Roppongi Hills was unlike anything Tokyo had ever seen before. Until it opened 10 years ago, Roppongi was more often seen as a "High Touch Town," where businessmen partied with foreign hostesses and off-duty soldiers packed the nightclubs.

Without “Akira” there would be no “Cool Japan.” There’s no denying that for many non-Japanese back in early 1990s. The anime adaptation of the manga “Akira” was for them the first taste of a drug that ultimately drove the addicted to seek more highs ...

Until the 1950s, the Ochiai and Nakai areas in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward were home to more than 300 small cloth-dyeing factories that would wash their vibrant kimono fabrics in the clear, clean water of the Kanda and Myoshoji rivers — it must have been ...

It’s one of the most enigmatic questions of all time: What is art? Any gallery that holds an exhibition using that as its theme is either taking things very seriously indeed, or it’s having a laugh. “AIDA Makoto: Be it Art or not Art,” ...

On entering the minimalist five-story cube opposite the Yokohama Cosmoworld ferris wheel in Minato Mirai, it’s hard to believe that the huge white-walled atrium, with its monumental wooden staircase and beech floors, is not the entrance to a modern-art museum. The blurb in the ...

In 1971, when artist Kenji Yanobe was a child, he often played in the abandoned site of Expo ’70, not far from his family home in Osaka. A year before, under the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” Japan’s World Exposition had showcased ...

When the magnitude 9 megaquake hit northeastern Japan in the early afternoon of Friday, March 11, I was at work in The Japan Times office some 250 km to the south in Tokyo. As the building here shook, I ran down the emergency stairs ...

Years ago, Daikanyama was one of those places you could visit for a bit of peace and quiet in Tokyo. It had beautiful tree-lined streets and lovely old traditional Japanese houses. There was also a slightly bohemian edge to it, with small independent shops ...