Every January, Tokyo Dome—the home stadium of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team—hosts Furusato Matsuri, the “Hometown Festival.” Regional food and festival culture from all over Japan converge at this event, which is currently underway (and which I had attended twice before, once in 2017 and once in 2018). A Nebuta parade float from Aomori is one of the annual centerpieces. This year, someone we know happened to be a member of the team whose float was on display.

When Azusa and I returned to Osaka by bullet train the second weekend of January, we were surprised to see Christmas trees still up in places, including but not limited to Universal Studios Japan. Evidently, that’s just how they roll in Osaka, where everything from signs to personalities are big and boisterous, and people stand on the right side of the escalator instead of the left like in Tokyo. We were there for one last bit of winter vacationing and birthday celebration over the three-day weekend. Among other things, we did a revenge trip to Super Nintendo World at USJ so we could see it during the day this time.

With over 100 years of history behind it, the Tokyo Station Hotel stretches all across the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station. It spans just four floors, but as a member of the hotel staff was guiding us to our room, she said that the length of the hotel is greater than the height of Tokyo Tower. The third floor, where we were staying, is essentially one long hall that wraps around the inside of both the North and South Dome. You could get as much exercise as a mall walker going up and down the hall, from one side of the building to the other.

Every New Year, my wife, Azusa, and I go back to her hometown in Fujinomiya, Shizuoka, to visit her parents and see Mount Fuji. We inevitably eat my mother-in-law’s toshikoshi soba (year-end buckwheat noodles), then go to bed late New Year’s Eve, and drag ourselves out of bed bright and early on New Year’s Day to see the hatsuhinode, or first sunrise of the New Year. It’s always the same drill, where we’re running a little late in the morning as my father-in-law drives us all out to the Fujikawa-Rakuza roadside rest area in the neighboring city of Fuji.

[Update: 10/28/2023. Lunch and dinner shows are back at Tokyo Disneyland, with The Diamond Horseshoe now running a new show called The Diamond Variety Muster several times a day. At the Polynesian Terrace yesterday, we caught a performance of Mickey’s Rainbow Luau, which is showing for both lunch and dinner now. I’ve updated my original post here with a few fresh pics, but I’m not altering the text too much because much of it still holds true even with the end of pandemic restrictions.]

At Tokyo Disney Resort, there aren’t a whole lot of options for character dining anymore. Previously, at Tokyo Disneyland, you could meet Winnie the Pooh characters in the Crystal Palace Restaurant in Adventureland, while over at Disneysea, you could meet Mickey Mouse and friends in futuristic costumes at the Horizon Bay Restaurant in Port Discovery. However, the resort discontinued the character dining option in these two locations in 2019.

Now, inside the parks, you’re limited to lunch and dinner show venues where you’d normally be watching the characters on stage. Except, as a prolonged effect of the pandemic, none of the actual shows are running right now. This leaves the Art Deco buffet restaurant, Chef Mickey, in the Disney Ambassador Hotel as the only current character dining restaurant in Tokyo Disney Resort.

Earlier this month, my wife and I returned to Tokyo Disney Resort for the first time in three years. From 2014 to 2019, we visited Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea at least once a year. Those last few years especially, I had stepped up the frequency of my visits, going through an intense theme park phase as I wrote photo reports and other articles for sites like TDR Explorer and WDW News Today (WDWNT). This involved taking thousands of pictures—not quite 20,000, but close enough.

The international exposure to horror manga artist Junji Ito looks to continue in 2023, with the release of the Netflix anthology, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, and the long-delayed Adult Swim and Production I.G. anime adaptation of Uzumaki. For the latter, a Shinto ceremony was conducted at Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku, Tokyo, blessing the miniseries and its creators and praying for their stateside success. This is the same shrine that inspired the face of the Disney character Baymax with its bells.

I just penned an article for GaijinPot about “The Western Influences Behind Junji Ito’s Manga Work,” but presumably because it’s a Japan-based site (and therefore not protected by American fair use laws, which enable the use of copyrighted images for commentary purposes), they had to go with stock photos and Creative Commons images in lieu of any of Ito’s actual manga art. If you’re not already familiar with the illustrated material discussed in that article, this might give it the effect of walking into a museum and reading labels on the wall without being able to visually reference the corresponding artwork.

Since The Gaijin Ghost is an offshore site attached to my permanent address in the U.S., I have a little more leeway here, through fair use, to share a few images of Ito’s manga art.

Last month, I finally concluded my perennial Star Wars tour of Japan, though it really just meant taking long-overdue trips to Aomori and Tottori, two places I first gained awareness of through their local Star Wars promotions back in 2015. With the country reopening its borders to individual foreign tourists in three weeks, here’s a quick look at five potential travel destinations for you across Japan that I’ve visited since 2015. As you’ll see, each of these places has a history of mingling Star Wars with Japanese culture.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos here are by Joshua Meyer. Star Wars is ™ & © Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

“Silence is golden.” A student once repeated this old proverb in a class I was teaching, and at the time, it went against what I was hoping to accomplish, since this was a conversation class and I wanted to get the students talking more. In that context, “Silence is golden,” landed like an excuse not to talk.

Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Oscar-winning adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story, works the same phrase into its dialogue and lends new meaning to it in the process. Sometimes, you can talk and talk for 20 years without ever really communicating the thing that matters most. That’s a lesson that stage director and actor Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) learns one day as his flight gets canceled at the last minute, and he drives back home from Narita International Airport to catch his wife in a compromising position.

Since August, I’ve written over a dozen news articles about Dune, the big-budget Warner Bros. film adaption of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi literary masterwork. Yesterday (or today, depending on how you look at it with the time difference), I had one more article go up, while the movie itself became available as a premium purchase or VOD rental in the U.S. iTunes Store.

This post contains links to my complete news coverage of Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve. But first, I want to discuss Arrival, the 2016 film that marked Villeneuve’s transition from thrillers into science fiction (picking up eight Academy Award nominations in the process).