Joining the recent silliness of Condom Day in the (ever-increasing) list of odd anniversaries in Japan, "Kiss Day" is celebrated on May 23rd because it is the day that the film Hatachi no seishun (20-Year-Old Youth) was released in 1946. In case you're not a film buff, that's the movie that featured the first ever kiss scene, though the stars may have had gauze between them. To celebrate, Edition Aoyama, a club in Akasaka, Tokyo, is holding an event on Saturday where couples (not necessarily male-female, it seems) are invited to kiss each other through an acrylic plastic ...

Megumi, Kazuki, Tadashi and I like to scour the streets looking for new adventures in Tokyo. But we also make time to read. Obviously, with the amount of crime and dirty antics we report on in this blog, we need to keep a close eye on the weekly tabloids. But we also like to read serious books. One I've been perusing recently is The Inland Sea (1971) by the late, great Donald Richie. Richie was a famous Japan observer, a writer based her from just after the war and who did a lot to promote Japanese cinema in particular. In the early 1960's he took a long trip around the Seto Inland ...