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The Gaijin Ghost

A photoblog, where you become the phantom foreigner, exploring travel destinations in Japan.
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mandalorian grogu glowing nebuta parade float star wars celebration japan 2025

A Nebuta parade float depicting The Mandalorian & Grogu at Star Wars Celebration Japan 2025.

'Star Wars' Comes Home to Japan at Celebration 2025

April 20, 2025

“It feels like a coming home,” said director Jon Favreau after walking out onstage on the opening day of Star Wars Celebration Japan 2025. It was the morning of Friday, April 18, and Favreau was there to promote The Mandalorian & Grogu, the first new Star Wars movie since 2019’s The Rise of the Skywalker. Yet his comments about this homecoming-like occasion (a nod to the franchise’s Japanese inspirations) also summed up my personal feelings as I had my own full-circle moment with Star Wars in Japan after ten years.

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ANA’s R2-D2 jet at Narita International Airport in Chiba, Japan, May 2019.

'Star Wars' Coverage (Portfolio)

April 20, 2025

The memory systems of this R2 unit contain 50+ Star-Wars-related articles and posts that I wrote while working as an independent contractor for the Death Star /Film and other sites. The links below cover a ten-year period, from December 2015, when The Force Awakens was in theaters (and Aomori’s Star Wars Nebuta floats were in Tokyo), to April 2025, when the Star Wars Celebration event took place in Chiba, Japan.

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Tags star wars in japan
Koinobori Carp Streamer Wind Socks Tokyo Tower Children's Day Golden Week Japan

Koinobori (carp streamer) wind socks flying under Tokyo Tower during the spring holiday of Golden Week in Japan.

Japan Travel Writing Portfolio

November 23, 2024

This post mainly covers Japan-related travel writing, all the best pieces I have that don’t pertain to movies (which receive their due elsewhere in my Movie-Lover’s Guide to Japan portfolio). There are 125 links here, some inbound, others outbound to Explore.com and two GPlusMedia sites, GaijinPot and Japan Today. In 2023, I poured more effort into the site you’re now reading, The Gaijin Ghost, while expanding the focus of my freelance assignments to include other places in Asia and America.

Gaijin means “foreigner” in Japanese, with GaijinPot catering to the melting-pot readership of foreigners in Japan, and The Gaijin Ghost existing as my personal portfolio: the internet ghost of an American expat named Joshua Meyer.

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Joshua Meyer - Film and Television Criticism Portfolio

November 5, 2024

For six years, /Film was my home for film and television criticism. From June 2017 to June 2021, I contributed to the site on a freelance, article-by-article basis. From July 2021 to July 2023, I maintained an hourly News Writer position. More recently, I’ve branched out and contributed to Inverse and Dread Central. Pull-quotes from my movie and TV reviews have appeared on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, in the Television Academy’s Emmy Magazine, and in official AMC and Toho promos.

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Tokyo DisneySea Hotel Miracosta Balcony View

Balcony view of Tokyo DisneySea from a room at the in-park hotel, the Miracosta.

Disney Parks Coverage (Portfolio)

June 13, 2024

Webster’s defines “Mickey Mouse” as an adjective for “too easy, small, ineffective, or unimportant to be taken seriously.” The portfolio of a freelance writer who first entered the market online as a Disney parks photoblogger might be worthy of such a description. But that’s what this is. It’s the running list of Disney-related articles, blog entries, and photo galleries that I’ve posted here and off-site under the bylines of “Joshua Meyer” and “The Gaijin Ghost.”

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Tags tokyo disneysea, tokyo disneyland, tokyo disney resort

Shin Godzilla statue in front of the Tokyo Midtown Hibiya shopping complex in Central Tokyo.

Movie-Lover's Guide to Japan (Portfolio)

April 27, 2024

The 100 links in this post represent six years’ worth of freelance writing from a cinephile and Japanophile’s perspective. Here, you’ll find Japan-related film analysis and film-related travel writing that I’ve done for /Film, Inverse, Dread Central, Explore, and GaijinPot, including my Lost in Translation and Anthony Bourdain sightseeing guides, which respectively ranked as the #1 and #7 top-performing articles by organic search on the GaijinPot Blog the year they posted.

If you like movies and you’re interested in Japan, the links here offer a comprehensive guide to movie locations in Tokyo and elsewhere across the country. They also serve as the portfolio of a writer with press-accredited coverage of the Tokyo International Film Festival.

