On Japan Category (103)
Tokyo Weekend Excursions
Take a weekend excursion outside of Tokyo at the haven for artists Art Biotop in Nasu, or see the beautiful Mt. Fuji near Seikai Yamanaka Lakeside Hotel or the Fuji-Hakone Guest House.
Ginza
Show this image to any Tokyoite and few will be able to tell you where this place is. They’ll guess it is somewhere abroad. But this is Ginza, Tokyo’s celebrated high-class shopping avenue as it looked in the 1880s.
A horse-drawn streetcar casually runs along an almost empty sandy road flanked with magnificent willow trees and Western-style brick buildings. How immensely different from today’s noisy and crowded Ginza.
Pointing his camera toward Kyobashi, photographer Kimbei Kusakabe stood near what we now know as Ginza Wako, a shop famous for its expensive watches, jewelry and other luxuries.
Toyo Ito
Architect Toyo Ito Presented with the 2013 Pritzker
Architecture Prize
ON May 29, 2013, Tom Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, presented Toyo Ito with the Pritzker Architecture Prize medallion for 2013 and a $100,000 grant. In his acceptance speech, Architect Toyo Ito said, “This is the best day of my architectural life so far!” Mr. Ito was the 38th recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which has been sponsored by The Hyatt Foundation since its founding in 1979. A black-tie audience of more than 300 guests, including previous prize laureates, witnessed the ceremony in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. tj
The complete article is available in Issue #272. click here. to order from Amazon
Tokyo Street Fashion
Tokyo Journal Street Editor Kjeld Duits hits the streets with his lens to see what's hot in Harajuku
Garrity's Japan
The Open Road
As I sit at home in Hawaii, enjoying our short winter, or rainy season as many locals call it, I am reminded of a journey I took in the summer of 1994. At the time I was studying haiku poetry and the life of one of its most prominent icons, Matsuo Basho. It is difficult to turn a page of a book on haiku poetry without running into Matsuo Basho. He usually is the first author a foreigner meets when they begin haiku.
I decided to replicate Basho’s trip to Japan’s northern wilderness as detailed in his world-famous “Oku no Hosomichi.” A fifteen hundred mile journey from his home in Fukugawa, Tokyo to the north country of Hiraizumi, then left to Yamagata and south to Lake Bizen and ending his journey shortly after.
