A year ago today, I had an article post on /Film entitled, "Licorice Pizza Director Paul Thomas Anderson Responds to Criticism of Fake Asian Accent." The backlash Anderson was addressing stemmed from two scenes in his film, where a character based on real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick employs an offensive, outmoded, stereotypical Japanese accent when talking to his first and second Japanese wife.

At the time, Licorice Pizza was up for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay at the 94th Academy Awards. In the U.S., the Media Action Network for Asian Americans had already called for an awards boycott of the film due to the “casual racism” it depicts, saying in a statement, “To shower [Licorice Pizza] with nominations and awards would normalize more egregious mocking of Asians in this country.” Ultimately, the film didn’t win any awards on Oscar night, but it did mark a turning point in how I watch movies, write about them, and think about the people who make them.

In my last post on Chinatown, I mentioned revisiting Gundam Factory while in Yokohama. It was on my list of 2022 highlights, too, but it closes next month year, so there’s not much time left to see it. For me, seeing this 59-foot robot swing its arms and legs in a walking motion and do deep knee-bends was the culmination of a 12-year (now, 13-year) journey. I had already seen plenty of Gundam in Japan, beginning in 2010, as I followed around various life-sized versions of it, saw it draw famous visitors like Guillermo del Toro, and saw it evolve into a dynamic, quasi-ambulatory mech.

As you may have noticed from the Google Doodle for February 5, today is the Lantern Festival, the last day of the Chinese New Year—or Lunar New Year, for other cultures. It’s become a point of contention how to even refer to this holiday, with the actual Chinese name for it being the Spring Festival, since it marks the beginning of spring.

While Yokohama Chukugai isn’t decorated with as many lanterns as you would see in the Nagasaki Lantern Festival, it has both Nagasaki and Kobe beat as the biggest Chinatown in Japan. And there are still some scattered installations and plenty of hanging lanterns that you can see there during the Spring Festival.

We’re already a month into 2023, and I’m just now getting around to sharing this. But 2022 was the year I started venturing out again—sometimes on writing assignments, sometimes just on personal trips—after two years of working remotely from home, going into the city less, and traveling outside Tokyo much less than I did in the preceding decade. If we’re being honest, I almost packed too many excursions into the back half of the year, as if to make up for lost time.

In my last post, I mentioned the eat-till-you-drop spirit of kuidaore (which I initially misspelled as kuidadore, but that’s what happens you edit your own writing. It’s since been corrected.) This is something the late Anthony Bourdain talked about in the Osaka episode of his Travel Channel show, No Reservations. While in Japan, I’ve managed to dine at many of the places where Bourdain dined in his travels here, but today, I want to focus specifically on a stretch of restaurants in the neon-lit street food mecca of Namba, Osaka.

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.