Welcome to NOTEBOOK, a cultural guide to art, design and architecture along with a resource of local news and information in English giving a realistic view of Tokyo and further afield.
May marked the beginning of the festival season with the national Golden Week holiday. It also marked the first time in three or four years that many festivals returned to normal with hundreds, if not thousands, hitting the streets in celebration, soaking up the warmer weather. The month also saw another full month of field recordings from different parts of the city, threading local history with more incidental moments that document a city still coming to terms with the pandemic, even when it appears unscathed and weathered the worst of it. The memory of it lingers on.
Revisiting May
05/31
Typhoon Mawar approached the southwest of Okinawa with high tides and violent winds advancing toward the Sakishima Islands. With the onset of an annual hay-fever season, the Japanese government said it would speed up its plan to cut down a number of cedar trees known to exacerbate the allergy. Toyota’s global production in April rose by almost 14 percent. And, the world “yakko-negi” championships took place in Kochi Prefecture, to see just how far the local vegetable could be thrown.
NB also dropped by Hamarikyu Gardens in Chuo ward. Unable to enter the park as it closes daily at 5pm, NOTEBOOK stood outside and listened to the sound of the nearby Tokyo Expressway, deadened by a wall of trees and waterways that surround the gardens.
05/29
Films by Japan’s Studio Ghibli were set to be removed from the Russian streaming service Kinopoisk as Russia's war in Ukraine dragged on, that’s according to Tass, the Russian state news agency. The Japanese actor Koji Yakusho was named Best Actor at this year's Cannes International Film Festival for his leading role in Wim Wenders’ latest film, “Perfect Days.” And in currency news the yen slumped to 140 yen against the dollar, the lowest it's been in almost six months. Meanwhile, following recent festivals in Kanda and Asakusa, Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku held the annual Grand Festival — or reitaisai.
05/26
During a speech in Tokyo, South Korea’s Ambassador to Japan Yun Duk-min said his country was eager to join the G7 after joining the previous summit as a guest country. Haruki Murakami won this year's Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain, 11 year-old Kunzaburo Yuno from Oita won a special prize at the Children's Nonfiction Literature Awards in Kitakyushu. While a painting which remembers victims from the Minamata poisonings of more than 6 decades ago has now been restored and placed back on display in Kumamoto.
In Tokyo, Shunsuke Imai's painting exhibition titled “Skirt and Scene” took place at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery near Hatsudai, and NOTEBOOK skirts through Shinjuku, catching its local sights and sounds riding the local bus towards Shibuya.
05/24
Japan's Fugaku supercomputer developed by the Riken research group and Fujitsu has been ranked the world's most powerful supercomputer for the seventh time in a row since 2020. A group including several Japanese universities has said that it will use Fugaku to develop tools using generative artificial intelligence. Japan is said to be considering an overhaul of its tax-free shopping system following the growing trend of tax-free items being resold overseas.
The lone yokozuna-level sumo wrestler ‘Terunofuji’ and the former ozeki-level ‘Asanoyama’ both lead the field at the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament which took place at the Ryōgoku Kokugikan arena (May 14th~28th). With the Netflix drama Sanctuary proving a hit, we headed to Ryōgoku. But tickets had completely sold out so all we stood outside waiting as a trickle of sumo wrestlers marched in and then summarily sauntered out.
05/22
The G7 summit in Hiroshima concluded after discussing Ukraine with its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who made a highly-publicized visit. With all eyes on the summit, two Chinese coast guard ships slipped into Japanese waters that very same day entering the East China Sea and waters around the disputed Senkaku Islands. And with current affairs dominating every conversation, Japan’s Environment Ministry quietly revealed the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 had risen for the first time in eight years.
Prosperity and fortune were celebrated as part of Sanja Matsuri in Asakusa, one of the three big Shinto festivals that take place in Tokyo, as well as one of the wildest, passing through the streets surrounding Sensō-ji Temple and Asakusa Shrine for the first time in four years.
Festivities began Friday afternoon (May 19) before the event concluded on Sunday (May 21), each day featuring local mikoshi, a small golden temple carried by teams of local volunteers, moving slowly through the streets while heading towards Sensō-ji and Asakusa Shrine. 44 local neighborhoods took part with mikoshi paraded back through each respective neighbourhood as a sign of good luck and prosperity.
