sushi yoshitake tokyo international film festival food truck — The Sushi Yoshitake food truck at Roppongi Hills Arena in 2015.

The Michelin Files: Sushi Yoshitake, Tokyo's Only Three-Star Michelin Sushi Restaurant

October 11, 2023

Update: 12/18/2023. It seems I caught this restaurant at the raw, fish-tail end of its three-star run. In the 2024 Michelin Guide (which I’ve written about now for Explore), another Ginza joint named Harutaka has dethroned Sushi Yoshitake as the capital’s reigning three-star champ. Sushi Yoshitake still has two stars.

I first ate Tokyo’s only current three-star Michelin sushi out of a food truck. That may sound like a contradiction of culinary trappings, but in hindsight, marrying fine dining with street food was a good place to start my Michelin journey. It’s a journey I’ve accelerated of late, using the famous restaurant guide to seek out new dining experiences in Tokyo. And it’s a journey that peaked last night with a more formal, sit-down meal at Sushi Yoshitake in Ginza.

'Star Wars' Cinema Concert at the Tokyo International Forum

October 7, 2023

This time last week, Japan’s oldest symphony orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, was performing one of two cinema concerts in accompaniment with a screening of Star Wars: A New Hope. The concert venue was the futuristic Tokyo International Forum, where lighted walkways lead into Hall A, a double-tiered, proscenium-style theater that seats over 5,000 people.

jingumae crossing portable shrine tokyu plaza harajuku harakado

Photo Highlight: Portable Shrine at Jingumae Crossing

October 2, 2023

In this photo, a team carries a golden mikoshi through Jingumae Crossing, the intersection between the avenues of Omotesando and Meiji-dori in Shibuya, Tokyo. Such portable shrines toured the neighborhood as part of the autumn festival down the street at Aoyama Kumano Shrine, on Sunday, October 1, 2023. This was the first time for the festival to take place since 2019, though not because of the pandemic. It’s usually held once every four years.

In the background, you can see Tokyu Plaza’s new Harajuku Harakado shopping complex, which is set to open in the spring of 2024. It sits on the same corner the Condomania store used to occupy, directly opposite Tokyu Plaza’s existing Omotesando Harajuku complex. To differentiate it from the new building with the similar name, the original complex — famous for the kaleidoscope of mirrors over its escalator — will now be renamed “Omotesando Omokodo.” This will leave the intersection supporting twin malls, each with a rooftop garden, one on the Harajuku side, the other on the Omotesando side, both branches of Tokyu Plaza.

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.