Buying a Japanese knife in Kappabashi sounds simple until you actually arrive. There are knives everywhere. Whole walls of them. Santoku, gyuto, bunka, petty knives, carbon steel, stainless steel, Damascus finishes, traditional single-bevel blades, handmade handles and prices that can move from perfectly reasonable to mildly alarming within the space of a few metres. The … Read more
Kappabashi doesn’t have a shortage of knife shops. Walk north from Asakusa and you’ll pass windows filled with gyuto, santoku, deba and yanagiba, some from businesses that have been selling kitchen tools for generations. For anyone who has arrived in Tokyo determined to take home a Japanese knife, the choice can become overwhelming surprisingly quickly. … Read more
Getting from Tokyo to Enoshima should be simple. Then you look at the map. One train ends at Katase-Enoshima. Another ends at Enoshima. A monorail ends at Shonan-Enoshima. JR gets you close but not quite there. Google Maps may show three routes with similar journey times and completely different prices. None of them are wrong. … Read more
Getting from Tokyo to Kamakura is much easier than the Tokyo rail map can make it look. You do not need a Shinkansen. You do not need to reserve a seat. And if you already have Suica or PASMO, you usually do not need to buy a ticket before boarding. For most travellers, the only … Read more
There is a moment on the Enoden when Kamakura seems to fall away. The train has already slipped past temples and low houses. The tracks feel impossibly close to garden walls. Stations arrive before you’ve quite finished looking at the last one. Then the buildings open. The sea appears beside the train. For many travellers, … Read more
Combining Kamakura and Enoshima in one day sounds ambitious until you look at a map. Then it looks almost too easy. The two places sit along the same stretch of coast, the Enoden railway links them, and both are close enough to Tokyo that you can be back in the city for dinner. It is … Read more
Enoshima looks almost too small to justify an entire day. From the mainland, it is a compact green island sitting just offshore, joined to the coast by a pedestrian bridge. You can see the lighthouse rising above the trees. Tokyo is only about an hour away. It seems straightforward. Cross the bridge. Walk around. Have … Read more
The Great Buddha gets a lot of people onto the train to Kamakura. It isn’t necessarily the reason they’ll want to come back. Kamakura works because the famous sights aren’t isolated attractions surrounded by car parks and souvenir buildings. They sit inside a real coastal town, connected by narrow streets, wooded hills, small trains and … Read more
Kamakura is often described as an easy escape from Tokyo. That description is accurate, but it undersells the place. Less than an hour after leaving central Tokyo, the dense city gives way to a coastal town built around old temples, wooded hills, narrow streets and one enormous bronze Buddha that has been sitting outdoors for … Read more
The best time to visit Gokayama depends almost entirely on what you want the villages to look like. Come in February and Ainokura and Suganuma can disappear beneath deep snow. Visit in May and you’ll find fresh green mountains, spring flowers and rice paddies beginning to fill with water. September brings some of Gokayama’s most … Read more