1. Dig up the old camcorder for Sports day festivals at schools. Health and Sports Day (体育の日 Taiiku no hi), also known as Health-Sports Day or Sports Day, is a national holiday in Japan held annually on the second Monday in October. It commemorates the opening of the 1964 Summer Olympics being held in Tokyo, and exists to promote sports and an active lifestyle. The first Health and Sports Day was held on October 10, 1966, two years after the 1964 Summer Olympics. October...
Read MoreThings to do: Go to Akihabara and enjoy some maid cafe madness. Here is my top 5
Maid cafés may seem like a fad from 2006 but they’re here to stay. We present you with a guide to the maid experience. Maid cafés have become so embedded in Japanese media and fetish culture that it is hard to imagine a Tokyo without them. There are now about 217 maid cafes in Japan, but the good news is that increased competition is making them much, much crazier. (For those needing background, there’s more on the history of maid cafes here) Here is a guide to the best...
Read More5 Tokyo bars for train nerds (yes, they exist)
You thought your grandfather was a train buff? Sorry to break the news to you, but ol’ gramps would have been a mere caboose in the train of railway geeks inJapan, where hard-core train aficionados are referred to by the somewhat affectionate term “densha otaku,” or train nerds. They’re famous for feats like memorizing phonebook-size timetables and visiting every single one of the country’s almost 10,000 stations. When they aren’t trying to increase their encyclopedic...
Read MoreThings to do: Only in Japan; Visit an Art Aquarium
Of all the bizarre art niches out there, “goldfish aquarium art” must rank fairly high. Yet the artist Hidetomo Kimura has built an entire career as an “art aquarist,” and his weird and wonderful live installations are now on display again at an exhibition, “Edo — the coolness of goldfish“ (link in Japanese), at the Nihonbashi Mitsui Hall, in Tokyo. First held in 2011 to mark the centenary of the Nihonbashi Bridge, where the hall is located, the unusual exhibit proved so...
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