Tag: Japan

Nina Li Coomes reckons with the quandary of citizenship and the meaning of home.

After the 2011 disaster, which killed his grandmother and laid waste to his ancestral home, an American journeys to Japan to search for what the tsunami left in its wake.

A woman who doesn’t feel like going to work today stays in bed and looks at the internet instead. She finds a blog by a fed-up call center employee who complains about the customers.

Japan is committed to waiting: its language includes the phrase gyouretsu no dekiru mise: “restaurants that have very long lines.”

Kathleen Drew-Baker died never having set foot in Japan, and never knowing what an impact her research would make. Plus, how to build a lazy bed, how to cook Irish blancmange, and other surprising seaweed stories.

Nina Coomes unpacks the origins and legacies of the Japanese word hafu, or half.

In Japan, business is booming for those who clean out apartments after people die.

When Haruki Murakami walked the long distance between his childhood home outside Kobe and the city center, he found a city changed by the great Kobe earthquake, and the constant spector of violence.

If you lost your umbrella in Tokyo, don’t worry. It’s probably among the thousands stored inside the Metropolitan Police Department’s six-story lost and found center.

How the best robot, “Little Sunfish,” helped Japanese scientists understand the scope of the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

William Vollman enters the radioactive red zone to visit the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

For some elderly women in Japan, prison offers companionship and a life free from worry.

Many members of Japan’s rapidly aging population live isolated, solitary lives in massive apartment communities filled with people.

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami killed thousands in Japan. Those left behind were haunted by the dead, and some were possessed by them.

Hiroshi Ishi­guro has spent his career creating robots. But does he know enough about humans to make them lifelike?

On belonging — and not belonging — in two worlds at once.

“I’ll never go back to dating a real woman again — no matter what happens.”

In the essay “So What Shall I Write About?” from Monkey Business magazine, Haruki Murakami gives readers a glimpse into his creative process and how to become a novelist.

For Roads & Kingdoms, Bianca Bosker explores the world of high-end Japanese fruit: $500 strawberries and $27,000 melons.

After a trip to Japan to improve her archery skills, Leigh Ann Henion realizes that achievement with the bow and arrow comes only after mastering one’s mind.

At Eater, journalist Emily Yoshida hits some of Tokyo’s absurd, popular tourist attractions trying to understand specifically what themed-destinations offer and why they’re so popular.

I couldn’t quite figure out why Japanese listeners had come to appreciate and savor the blues in the way that they seemed to—lavishly, devotedly. Blues is still an outlier genre in Japan, but it’s revered, topical, present. I’d spent my first couple of days in Tokyo hungrily trawling the city’s many excellent record stores, marveling […]

Sarah Miller travels to Japan to learn more about sochu, and ends up learning more about her own limitations as a traveler.

Kathryn Tolbert reports on Japanese war brides — including her mother — who struggled to fit in in post-war America.

Matt Goulding follows the origin story of okonomiyaki, the harmoniously messy pancake that has become a staple of post-war Hiroshima cuisine.

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi writes about proxy services which help Western shoppers navigate the Japanese online marketplace and buy the goods retailers refuse to sell outside Japan.

Matcha ─ you’ve read about its health benefits, you’ve seen it in chic cafes sold as bright green lattes and iridescent bubble teas. Consumed in Japan since the 12th century, it’s suddenly trending in America. So what is it and where does it come from? In Serious Eats, food writer Matthew Amster-Burton provides a rare look […]

The end of divine rule in postwar Japan, and the absolute power of General MacArthur.

Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — […]

As a ramen maniakku or enthusiast myself, I reread Lucky Peach‘s debut Ramen Issue once a year. The issue has an essay by chef Ivan Orkin, where he tells what it was like operating a ramen restaurant in Japan, as a gaijin, or outsider. Lucky Peach is a food quarterly started by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan in 2011. The […]