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The View from Abeno Harukas, Now Japan's Second Tallest Building

July 31, 2023

Earlier this month, Japan’s new tallest building, Azabudai Hills Mori JP Tower, finished construction in Tokyo. We saw it on our recent bus tour from Tokyo Tower to the Rainbow Bridge. It’s part of the same new complex where the popular digital art museum, teamLab Borderless (formerly located on Odaiba), will be moving. The country’s tallest structure is still Tokyo Skytree, but topping out at 325.5 meters (over 1,000 feet), Azabudai Hills Mori JP Tower and its long, clunky name have now surpassed Osaka’s Abeno Harukas in height.

Abeno Harukas had been Japan’s tallest building since it opened in March 2014. It already looked mostly completed when I visited Osaka in the summer of 2013, and it still held the record when we visited its observatory in January of this year, almost a full decade later. The building had a good run, and it’s still there, of course, but visitors to the observatory will now have to content themselves with the knowledge that they’ve been to Japan’s second-tallest building (still the tallest one outside Tokyo).

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Photo Highlight: Shin-Okubo to Shinjuku

July 24, 2023

In his 1999 book Tokyo: A View of the City, the late Donald Richie said of the metropolis, “There are few full-scale, in-your-face frontal views of anything. Except for several shrines and temples, a couple of banks or company headquarters, there is no feeling of frontality at all.”

That’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed with certain buildings, most recently the new Kabukicho Tower in Shinjuku. If you’re approaching it from Shinjuku Station, you can see a frontal view of Kabukicho Tower as you round the corner into Cine City Square from Ichibangai (First Avenue). But at that point, you’re so close up that it almost flattens the building’s design, which is meant to evoke a fountain.

You can take it in better at a slight distance and from an angle, but in Shinjuku, there are other buildings in the way. Yesterday, while walking back to Shinjuku from Shin-Okubo (Koreatown, the next stop on the Yamanote Line), I realized that Kabukicho Tower can be seen much better when coming from that direction. Walking along the train tracks up to Seibu-Shinjuku Station yields a nice view of the tower all along the way.

The 100 Greatest 'Star Wars' Moments

July 20, 2023

Last month, I was asked to participate in a group project at work ranking “The 100 Greatest Star Wars Moments.” It’s the kind of thing where everyone submits their nominations, an editor tallies the final list, and then people alternate writing different entries. The Emperor wanted “tiny little odd moments you happen to love,” so my list of nominations was and is fairly granular. Some of what it’s referencing might only be understood by those with a working knowledge of all the different live-action Star Wars movies and TV shows. (I’ve seen The Clone Wars movie and both seasons of Visions now, but other than that, the animated stuff is a blind spot for me.)

Since then, I’ve moved on to a new permalance travel writing gig—which is obviously big news, but I’ll explain more when the time is right. In the meantime, I’m not sure if my nominations will get factored in, but if and when that list of “Greatest Star Wars Moments” sees the light of publication on /Film, the actual list entries won’t have any writing input from me. I spent a lot of time coming up with my list of 100 nominations, however, so I’m sharing them here for posterity.

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This Bomb Is Mobile: 'The Dark Knight' Trilogy as an American Time Capsule

July 20, 2023

Tomorrow, Oppenheimer hits theaters in the U.S., though it doesn’t have a release date yet in Japan, maybe for reasons of cultural sensitivity. Would Japanese audiences really want to watch an American movie about the father of the atomic bomb?

In this biopic of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan is confronting U.S. history head-on with a story set against the Manhattan Project’s research and development of nuclear weapons during World War II. Yet Oppenheimer isn’t the first time that a Nolan film with Cillian Murphy in it has brushed up against American history and the potential perils of technology, nuclear or otherwise.

Speaking of history and the uncertainty of movie releases, this has been an eventful week in Hollywood and in my own professional life. I will have more to say about that in the future, but at present, I’ve got bats on the brain. Join me now in a deep dive from the belfry of that Gothic cathedral into the shadowy, subtextual underground of a trilogy that includes two of my favorite movies. We’re here to talk about The Dark Knight trilogy, where bombs are a recurring plot device and Murphy’s Scarecrow is a recurring villain.

