Japan Navigator

On Gourmet.com, chef Wylie Dufresne discusses a recipe using sake kasu or sake lees in a brief video.
What are sake lees? At the end of the fermentation process of sake, the moromi is squeezed through a fine mesh. The clear sake will flow out and leave a solid rice substance behind. These “dregs” can be [...]

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For many Americans, Godzilla seems to be the most famous “Japanese”… and that is not far off the mark as the evolution of the roaring city-destructing monster is a good reflection of the social and political changes in postwar Japan itself. In his turn, Godzilla has exerted a large cultural influence.

To get the ins and [...]

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It must have been the photographer of death, Joel-Peter Witkin, who inspired Oxide Pang Chung to this 2005 film Ab-normal Beauty (there is a shot in which we see Witkin’s photo books). As Wikipedia relates, Witkin witnessed a car accident as a child in which a young girl was decapitated:
At the place where I stood [...]

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As the Yomiuri reports, aging is a good thing, at least when you are made of pumpkin liqueur. Small shochu distillery Miyako no Izumi in Miyazaki Prefecture was preparing to close down for business, when its president Mr Tsuzuki discovered that some storage tanks still contained a 25-year old pumpkin shochu.
Shochu, Japanese distilled as opposed [...]

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PingMag, a great site about Japanese art and design with a steady stream of fascinating articles, unfortunately has thrown the gauntlet into the ring. Apparently because of financial difficulties – it was a site with paid writers. It is unbelievable that even a popular and excellent site like PingMag can’t keep its head above the [...]

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Hatsumode, the New Year’s visit to a Shinto shrine, this year took us to the Himukai Daijingu shrine in Kyoto. It was my first visit to this shrine. I had seen pointers to it during visits to the nearby Incline near Nanzenji, but actually never followed the path into the hills above Keage.

Visiting on the [...]

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Fear and Trembling is the imposing, almost Biblical title of a small novel (originally published in 1999) in which Amélie Nothomb describes the experiences of a young Belgian woman who works for a year in a large Japanese office in Tokyo. The protagonist, who is also called Amélie, is a well-intentioned and eager person, who [...]

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Crossfire is a supernatural mystery novel by prolific author Miyabe Miyuki (1960). The complex story is seen through the eyes of two women. One is Aoki Junko, a “human flame thrower” – she can start fires through willpower, and she uses her “pyrokinetic powers” to avenge unsolved rape cases – a comic book premise if [...]

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I was pleasantly surprised to find this article, “Japan auto sales plunge as young lose interest,” on Japan Today. It is about the phenomenon of “kuruma banare,” or “demotorization“ among young people, who regard owning a car as more trouble than it’s worth.

I could not agree more, as Japan certainly is the country least suited [...]

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Dana Goodyear, poet and staff writer of The New Yorker, has an excellent piece on the phenomenon of the keitai novel – cell phone or mobile phone novels (I found the article thanks to Metanotame, which also has an interesting and lively discussion section on this subject).
Keitai novels are meant to be read in [...]

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