People ask me all the time what websites I recommend—what blogs that I read as somebody who writes about Japan. I figure that I’ll answer this question once and for all; or at least until people forget that I wrote this post and start asking me again. While I skim a lot of the sites [...]
Japanese artist Mari Miyazawa plays with her food. Like, a lot. As a parent, she sent off her kids with homemade bento lunches, that much is normal; but where Miyazawa differs from most mothers is that her bento creations are works of art. They’ve been featured in photo exhibitions and on TV shows in Japan [...]
It’s not easy to write about art. Art is highly subjective after all, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a complete plebeian when it comes to art. But someone much wiser than I once said that art is supposed to make the viewer feel something – and I certainly had a lot [...]
For whatever reason, Japan seems to produce some of the most compelling artists in the world today. Case in point, I was blown away a couple of months ago when I came across pictures of some art by a Japanese artist, Ichi Ikeda: Even though it might look like it grew out of the ground, [...]
It’s always strange to see the more human, adult side of people who were important to us as kids. I was weirded out when it was revealed last year that Charles Schultz used Charlie Brown to hook up with his mistress. So when I found out that Dr. Seuss made anti-Japanese propaganda, I was a [...]
We’ve written before about how goldfish fit into Japanese culture and art. You can catch goldfish at virtually any festival in Japan, and a great many artists dedicate their time to creating beautiful works of art in honor of the small fish. One group in Japan has devoted their whole existence to goldfish. The group [...]
In Japan, there’s a huge and vibrant community of people who love to make things, whether they’re pre-made models, crafts, gadgets or anything in between. You can see what I’m talking about in our post last week about the Tokyo Maker Fair. One of the coolest DIY projects that’s come out of Japan recently has [...]
