Japan Subculture Research Center

Over the past 10 years YTJ has successfully blended “Education” and “Entertainment” into their company and now has 35 studios and over 8,000 members in the Kanto, Kansai and Chubu…

by Kaori Shoji It’s 35 degrees Celsius in Nagoya City and the mercury is expected to rise even further. Maybe the recent incident at the Aichi Triennale has something to…

Yoshioka completely lives for her job, to the point of excluding everything else from her life. It turns out that her father (also a journalist) had killed himself over an…

By Kaori Shoji  I am at the reception counter of Muji Hotel – the much touted and long awaited hotel produced by Muji, Japan’s popular minimalist clothing and household products…

Yakuza. Samurai. Monsters. NoFace. Lost face. Here's a guide to take you through the most memorable movies (including the bad, the good and the ugly) that adorned the Heisei era…

Bob Sapp, Pro Fighter and Actor will speak at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan this Friday! 18:30-20:00 Friday, June 7, 2019(The speech and Q & A will be in…

In the children’s picture book Teach me Enma-sama, written and illustrated by Hiromi Tanaka, Enma who is the King of Hell in Buddhist mythology teaches children how to behave in…

On April 30th, Emperor Akihito became the first sitting Japanese Emperor to abdicate the throne in over 200 years. Then, the following day on May 1st, his son Naruhito ascended…

Text & video by Phoebe Amoroso, cover image courtesy of Kanamara Shrine Our roving reporter, Pheebz, visited the annual Kanamara Festival on April 7th, which involves a lot of phalluses.…

You can’t make blood from a stone but you can make ink with a stone, and beautiful artistic ink. That is, if you’re using as 硯石(suzuri-ishi), a traditional Japanese ink-stone,…