Tonight in Japan, it is Tsukimi! This is the moon viewing festival, when people celebrate the harvest, and the moon is considered to be at its most beautiful. Tsukimi takes its origins from the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, which is a major event in the Chinese lunar year. Tsukimi and...

I don’t love summer in Japan. The skies are big and blue and full of giant fluffy cumulonimbus clouds, the trees and grass are green and growing, the birds are singing, and it is unbearably, unspeakably, unbelievably hot. Stepping out, even for five minutes, is a guaranteed way to...

Hayao Miyazaki, one of Japan’s greatest living directors, has been making movies since 1979, and has been retiring from making movies since 1998. He has definitively retired four times to date, after the completion of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo and The Wind Rises, but none of them stuck....

Last week I finally achieved a goal and made it in to Osaka to visit the Nintendo Osaka store. It opened last November but for a long time it was very, very hard to get into — it was so popular that they limited entry using timed tickets, and...

One of the things I love the most about living in Japan is how much there is to do. There’s always something new or exciting going on somewhere, and now I live here I can finally visit all the places and do all the things I’ve been reading about...

Momofuku Ando, creator of the world’s first instant ramen, founded the company that would go on to be Nissin in 1948. Originally called Chuko Sosha, it sold salt until its founder’s brainwave in 1958 to flash-fry noodles and sell them with chicken-flavoured seasoning. Not long after that, the company...

One of Osaka’s many claims to fame is that it was, in 1958, the birthplace of instant ramen. Invented by Momofuku Ando to help provide a steady supply of food to the Japanese population post-WWII, instant ramen — and then, in the 1970s, cup noodles — quickly became popular,...

Hi everyone! This is just a temporary sticky post while I finish ironing out the kinks in the blog layout (of which there are MANY). See below for my proper first blog post about the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum, but if I keep trying to get the blog perfect...

Osamu Tezuka is a name known by anime and manga fans around the world. Known interchangeably as the “father of manga”, the “grandfather of manga” and the “god of manga”, his works are indisputably the beginning of modern anime and manga. His output was prodigious, and he’s known internationally...