denver international airport mustang blucifer horse — "Mustang" by Luis Jimenez. Photograph provided courtesy of Denver International Airport.

The Skeptic's Guide to Enjoying the Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories

September 26, 2023

This was originally posted as an article on Explore.com before the site decided to expand it into a mini-feature, with six sections instead of three. Because of the time difference, I wasn’t immediately available to do the update, so they had another contributor do a rewrite instead. It’s now marketed as “The Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories Fully Explained,” whereas the version that follows here maintains the original angle of a brief skeptic’s guide to enjoyment.

shibuya nebuta festival float center gai tokyo

Photo Highlight: The Shibuya Nebuta Festival

September 18, 2023

Furusato Matsuri (The Hometown Festival) isn’t the only place where you could see an Aomori Nebuta float in Tokyo this year. On Saturday, for the first time since 2014, Shibuya held its own Nebuta Festival, with a team parading a small float across the Scramble and up and down Center Gai after a dedication ceremony in Hachiko Square. The special one-sided float was designed to fit the narrow street by Rika Tsukamoto, only the second female Nebuta master in history. It was accompanied by traditional haneto dancers, non-traditional gymnasts doing flips, and a Nebuta bayashi, or music band, playing taiko drums, hand cymbals, and flutes.

For two days before the parade, the float was on display in a tent near IKEA. Last summer, there was also a Nebuta decoration up on the entrance gate to Center Gai, but having the full parade this year made things livelier. It brought a taste of the festival atmosphere from the Aomori Nebuta Matsuri to Shibuya. Today was a public holiday in Japan — Keiro no Hi, or Respect for the Aged Day — so this was a good way to kick off the three-day weekend.

friday road show ghibli exhibition spirited away wolf moro

Street Art and a Ghibli Exhibition on Tennozu Isle

September 17, 2023

Today is the last day of the Toronto International Film Festival, which opened with the international premiere of The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length animated movie in ten years. This is that other TIFF, not to be confused with the upcoming Tokyo International Film Festival, which will close with the new live-action Godzilla movie from Toho Studios, Godzilla Minus One.

Produced by Studio Ghibli (who else) and distributed by Toho, The Boy and the Heron already hit theaters in Japan back in July. Here, it was released under the title of the Genzaburo Yoshino book it’s adapted from, Kimitachi wa Do Ikiru ka, or How Do You Live? The film initially eschewed any kind of trailers or promo images, but now it has made its North American debut with English subtitles.

In this respect, the Toronto screenings of The Boy and the Heron were geared toward a different audience than the ongoing “Friday Road Show and Ghibli Exhibition” at Warehouse Terrada, located on Tennozu Isle in Shinagawa, Tokyo. The Japanese-language exhibition features movie-inspired photo ops, the Ghibli’s Phantom Lighthouse installation, and a “World of Ohm” room with life-sized sculptures based on Miyazaki’s second animated film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

warner bros. studio tour tokyo making harry potter sunset

Photo Highlight: Warner Bros. Sunset

September 9, 2023

2023 should have been a celebratory year for Warner Bros. It’s the studio’s 100th anniversary, but since it merged with Discovery in 2022, started canning finished films like Batgirl as tax write-offs, and became embroiled in the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, the mood hasn’t been one of celebration. When CEO David Zaslav gave a Boston University commencement speech this May, graduates booed him and chanted, “Pay your writers!” A month later, there were reports that Warner Bros. was negotiating to sell off half its movie and TV assets.

One asset it holds is Harry Potter, now the subject of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Tokyo - The Making of Harry Potter. The sprawling four-hour tour opened on June 16, 2023, on the site of the former Toshimaen amusement park in Nerima. Tickets continue to sell out online weeks in advance, so Japanese fans seem undeterred by all the bad press for the studio or creator J. K. Rowling, whose comments on transgender issues in recent years have also courted controversy. I did take the tour on September 7, but the biggest highlight was when it was all over, and I stepped outside to see this gorgeous pink sunset. Life after movies.

10 Overlooked Highlights of Kobe, Osaka, Chiba, Shizuoka, and More

September 3, 2023

It’s been over a year now since we started traveling around Japan again in earnest, with August 2022 being a big month for trips that took us to Aomori, Kobe, Tottori, and Osaka, all cities that I’ve covered to one degree or another in posts and galleries here or freelance articles off-site. Kobe, I’m afraid, got the short end of the stick, and it’s not the only place that’s slipped through the cracks in a year of renewed travel writing.

Over the months, as we’ve visited them, I’ve also written to varying degrees about places in Kyoto, Yokohama and Kamakura (both in Kanagawa Prefecture), Nagoya (where the Studio Ghibli theme park is located), Chiba (where Nokogiriyama and Tokyo Disneyland are located), and of course, Shizuoka (where Mount Fuji and Azusa’s hometown, Fujinomiya, are located).

That’s a lot of place names, but for this year-in-review post, I’ve whittled down the focus to four, and I’m going to limit it to new, overlooked sights that I never found time to spotlight anywhere else in the year between August 2022 and August 2023. At the end, I’ll also share a little work-related status update for Labor Day weekend.

koenji awa odori 2023 dancers amigasa hats

Photo Highlight: Koenji Awa Odori Returns

August 27, 2023

This weekend, the Koenji Awa Odori Festival and its parade of dance troupes finally took to the streets again in Tokyo for the first time since 2019. The two-night annual event, rooted in an Obon tradition from Tokushima Prefecture, usually draws around a million visitors to Koenji, a district of Suginami Ward, located between Shinjuku and Mitaka on the Chuo-Sobu Line. However, it was canceled for three straight summers due to the pandemic.

The crowds came flocking back tonight to see women in amigasa hats and other dancers and musicians perform around the train station. One taiko drummer was pounding away so hard that I saw him break his stick, then grab a spare that he had tucked into his back belt, almost without missing a beat. That was just one moment in the three-hour parade, which begins at 5 p.m. and disperses promptly at 8 p.m., with a ten-second countdown each time. Pro tip: if you stake out a spot in the first standing row on the sidelines, people sitting in front will often leave before the parade is over, and then you can slide in and have the dancers looming right over you, as seen in this picture.

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).