You don’t need to travel very far in Tokyo to buy a Japanese kitchen knife. You do need to decide what kind of buying experience you want. That’s the part most guides miss. If you simply search “Japanese knife shop Tokyo,” you’ll find dozens of stores, many selling what appear to be broadly similar santoku … Read more
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
There is a moment when a binturong stops looking like an animal you’ve never heard of and starts looking like something assembled from several animals at once. The body is heavy and shaggy. The face has long whiskers and small rounded ears. The tail is enormous, and strong enough to wrap around branches almost like … Read more
The strange thing about the Shonan Monorail is that nobody needs to ride it. There are perfectly ordinary trains that will take you from Tokyo towards Kamakura and Enoshima. They run on rails. They stay underneath their tracks. Nobody describes them as roller coasters. And yet, if you’re planning a day around Kamakura and Enoshima, … Read more
Tokyo can make buying a watch dangerously easy. Walk through Ginza and you can move from Grand Seiko to Rolex and several of the world’s major Swiss brands without leaving a few city blocks. Take the train west to Nakano and the experience changes completely. Instead of polished single-brand boutiques, you’re standing in front of … Read more
At 1am in Kabukicho, hitting baseballs probably isn’t the first Tokyo experience most people expect to find. Yet behind the bars, neon signs, karaoke rooms and late-night restaurants of Shinjuku sits a batting centre that has been doing exactly that since 1978. Shinjuku Batting Center stays open until 4am. You don’t need to book. You … Read more
If you type Super Potato into a Tokyo itinerary, the next question usually comes quickly: Which one should you actually visit? Akihabara is the famous answer. It’s the branch that appears in travel videos, retro gaming guides and photographs of shelves packed with old Famicom cartridges. It occupies several floors and finishes with a retro … Read more
There are easier places in Tokyo to buy a video game. There are probably cheaper places too. Yet Super Potato remains one of the stores people remember long after leaving Akihabara. Part of that is the stock. Shelves are packed with old Famicom cartridges, Game Boys, Sega hardware, PlayStation games and systems that many visitors … Read more