There are a lot of WEIRD things in Japanese culture…cat cafés being one of them! Technically, the first cat café opened in Taiwan in 1998, and it wasn’t until 2004 before the first Japanese cat café opened up in Osaka. The popularity of cat cafés in Japan is attributed to many apartments forbidding pets, and to cats providing relaxing […]
The Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum is a food amusement park located in Yokohama devoted to the Japanese ramen and features a large underground recreation of Tokyo with actual ramen restaurants. These ramen shops come from all over Japan: Sapporo, Asahikawa, Fukushima, Tokyo, Yokohama, Wakayama, Hakata, and Kumamoto, each with their local tastes and identities.
Lost It’s really hard to navigate around Japan! Most small streets have no name, addresses refer to a series of concentric areas, streets are sometimes numbered according to when they were built rather than their location, and taxi drivers respond to landmarks not street numbers! Even with GPS assistance, I got lost countless times. I […]
Japan’s Tsukiji fish market is the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world, and has rightfully become an extremely popular tourist spot. One of the main attraction is the tuna auction, where businesses compete for the best tuna in the world. Lines to observe the auction is open to the general public, and starts forming […]
DREAM Since childhood, it has always been a dream of mine to visit Japan. My fascination grew from watching Japanese cooking shows (Iron Chef, Jiro Dreams of Sushi…), anime (Laputa, Nausicaa, Rurouni Kenshin…), drama series (Great Teacher Onizuka, Oshin, Yamato Nadeshiko…) and of course the ridiculous game shows! Even though there’s a Japantown in nearby San Francisco, it was never enough […]