Many mikoshi were also pulled by local children, through shopping streets, past Nakamise-dori and up towards Sensō-ji, with teams of musicians, drummers, and storytellers alike welcoming their collective return.
05/19
Japan's National Tourism Organization JNTO confirmed the number of foreign visitors bounced back April to 67 percent of the same month in 2019, with a little help from this year’s cherry blossom. Former volleyball player Tadayoshi Yokota who won gold at the 1972 Munich Olympics passed away in early May. In Hiroshima, security ramped up in readiness for May’s G7 summit following several high profile attacks on current and former Japanese Prime Ministers.
And from Electric Town in Akihabara NOTEBOOK dropped by the Intermediatheque museum near Tokyo Station to see the exhibition, Tokyo Ephemera, before heading towards Aoyama to catch IMAGESPACE by the American painter Terry Winters at Fergus McCaffrey. We ended our trip across town at the edge of Kabukicho, another Electric Town but one that is a short walk from Shinjuku Station.
05/17
A small distillery in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture, recently claimed its sixth whisky award at an international competition held in London. In Okinawa, a woman was arrested after approaching the U.S. consulate general brandishing what she claimed to be a pipe-bomb. In Hiroshima, the U.S. President Joe Biden was set to hold talks with Prime Minister Kishida, with Biden and other leaders including the Brazilian President Lula da Silva descending on the city for this year's G7 summit.
Amid the heightened tension of these official visits, Notebook headed to the edge of Tokyo bay wandering the outer market of Tsukiji, once the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. We arrived as business was winding down for the day and talked with the owner of Mejicafe, a small coffee roaster found along the market’s Yokocho-dori.
05/15
Chiba was still reeling from the effect of an earthquake measuring 5.2 which hit the previous week. Another measuring 5.1 hit the southwestern prefecture of Kagoshima the previous weekend. As Tokyo reported to have the second highest number of millionaires in the world, villagers in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Shirakawa village in Gifu prefecture assembled to re-thatch one its well-known houses for the first time in five years. Fukuoka’s Daizafu-Tenmangu Shrine, also undergoing renovation, unveiled a temporary hall at the shrine designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Meanwhile, the 1,300 year-ago Kanda Myoujin Shrine in Tokyo which sits just above the Kanda River received hundreds of gold mikoshi carried through the streets of Kanda and Akihabara on the shoulders of local volunteers for the bi-annual Kanda matsuri.
05/12
Four young men were taken into custody following the robbery of a watch shop in Tokyo's Ginza district. The Naoki Prize-winning novelist and pianist Ryo Hara passed away on May 4th, aged 76. And as COVID-19 in Japan was downgraded to the same level as seasonal flu, residents in Hyuga city, on the main island of Kyushu, attended a ceremony praying for an upturn in local business.
A group exhibition of painting and sculpture entitled “Borrowed Landscapes” which featured works by Friedrich Kunath, Masayoshi Nakamura, Kenjiro Okazaki, Akane Saijo, Magdalena Skupinska and Daichi Takagi opened at Blum & Poe gallery, Harajuku. NOTEBOOK wandered through the neighbouring Meiji Jingu, established in 1915 and a park that faces the gallery, catching sight of a wedding procession at the temple in the heart of the forest, moments before the heavens open.
05/10
An 11 year-old mountaineer from Yamanashi prefecture geared up to conquer Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, while closer to home, a small explosive device detonated near Nishi-arai Train Station late Monday in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward injuring one. In Singapore, a Tokyo-based venture capital company, made up of Japanese bank SMBC and the Incubate Fund, established a funding initiative, investing across Asia in promising finance-related technology or fintech. This coincided with NexTech Week Tokyo, a 2-day technology trade fair at Tokyo Big Site, with a second session planned for later this autumn.
And as the spring holiday season ended another began with a holiday invented in 1948 and christened 'Golden Week' by the Japanese film industry in 1951. NOTEBOOK walked past Tokyo Tower one warm afternoon listening as people returned to work.
NOTEBOOK episodes are published 3 times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Things that don’t fit into each episode will appear here for when your visiting or thinking of visiting Japan.
We have recently been adding field recordings from different parts of the city and around the country, while interviews explore things that others might (or might not) recommend.
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