The origin of Japanese sweets has a deep connection with the history of the culture of tea ceremony in Japan. Where tea culture is rooted, there are a variety of traditional sweets. Kyoto is famous for the culture of tea ceremony as well as sweets. Another famous town is Kanazawa. ...
I found Japanese shopping bags are beautiful. Some of them are elegant and some are cute. So I cannot resist from collecting them. But I don’t want to use them because they look nice and I end up finding my closet full of them. This is a bad habit maybe ...
Sometimes, Japanese shops have unique facade. I would like to show them to you whenever I found one. Today, let me present you the examples I saw recently. Facade 1: A Carpenter on the Roof The first one is the roof of the office of a construction company Takachiho Construction ...
When I went to Kuramae last time, I saw a stationery shop called Kakimori. This is a very unique shop where you can make your own one-and-only notebook. There are two sizes you can choose from; B5 (182x257mm) and B6 (128x182mm). ...
Kuramae has quite a few artisans’ workshops. Sometimes the town is called as Brooklyn in Tokyo. If you visit those workshops, you may find something special is waiting for you. Those crafts are what you cannot find in the ordinary chain stores or branches of large-scale retail shops. ...
Kuramae is a town of wholesalers. As I wrote in the previous posting, there are shops old and new. Kuramae in Japanese means “in front of the rice warehouses”. It was called so because there used to be rice warehouses where Edo Government during 17th – 19th Century kept rice ...
Kuramae is not far from Asakusa and a kind of “emerging artisanal area” as lots of craft shops lined up along the street. Some of them are century-old shops and some are new comers including trendy cafes. There is a good mixture of old and new. ...