues from the west that suit Japanese sensibilities and rejecting those that don’t. As society evolves, so does its vocabulary. New words and expressions keep popping up on TV variety shows, in songs, bars and…

You could quite easily plan a travel itinerary around Japan by plotting the location of its teahouses. Where there is culture, you might say, there is tea. Eclipsed by the grandeur of mountains, even the most hubristic will feel humbled. It’s something similar to the willing, shrinking of the ego that takes place when we…

In his early teens, Kaido Hoovelson played basketball. Like many other kids in his village in Estonia, he would have grown up watching the great Michael Jordan strut his stuff with the Chicago Bulls. By his later teens, his above-average size started to become apparent, and Kaido moved into the world of high school sumo….

It’s difficult to characterize Asakusa and Ueno in a single word. One that is often used to describe them, shitamachi, is often translated as “low city.” This term refers to the area’s less-than-heavenly elevation along the banks of the Sumida River. While these Tokyo neighborhoods were once the epicenter of entertainment, culture, and modernity, there’s…

In the north of the country and in the mountains it still feels like winter: the snow-whitened peaks are clear against the blue sky and the nights cold enough to see your breath on the dark air. Along the coast and to the south the plum trees are blooming or have bloomed, but up here…

Jasmine sat on her living room floor covered in fake gorilla fur. She sneezed — twice. What she really wanted to do, though, was cry as she held a crumpled sheet of music in her right hand, and a very incomplete costume in the other. In less than a week, she had to play a…