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Photo Highlight: Sawtooth Mountain's 'View of Hell'

July 18, 2023

Nokogiriyama is a mountain with a 329-meter summit in Chiba Prefecture. The name means “Sawtooth Mountain,” and when you see its jagged Jigoku Nozoki (View of Hell), it does live up to the sawtooth image. The mountain’s steep cliffs rise up from the Boso Peninsula and Tokyo Bay, and though the view during the day is far from hellish, just imagine looking down from that precipitous drop-off at night. It might really feel like gazing down into a dark, bottomless pit.

Nokogiriyama was once the site of a stone quarry, and you can still see a huge relief of the goddess Kannon cut into one wall among the ruins there. It’s worth remembering that the stone steps leading up and down the mountain were shaped by human hands as well. There’s also a Daibutsu, or giant Buddha statue, on the grounds of the mountain temple, Nihon-ji.

On weekends and holidays like Umi no Hi (Marine Day, the third Monday in July, when this picture was taken), you can reach Hama-Kanaya Station and the ropeway to Nokogiriyama via the Shinjuku Sazanami train. It’s a seasonal version of the limited express Sazanami train, which otherwise runs year-round from Tokyo Station to Tateyama.

Tokyo from the Bike Lane: A New View of the City

July 13, 2023

I've always wanted to cycle around Tokyo, despite not owning a bike. After our impromptu bus tour last week, I decided to finally do the deed on Tuesday and rent a bike, cycling from Shinjuku to Ueno and taking in a new street-level view of the city along the way.

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Photo Highlight: Crossing the Rainbow Bridge

July 7, 2023

You can walk, drive, or ride the Yurikamome train across the Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo. I’ve done all three, though for me, “driving” just meant riding a highway bus across the Shuto Expressway’s Daiba Route. The two pedestrian promenades on either side of the bridge have various lookout points, but because it’s a double-decker bridge, you’ll be walking under the road most of the time.

It’s a very different thing to feel the wind whip through your hair as you ride an open top bus across the bridge’s top deck. Since the weather was nice yesterday and we had just spent two hours in a museum, we decided to hop on one of those red Sky Buses that you sometimes see driving around town. By 4:30, it had cooled down enough that we could do it without turning into sun-dried tomatoes. The 50-minute Tokyo Tower/Rainbow Bridge course also takes you across the Kachidoki Bridge and past landmarks like the Kabuki-za theater and the Wako department store clock tower in Ginza.

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Tokyo Disneyland 40th Anniversary Report

July 5, 2023

Tokyo Disneyland first opened on April 15, 1983, and on its 40th anniversary this year, it kicked off a year-long event to celebrate, with the theme of “Dream-Go-Round.” The biggest piece of entertainment to debut during this event was the new daytime parade, “Harmony in Color.”

In this photo report, you’ll see front-row pics of the parade, along with anniversary decorations at the park entrance, on Cinderella Castle, and in a room at the Tokyo Disney Celebration Hotel. We’ll also talk about how the parade factors into some of the changes that have occurred, for better or worse, at Tokyo Disney Resort since the pandemic upended the theme park business.

Photo Highlight: The Back Side of Terror

June 28, 2023

On the Jungle Cruise ride at Disney parks in the U.S., there’s a famous bad joke where the boat passes behind a waterfall and the skipper directs the passenger’s attention to the amazing sight of “the back side of water.” The pedestrian path outside Tokyo DisneySea yields the equally impressive(?) sight of the back side of the Tower of Terror attraction, as pictured here on June 26, 2023.

Since the tower is backed up against the wall, it’s only when you’re outside the park that you can see it from this vantage point. The palm tree-lined path runs parallel to Tokyo Disney Resort’s monorail line and continues up to the Maihama Coast Boardwalk, where you can walk alongside Tokyo Bay, hear the crashing of the waves, and see Tokyo Gate Bridge in the distance. Along the way, you’ll also see the back side of the resort’s new Toy Story Hotel.

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Fushimi Inari Taisha: Climbing Kyoto’s Famous Mountain Shrine

June 22, 2023

Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Shrine gets quite crowded during the day; everyone and their grandmother wants to be the lone figure pictured in its tunnel of vermillion torii gates, as seen in the film Memoirs of a Geisha. The shrine's official website notes, "The whole of Inariyama, the mountain where Fushimi Inari Taisha rests, is considered a precinct of the shrine." This means that if you really want to get the full experience, you’ll be ready to climb the 764-foot mountain from top to bottom.

Here, we’ll review a few tips and tricks for doing that. I’ll also talk a bit about the shrine’s importance relative to Kyoto’s history and thousands of other sub-shrines across Japan.