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Tags film-lover's guide to japan
jizo statues hasedera temple kamakura japan

Jizo statues, honoring babies lost to stillbirths, miscarriages, and aborted pregnancies at Hasedera Temple in Kamakura, Japan, on June 6, 2023.

The Year in Review (and an Announcement for 2024)

January 1, 2024

As I post this, news of the massive earthquake on the opposite coast of Honshu in Ishikawa Prefecture is still unfolding live. The bulk of this was written before today, but we’ve heard the tsunami warnings and seen the ongoing TV footage of buildings burning and road damage caused by the quake. It’s not a very auspicious start to the New Year for that side of Japan. My heart goes out to anyone affected by this disaster on what is normally the biggest family holiday in Japanese culture. It makes the rest of this (which is just my own unrelated personal thing) seem trivial, but I’m going to follow through with posting it to wrap up the year as planned.

As they say in Japanese: Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu. A year ago, on January 1, 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution to update this site more regularly, writing at least once a week about something related to travel or culture — including pop culture — in Japan. Now that 2023 is over, I thought I’d take a look back at the list of things I posted here over the last twelve months. For each month, I’ll also share one or more new photos, closing out the yearbook with some final overlooked highlights from places in Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Kyoto. At the end, I’ll make a special announcement and give some news about the future of this site.

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rainbow bridge lit up white sunset tokyo north promenade walkway

Photo and Video Highlights: Rainbow Bridge Sunset and Fireworks

December 24, 2023

Usually, Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge is illuminated white at night, which may be disappointing for some visitors who have seen dynamic photos of it lit up in actual rainbow colors. According to Japan Airlines, the bridge’s real name is “Tokyo Bay Connector Bridge,” but that was news to me when I first heard it, and I’ve never heard anyone call it that. In years past, the Rainbow Bridge did sometimes live up to its unofficial name in late December.

There’s another pic here, before the fireworks video, where you can see the bridge at sunset and it’s legitimately rainbow-colored. However, when I was there last night on the north promenade, the sun went down around 4:30, and when the lights came on at 5 p.m., it was just “warm white,” the usual winter lighting pattern that they have from November to March. Tonight, it was the same color in the live webcam view from the Fuji News Network’s Odaiba headquarters.

It wasn’t until 7 p.m. last night that the lights went off and then came right back on again, with the bridge rocking the rare rainbow lighting pattern, as it did back on August 26, 2023, when it celebrated its 30th anniversary. This was part of a special, five-minute fireworks show that took place over the Rainbow Bridge on the first four Saturdays of December. The final show last night synchronized the fireworks to Christmas music, and afterward, they left the rainbow illumination on for the weekend holiday crowd to enjoy.

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oppenheimer kyoto scene cillian murphy josh hartnett

Oppenheimer's Most Effective Scene Puts Kyoto in the Room

December 21, 2023

In Oppenheimer, the pen is mightier than the bomb, even in the context of a three-hour biopic about the bomb’s father. Christopher Nolan’s summer movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is finally available to rent in the U.S. as of this week. Yet the movie’s single most effective scene, emotionally if not dramatically, hinges on the stroke of a pen and the mention of another country, where Oppenheimer won’t receive a theatrical release until 2024.

In this scene, Japan’s presence — felt but not seen in a room full of Irish and American actors — hints at a different kind of third act that could have developed if Nolan had chosen to open up the narrative to other perspectives. In an interview with Total Film earlier this year, he addressed Oppenheimer’s point-of-view, saying, “I wrote the script in the first person,” and, “The colour scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective.” However, it ultimately feels like the black-and-white scenes just offer a second subjective viewpoint from another character.

For much of its runtime, Oppenheimer is riveting, but toward the end, as it gets caught up in courtroom drama and petty personal vendettas, it starts to feel like it’s so limited in its cultural perspective as to be almost myopic. Maybe that’s the point since it’s all about a man with supreme tunnel vision. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is focused so deeply on his scientific work that, until it gets away from him, he neglects to fully consider the collateral damage it might cause, or the damage he might cause in his relationships.

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sumatra curry kyoeido jimbocho michelin guide tokyo bib gourmand restaurant

The Michelin Files: A Yakitori and Curry Shop Starter Pack

December 11, 2023

A new Michelin Guide for Tokyo in 2024 dropped last week, just in time for me to wrap things up here with “The Michelin Files.” This will be my last installment for the time being, but it’s focused on two of my favorite Japanese foods, yakitori and curry. Due to its proximity to a certain yakitori restaurant, I’ll also circle back to where I started with this series — sushi — and talk about one famous restaurant in town that might be impossible for anyone but a head of state to book.

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