End of the line for the Shinkansen?

Whenever you pass through a JR East train station in Tokyo, sleek images of the latest Shinkansen…

Letter from Itoshima

After four days in Nagasaki, I hop on a 7:14 AM northbound train for my next destination, Itoshima, a rural city of…

Renovation culture in Kokura

The third destination I visited during my December trip to post-growth communities was Kokura, a city located…

Pandemic in a peaceful daze

I mostly passed the month of March at my windowsill in Tokyo, minding my plants and parsing the gap between…

The meaning of Ueno Station’s new phantom platform

Note from Nagasaki

At 9:30 PM on my first night in Nagasaki, Satoru Iwamoto meets me in front of the Oura Church, built in 1864 to honor the…

What I’m talking about when I talk about akiya

Welcome to life in capitalist ruins