Japan Navigator

Japan Newbie has a nice piece on a kushikatsu restaurant in Juuso, Osaka, run by an elderly couple. The cook wears berets and the wife is extremely forgetful, but the taste is great.

The New York Times features Mori Minoru of Roppongi Hills fame in The Builder Who Pushes Tokyo Into the Clouds. Yes, Mr Mori is planning more huge complexes for Tokyo, aiming ever higher…

Supporters from Japan (including the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo) have helped restore the pottery set up by Bernard Leach in St. Ives, England. Leach was a collaborator of one of the greatest 20th century Japanese ceramic artists and scion of the Folk Crafts (mingei) movement, Hamada Shoji, and he often visited Japan. Report by the Japan Times.

Spice of Life takes some of the best Kyoto pictures I know. Here are the photos for March, including a beautiful sakura tree in Gosho (the ito-zakura of the former Konoe Residence), sakura in Kikokutei Garden (belonging to Higashi Honganji) and Yasaka in the rain.

Janne in Osaka reports on the Cup Noodle Museum in Ikeda, Osaka, a monument to inventor and Nissin Food Products Company founder Ando Momofuku (in 2005 his noodles were even eaten in space by a Japanese astronaut).