Tokyo
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Tokyo Diary day #2
“It’s your holiday, do what you want to. The holiday police aren’t looking over your shoulder”. I was tired today, and felt bad that I wasn’t making more of my limited time in Tokyo. Flying feels a guilty miracle. All that carbon, all that waste, just to play board games online on the other side Read more
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Tokyo diary: day one
Tokyo, 2am Saturday 2nd December Hello! I write from a hotel between the Japanese Sword Museum and the National Sumo Arena. I landed at half nine local time, took a while to get through security, took a monorail, and arrives at the hotel just before midnight. On my way, I saw the traditional Friday night Read more
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REVIEW: A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir, by Ian Buruma
Note – this first appeared in my substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here You know how it is. It’s the mid-seventies, you’re an upper-middle-class Anglo-Dutch student, and you’re macho-posing in a red jockstrap to Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” in a seedy theatre behind Kyoto station while a topless dancer writhes around you. Read more
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A picture a day keeps the context away: Japan diary part 3
Since I wrote about DYRTFT2, I have posted the odd vignette but I haven’t maintained a day-to-day diary like part of my brain and versions of my past self reckon I should. So here’s a brief, hopefully memory-evoking* skip through the past few weeks of living in Tokyo. I will try to limit myself to Read more
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A wander from Meidaimae to Ebisu, Tokyo
I am stood in my Ballardian high-rise in Meidaimae, a suburb in the west of Tokyo, staring out east towards the skyscrapers of Shinjuku. Richard Hawley’s Tonight The Streets Are Ours is in my head. I can see, vaguely, where I want to be going – Ebisu, a bit south of Shibuya. At least, i convince Read more
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Oh but you know that we’ve changed so much since then – Japan diary pt 2
Day four: Koenji, or dance like there’s nobody watching The exit polls were promising. Buoyed by a fun and busy first attempt at re-Britpopping the good people of Tokyo at March’s Do You Remember The First Time, we were confident the second iteration of the club night would go just as well. We spent the Read more
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Bullet train, take away the pain: Japan diary pt 1
Day One: Marunouchi, Tokyo After spending an enjoyable few hours in the non-place of Ataturk international airport, I headed on to the second, longer leg of my trip: an eleven hour flight to Tokyo’s Narita airport. The trip was uneventful: I got some sleep, some Japanese art students tried to teach me some useful words of Read more
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A cat cafe in Tokyo, October 2013
About a year ago, I went to a cat cafe in Tokyo. It was basically just a middle aged woman’s apartment, full of cats. We took the lift up to her floor. The doors opened directly into her hallway. She welcomed us and gestured to take off our shoes. She wouldn’t sell us any drinks, Read more
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