Hidden Spots

Japan’s Shotengai: The Covered Shopping Streets That Refuse to Disappear

There’s a particular kind of afternoon light that filters through the translucent roof panels of an old

Most visitors to Yanaka arrive looking for the living. They come for the shotengai — that long, unhurried shop

Most people arrive in Kanazawa with Kenroku-en already circled on their phone. They spend forty minutes in the

There is a specific kind of loneliness that only exists in Japan at three in the morning. Not the heavy, crush

Walk through the streets of Tokyo long enough and you’ll come across roads that curve strangely for no o

Nobody told you about the bit between Nakameguro and Yutenji. It’s not on any list. There’s no Fam

The clock on the wall stopped sometime in the mid-1970s. The jazz — real jazz, on vinyl — plays at a volume ju

You are standing under a neon sign that hasn’t flickered in twenty years. To your left, a fishmonger is carefu