osaka castle main tower entrance — Entering Osaka Castle’s main tower.

Osaka Castle (By Day and Night) and the Tower of the Sun

August 20, 2023

This week, Typhoon Lan hit Japan, causing the suspension of bullet train services on the Tokaido Shinkansen line between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka. It happened in the middle of the Obon holiday, stranding many people who had gone back to their hometowns to visit their family graves. Our trip to Fujinomiya to observe that tradition (and climb Mount Fuji from the Shizuoka side) got cut short by a day, as we were following the news and decided to leave early.

It was almost a repeat of what happened last year, when we were coming back from Tottori around the same time and Typhoon Meari was bearing down on Shizuoka. In that case, however, the typhoon was ahead of us, so we ended up staying an extra day in Osaka on the way back. This let us visit Osaka Castle (for me, it was a revenge trip) and the site of the 1970 World Expo, where Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun monument still stands, rain or shine.

Typhoon season notwithstanding, you can currently travel from Tottori to Osaka and all around the Kansai region at a discount with JR West’s Kansai Wide Area Excursion Pass, which provides unlimited travel for three days to any foreign passport holder, regardless of visa status.

climbing mount fuji fujinomiya trail shizuoka

Photo Highlight: Climbing Mount Fuji

August 12, 2023

The Fujinomiya Trail, on the Shizuoka side of Mount Fuji, is the shortest of the four trails leading up the mountain. More climbers take the Yoshida Trail, which is said to be the easiest, but the Fujinomiya Trail starts at a higher altitude (2,400 meters, about a mile and a half up). It’s also unique among the four trails in that you ascend and descend the same rocky route. On other trails, you’ll go up the mountain one way and come down another way.

This picture was taken just as we were beginning our climb—on Yama no hi, or Mountain Day, weekend, appropriately enough. It’s probably the best view we had looking straight up the mountain, not far from the bus stop at the 5th station. I’ve seen Mt. Fuji veiled in clouds often enough, but on the Fujinomiya Trail, we walked through some of those clouds. I may share some pics of misty Mt. Fuji in a future post, but for now, just imagine looking at blue skies one minute, then thick fog.

world breakfast allday all day kichijoji tokyo

Tokyo's Mexican Breakfast Options (Plus, A Trip To The Starbucks Reserve Roastery)

August 7, 2023

Tucked away on a back street in Kichijoji is World Breakfast Allday, one of three local branches that allows diners to “get acquainted with foreign culture over breakfast.” While British, American, and Taiwanese breakfast plates are available on the regular menu year-round, the best part of World Breakfast Allday is its other rotating menu, which spotlights a different kind of international cuisine every two months. From now until Sunday, October 1, it’s serving a Mexican breakfast of “huevos divorciados.”

Even if you miss that offering, there are other local restaurants like Breakfast Club Tokyo in Meguro or Soul Food House in Azabu-Juban that still serve huevos rancheros or breakfast burritos. Breakfast Club is also right across the street from the Starbucks Reserve Roastery, one of only six in the world.

abenos harukas observatory tennoji park view osaka

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.

dark knight batman explosion wreckage 9/11

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.

nokogiriyama sawtooth mountain jigoku nozoki view hell chiba

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.

rainbow bridge top deck tokyo sky bus tour

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.