Japan

The Mapputatsu? Parfait tackles food waste without sacrificing visuals so that you can still happily feed both yourself and your phone. Back in January, a new style of parfait appeared at Denny’s Japan. From the front it appears as a regular parfait, but from the side, it looks like it’s been split in two–leading to its name, the Mapputatsu? Parfait (“Two equal parts? Parfait”). ▼ Pictured below are versions with Shine Muscat grapes for 1,078 yen (US$6.87) and wit

A roadmap for starting your journey of eating your way through Family Mart’s sweet potato sweets lineup. Though they usually have a little fruit and vegetable corner where you can pick up some bananas, a carrot, or half a head of lettuce, Japanese convenience stores aren’t really the best place to go if you’re looking for fresh seasonal produce. Japanese convenience stores are, on the other hand, exactly where you want to be if you’re looking for new seasonal sweets. Sweet potato sweets season

The mysterious god even has a moving mouth, to eat the tasty anime meals on the note pads. As ardent lovers of both Studio Ghibli and Japanese stationery, we’re always very excited when the anime studio releases a stationery collection. So when Ghibli specialty chain Donguri Kyowakoku unveiled a brand new range of memo pads adorned in food from some of our favourite Ghibli anime, plus a stand designed to look like the River God from Spirited Away, we had to stop ourselves from immediately

Here is essential advice for surviving sudden disaster in Japan. On September 8, 2026, the regions of Chubu, the center of Japan, were struck by an aggressive autumn front that unleashed a sudden and immense downpour, resulting in one of the highest levels of rain the area has seen since records began. The streets of Nagoya and railways became rivers, and the subway stations became pools, halting any and all public transport, leaving commuters and travelers stranded with no way to return home.

Japan’s reigning monarch and his sweetheart get into the spirit of Ghibli Park. Theme parks are popular date spots in Japan, and Ghibli Park is no exception. On any given day you can expect to see lots of couples strolling around the Aichi Prefecture park and soaking up the atmosphere, and with Ghibli anime being loved and respected by people of all ages in Japan, it’s not just teen sweethearts who want to snap photos with characters and scenery from the studio’s films. So, ordinarily, there wo

Perhaps even more impressively, it’s also the 56th consecutive year that centenarian numbers have broken records. 100 is an impressive number on its own, especially when you see it laid out in some kind of visual form. 100 coins, 100 books, 100 days on a calendar…you’re probably running out of physical room to display whatever it is. However, let’s now multiply that number by 1,000 to arrive at 100,000–a virtually incomprehensible number from a visual standpoint, b

If you can’t beat them, float on them. As in many corners of the globe, Japan has been putting up with an increasing number of previously rare weather-related natural disasters. One of the more surprising was the widespread flooding around Chiba after torrential rains fell from a line of squall clouds that inexplicably stopped moving for a while. ▼ Many people were caught while out driving and had to abandon their cars on the street after the water caused them to stall. In addition to 13

Riding the waves and eating the sweets in Asagaya. It’s been said that you can learn everything you really need to know in life in kindergarten, but that’s obviously oversimplifying things quite a bit. Adult life presents problems far more complex than the topics handled in a curriculum designed for five-year-olds. For example, from a young age pretty much everyone gets taught not to play with their food…but what do you do when the people who’re giving you that food not only encourage you

Further proof that no matter what we need, we can probably find it at Japan’s favorite 100 yen store. Japan has embraced the frights, fun, and food of Halloween in a big way in recent years, but still not in a complete mirror of how things are done in America. For example, Japan doesn’t anything equivalent to Spirit Halloween or other temporary discount specialty shops that move into vacant shopping mall spaces to offer costumes ideas ahead of October 31. So what should you do if you find yours

Gyudon on the go in Kyobashi Station. When you spot a restaurant on a train platform in Japan, the odds are extremely high that it’s going to be a noodle joint, and specifically a soba/udon one. Since they both use the same sort of broth, the logistics of keeping a pot of it heated and always having batches of noodles boiling makes it pretty easy to serve up meals in a speedy fashion. But while he was passing through Osaka’s Kyobashi Station the other day, our Japanese-language reporter Seiji N

