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Let’s Get Lost (Event)

 Down by the river and pockets west in Taito-ku this October 5 you will find First Saturday, the monthly event that is less a single happening than a sort of current or tide that connects people who make stuff in the places you see on this map. Fashion your flow, join your own dots. Pick…

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Hidden in View

 Fukuchan was a special find, a sort of jewel. For years you came off the Ginza Line from a different exit, with barely a thought to the station itself, then one day your friend takes you out the gate marked Matsuya-and-Sumida-Park, into the mouth of this brown, short, low-ceilinged corridor, tangled with pipes and electrical…

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The Distant Shore

 You get sidetracked around here. You duck out this morning to buy some lemons — and shazam, it’s afternoon. Must be the timewarp bubble around these religious structures, like the foreboding, gothic-like Higashi Honganji, with its present building dating from 1939 as Japan’s first ferro-concrete temple. And today you’ve detoured into the carpark and o-higan,…

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Untamed Desires!

 Yuko Tamura could be an Asakusa kid, with her innocent looks over a street-sharp twinkle, she fits right in, here by the river at the inaugural exhibition, the Asakusa Collection. She says she is on a business trip, but she hasn’t anything to sell, apart from her swag of fantasies to arouse you, and they’re…

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Trick of the Light

 The keepers of Kaminarimon gate have removed from the fabled structure its massive 670-kilogram paper lantern. This is for 10-yearly renovations that continue until November. In its place they’ve hung a sort of roller blind showing a photograph of the big red light. It’s a bit of a low-budget affair – the somewhat blurry photo…

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Thanks Dad

 When you step into the past at Uogashi Sushi it is also entirely the present, and this is really comforting. The worn wood panelling strikes you as uncannily of the same honey tone as the thickly varnished desks and chairs of your primary school. And here you are in somebody’s workspace and just across the…

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Remnant

 Coffee with Mr K in the crisp air after yesterday’s typhoon, and the light slants into the flat shopfronts over the road. K grew up here in Honjo in the postwar. He used to go behind those buildings to where there is now that modern apartment block, to the Kabaya sweets factory where you could…

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State of Origin

 Why don’t you choose, said Jose to Masako as they were ordering their hulking VR Diedrich, and she liked the pink on the colour chart, and although they had to wait for it to be spray-painted, as no one has ever ordered the 300-kilogram Diedrich industrial coffee roaster in pink, and then shipped, which cost…

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House of the White Snake

 Sometimes you walk with your tongue savouring the place names in translation. It seems to fit with the carnival air, with making things up. Head up Willow St from International Avenue, toward Thunder Gate – that’s Kaminarimon – around the corner from the Tyrolean-style coffee house called, in Roman letters, Angelus. Coming up is a…

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3 encounters

 Today Saturday you’re running an errand at the back of Asakusa 1-chome when coming the other way the older woman gives you a wink, so you say, May I take your photograph, you all three look splendid! Why certainly. Thank you, you are taking a stroll? Yes we are! Where are you off to? We’re…

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