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Hub 2015

 Pull up your scarf and walk hunched into the bitter wind that slices through Asakusa this New Year’s eve. On your way home. You’re feeling less than celebratory. Perhaps it was the mindless crush of Shibuya. Knocks it out of you. Things are better on this side, out east. And maybe they’ll be good this…

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Tramline to Gyoza

 It happens that at the end of the year, you happen to be near the streetcar terminus at Minowabashi. And since it happens to have been a while since you rode Tokyo’s last remaining tramline…you happen to get on. The tram hiccups along, pauses for a traffic light. You realise you are starving. The sun…

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Roughly Ideal

 Ramen chefs Kosuke Nagasawa and his partner Ka had plenty of time to work on their soup before striking out on their own. They were five- and seven-year veterans of another store up the street. The location they chose for their own restaurant is on the corner of a lane off Kokusai Dori, near Hayashi…

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Wrapped House

 Maybe you clock it subconsciously or perhaps it’s coincidence, how the jacket of this gentleman in Kuramae blends so nicely with the oxidised bronze house with the sign, “Aoki Printing”, and how he turns out to be…Mr Aoki himself! Heading home this Saturday afternoon with a little shopping. Hello he says. You tell him you…

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In Camera

 So there’s one carrot cupcake left, on the counter at Camera. Go on, rescue it. The cream-cheese icing has just the right tang, and the main bit is moist and fibrous. It’s made by Miwako Yamada, who opened this cafe-bakery-leather bag store on Kokusai Dori, Kuramae, in October, with her husband Kosuke Tamura. He is…

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Gifu People – Event

 Special event this First Saturday (and beyond) featuring short documentary video Gifu People by Sumida riverside local Shoji Onuma. The perennially curious photographer has published an exhaustive book on Japanese sento public baths and another on the “ganguro” deep-tanned  “panda” girls of Shibuya, among much else. How do you describe this latest project? Ask Shoji: Haha, it’s simple!, she…

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Five-Seats Szechuan

 Language is not such a barrier when you know what you’re doing and can say the basics, such as: OK. Tsai doesn’t speak much Japanese or English and you don’t speak Chinese. OK he says, to your gesture, leave the bicycle in front of my counter. OK, come in. OK, hot leek miso noodles. Kara…

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Field Work

 There’s a performance element to this First Saturday. You duck under the electrical workers along the river and to Chie Nakagawa’s store in-kyo. Amid her earthy-and-elegant selection of ceramics, husband and wife team the Yamazakis dish up samples of their new season’s rice, grown without chemicals in their paddies in Ibaragi. Try some, says Mrs…

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On the Corner

 In midsummer the fruit and vegetable shop Ichikawa Seika seems to grow into the abundant vine as much as the vine seems to support the shop. Now the greenery has thinned, the seasons are changing. Mrs Ichikawa says, We’re getting persimmons and grapes. Soon lots of apples. She tapes together bundles of negi leeks in…

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