Two completely different ways to make a delicious Japanese autumn dessert. Now that we’re into the back half of September, we’re ready to switch our sweets snacking into autumn mode. And just like how farmers are harvesting their sweet potatoes, so too is it time for us to start bringing in Japan’s sweet potato ice creams for taste testing. Today we’re looking at two ice cream makers with very different approaches. First, we’ve got Häagen-Dazs, a premium brand that’s very comfortable with addin

Lawson’s crazy corn bento arrives as part of new series of “sugi” foods. In Japanese, the suffix -sugi translates literally as “too” or “too much,” but it can also be used in the sense of “very.” This can sometimes make the intended meaning hard to understand. For example, if someone says their coworker isn’t just yasahii (“kind”), but yasashisugi, that could either mean that they’re incredibly considerate, or it could mean that they’re overly, even problematically accommodating. So generally y

Cosy up in colder weather with cute characters cuddling your toes. With the days now getting colder in Japan, it’s time to start looking for cosy socks, and for Ghibli fans there’s no better way to stay warm than with some of the studio’s characters adorning your toes. This year, Ghibli specialty shop chain Donguri Kyowakoku is giving fans a giant hug in the form of two new sock ranges, with the first being a collection of embroidered socks, honouring four of the studio’

Morning walk interrupted by notorious Troop T1. The town of Yugawara, in Kanagawa Prefecture, seems like it should be a very tranquil place. A seaside hot spring town, with baths and inns dotting the cityscape as it stretches up into the mountains as you head inland, it’s the sort of setting that entices you to get up early and go for a nice stroll, and that’s how last Thursday started off for one local resident in his 40s. Unfortunately, at about 6:50 in the morning, as he was walking past the

Foxes rarely venture this close to the Tokyo city center…unless kitsune spirits are here all the time. You can spot lots of representations of foxes in Tokyo. Fox spirit sculptures often guard the entrance to shrines, and with the Japanese word for fox, “kitsune,” also being a way to describe soba or udon noodles served with fried tofu as a topping, it’s not unusual to come across illustrated foxes on restaurant signs, menus, or instant noodle packaging. ▼ You might even spot a fox tail a

In Japan, a cake that’s “imperfect” can sometimes be perfect. Whenever we’re not eating sweets, you can find us on the Internet, searching for sweets, and the rarer they are, the better. So when our reporter Natsuki Gojo discovered an odd-looking pack of cakes online, she immediately stopped browsing, and when she leaned in and discovered that it was a kilo (2.2 pounds) of cake ends from the cakes served to Japan Airlines’ first-class passengers, she wasted no time in clicking the purchase butt

Featuring night-lit gardens, imperial poetry, and custom digital garments. Kyoto is home to an abundance of heritage fused with modernity: a place where you could espy a traditional building from afar only to discover a familiar mermaid emblazoned on the sign when you draw closer. Tokyo-based creative collective Naked, Inc., known for combining cinematic storytelling with cutting-edge technology, embraces this dichotomy wholeheartedly, having run several digital art exhibitions over the years

Bandai Namco’s store that’s all about anime Mobile Suits is moving into new territories. There’s a Gundam-shaped, and also Gundam-sized, hole in the hearts of anime enthusiasts in Tokyo these days, as August 31 was the last day for the city’s life-size Gundam statue before the start of its dismantling process. But as Gundam fans in Tokyo dry their tears, it’s time for their counterparts in America to start smiling, because the U.S. is getting two new Gundam Base superstores this summer, and the

Burger stand near Tokyo’s most famous temple has local partners with more than 100 years of history helping the Square Burger stick out from the crowd. They say nobody’s perfect, but with an average out to 4.9 out of 5 stars as of this month for Kadomasu-The Square Burger, the Tokyo restaurant’s Google user reviews say the place is about as close to perfection as you can get. This isn’t a case of the restaurant lucking out with a string of its earliest customers all coincidentally happening to

Printing Museum hosts mini exhibition for crossover of virtual idol and ukiyo-e art. As Japan’s first virtual idol, Hatsune Miku was a major milestone in the digital art field. She wasn’t the countries first example of making art by non-traditional methods, though, as centuries before painter Katsushika Hokusai’s ukiyo-e creations were produced using woodblock printing, helping to greatly expand the scope of art appreciation among the common people. Back in the summer, we even looked at a colla