A short distance from Shibuya's madding crowds is Craftheads, a veteran bar in Tokyo's craft beer scene. I drift into this basement bar, grab a seat and reach for the menu before the masses arrive. I find a short roster of stalwart Japanese beers ...
Shinjuku is, in many ways, the center of Japan. It's the seat of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, home to the busiest train station in the world and has been immortalized countless times in film and literature. For many first-timers, a night in this frenetic ...
Fukuoka was named the world's seventh most-livable city by Monocle magazine this year for its eco- and business friendly initiatives — but its status as a ramen mecca couldn't have hurt. Within Japan, Fukuoka is known, perhaps more than anything else, for tonkotsu (pork ...
French accordion music is floating out from lamp-post speakers as people crowd into the narrow strips of shade on either side of a street in Tokyo's Kagurazaka neighborhood. Long a cultural center, the gentle slope on which the neighborhood now stands once ended at ...
Craft beer has come a long way in Tokyo. Twenty years ago, the market was mostly made up of generic lagers produced by major brewers such as Kirin and Asahi. Brewing laws prevented small players from entering the fray, and regulators were skeptical there ...
My alarm sounded at 6:45 a.m., but I quickly silenced it and rolled over in my futon. I enjoyed a fleeting moment of quietude before the thrumming of rubber soles on pavement and accompanying excited voices crescendoed, a brief multilingual hubbub that then faded ...
The traditional pilgrimage to Dewa Sanzan, or the Three Mountains of Dewa, begins with the smallest and northernmost Mount Haguro. The plaque at the beginning of the path through Zuishin Gate tells of 33 carvings of "gourds, sake cups and the like" scattered along ...
I emerged from Mitake Station, on the Ome Line, just after 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning amid a throng of day-tripping hikers easily identifiable by their heavy boots, seam-busting backpacks and seemingly standard issue trekking poles. Peppered here and there within this tribe was ...
My overnight bus from Ikebukuro, Tokyo, packed full of bleary-eyed college students on holiday, rolled into Shiga Kogen around dawn and began making stops along the belt of 21 interconnected ski resorts that make up Japan's largest ski area. I disembarked toward the end of ...
The region north of the Chugoku mountains in western Honshu is known as San'in — "the shadow of the mountain." In Tottori Prefecture, these craggy mountains give way to stretches of fertile farmland that butt up against the icy Sea of Japan. The erratic ...
