Anyone whose finger has been even intermittently on the pulse of Japanese cultural trends in the past couple of years has surely heard about cat cafes. Basically they're just what they sound like: ...

Japanese drivers will be celebrating the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on their cars with special license plates. All the boxes have been ticked here. Mt Fuji? Yes. Cherry blossom? Yes. Perhaps the only ...

Do you ever get the desire to shoot one of the ubiquitous AKB48 girls? Yes, we know we are not alone in our antipathy towards the hyper-manufactured bubblegum Akiba idol "music" group. Well, ...

Tokyo has been hit by record levels of snow this weekend, putting a significant chill on the last day of campaigning for the potential Tokyo governors. Polling day is today (Sunday) but the mounds ...

Japanese people love to dress up. There's hardly a public event these days that doesn't seem to feature a colorful mascot in a large costume or some crazily dressed comedian. So should this ...

Projection mapping has really taken off in Japan. Recently we have seen Tokyo Station being transformed in a video spectacle, as well as the Yokohama Odyssey event at a historical dockyard, and ...

Work by the composer of the most famous pieces of Japanese contemporary classical music from this century is now alleged not to have been composed wholly by its official creator. The score for ...

The Koppu no Fuchiko ("Fuchiko on the edge of the cup") by Kitan Club and Katsuki Tanaka was first released in 2012 as a Gashapon capsule toy. In a nutshell, it's a series of cute figurines of an ...

You may have heard about Japan's "gaijin houses," or communal residences for foreigners. It used to be that the only people who lived in such houses were foreigners and people who wanted to live with ...

The end of the school year is approaching. Every spring a generation departs and another takes their place. A lot of memories are cemented for both students and teachers at this time of year. One ...

After debuting last year, the Tokyo International Literary Festival is back. For such a literary city, it is shocking that Tokyo never had its own proper literature festival until last year. ...

Spring is not a fun time to be in Japan if you suffer from hay fever, which is normally a summer phenomenon in other countries. Due to a forestation boom after the war, Japan saw a surge in the ...

This article by Andres Zuleta first appeared on Tokyo Cheapo. [caption id="attachment_3642" align="aligncenter" width="620"] A rare sight in Tokyo[/caption] Free Wi-Fi in Tokyo is notoriously hard ...

For as long as I can remember, comic books have been tightly wrapped in plastic covers, refusing to reveal their content to any passersby in a bookstore. It hasn't been too long since convenience ...

Ligna, a company which operates a portal site of nightclubs and their employees across Japan, has released Club Diary, a 2014 planner that is specifically designed for nightclub hostesses. If ...