Tokyo has magnetism, and it feels endless. What hits you first is the scale. There’s the neon signs, the ancient temples, the skyscraper skylines, all of it mixed together. In the metro area there ar…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 2 comments

When Japanese bookshops opened up at midnight on Feb. 24 for his book launch event, Haruki Murakami was back in the news and back on our shelves. Although no publication date has yet been set for the…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 2 comments

Rather than a typical tattoo parlor, the room resembled a tiny school library filled with hundreds of books on everything from paintings to Chinese calligraphy. However, there were some clues pointin…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 1 comment

Pokémon the Movie 20: I Choose You! is set to open at cinemas across Japan from July 15, but keen moviegoers will get an advance chance to witness some of the action with an all new trailer screening…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 1 comment

Here is a new-to-me survey company, Qzoo, who conducted a survey on behalf of Sirabee into dating foreigners.

It’s just a single question survey, but the figures were interesting to me, and hopefully…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 2 comments

Serendipity brings with it all kinds of gifts. Sometimes chance meetings or random conversations can start new friendships, ideas, and collaborations. Other times when the timing is right, a simple q…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 1 comment

Japan is famous for its toilets. Japan is also famous for its crafts. So why not combine the two? Well, someone did.

Japanese toilets are somewhat renowned for their technology ingenuity, from the he…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 1 comment

Messaging app Line is set to make a big push into AI, later this year rolling out a Siri-esque voice assistant and an Amazon Alexa-style smart speaker, the Japanese company announced yesterday at Mob…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 1 comment

The mountain town of Karuizawa is about an hour’s train ride northwest of Tokyo, a journey that zooms past the small, heartbreaking scenes of beauty that any traveler here knows, an endlessly repeati…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 1 comment

It’s called sanpatsu, as drift video explainer blogger Noriyaro explains. It’s like a triple-flick to link one corner to another along a bit of a straight. There’s a wide port road built for trucks o…

posted by  banzaitokyo | 8 years, 8 months ago | 0 comments