Shouldn’t a three-course meal be 90 minutes? Do you know how hard you have to edit your menu to pull that off? Twenty-seven minutes. That’s the average meal at Jiro’s in Tokyo.
I have specific playlists for arrivals in different cities. Tokyo skews new wave, Paris more jazz, and New York is Top 40.
Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns.
I think it is one of the common themes for many Japanese people to choose where to live: Tokyo or their hometown.
A medal in Tokyo Olympics is my target, it’s the ultimate for an athlete. I am still young and my best is yet to come.
The pressure is high because of course… everyone’s expecting me to win the gold medal in Tokyo.
I think Tokyo is going to sink under water soon. All those stupid high-rise buildings will sink and maybe all the traffic will be gone. And everything will be peaceful and quiet.
I will never forget when we performed at the Tokyo Dome. Growing up, I was told that only A-list famous musicians are invited to perform at that venue.
When my dad toured in ’91, I think my first gig properly was the Tokyo Dome, 50,000 people indoors. That was pretty scary. I was 12, or 13.
The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city – there’s Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there’s African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.
There are so many more people in Tokyo than in New York, but it’s pristine. It’s so organized, and yet the address system is in complete chaos.
It’s marvelous when you visit Tokyo: they have these clubs, and they’ll have ‘Motown Night’ or ‘The Beatles – Totally Authentic and Live!’ You know it’s shrunk, but at least there’s some sort of youthful figure to it. Whereas, the blues scene in Europe is more like, ‘Here we go again.’
My husband and I met on OKCupid. We went out on our little coffee date, and I knew right away he was my husband. He’s a handsome, smarty-pants architect from Tokyo. On our first date, I said, ‘I wake up like this. I’m Pollyanna Sunshine, and I’m not for everyone’.
I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese cinema.
‘Fast and Furious’ continues to be alive, which means ‘Tokyo Drift’ is still alive, which means DK is very much alive.
The first day in Tokyo was disorientating – all neon, gadgets and extreme politeness – but I was surprised to find that I have a lot in common with the Japanese because they’re bonkers about food.
You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas.
I’m 24, which I know doesn’t sound very old. But in the world of gymnastics it is. The Tokyo Games are my last shot to compete as a gymnast for Team USA, and my last shot at winning a gold medal.
Shanghai set out to take over from Hong Kong and I think it’s done that. It’s got the most amazing futuristic skyline which rivals and even betters Tokyo.
Japan was this wonderful unexplainable sensual explosion – everything about it I found fascinating. There’s a real dichotomy between the ‘Blade Runner’-esque Tokyo to visiting a Buddhist monastery in the countryside.
I moved to L.A. and really didn’t dig living there until I found places like Koreatown and Little Tokyo. I really like hanging out in the grocery stores and restaurants.
Tokyo & Kyoto are two of my favorites. I like how Japanese cities live in harmony with their natural surroundings, with gardens and forests mixed into urban areas. The public transit is also fantastic and there are cat cafes everywhere.
In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.
Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley’s recent ‘Pictures from the Water Trade.’
I commuted to the prestigious Hibiya High School from my uncle’s home in Tokyo. During the high school years, I developed an interest in chemistry, so upon graduation, I chose to take an entrance examination for the Department of Chemistry of the University of Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.
I was born and grew up in Tokyo, so I didn’t know about nature.
The fans at our shows in Tokyo love music so much; they’re amazing. They give a kind of energy and adrenaline that builds us up when we play.
After the atomic bombs were dropped, the war ended and we went into Tokyo Bay with the rest of the fleet, the Missouri and the rest of them, while they signed the terms of surrender that ended the war.
Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, ‘I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.’
I knew I would try for the Tokyo Olympics back in 2016. I was sitting in the stands as an alternate at the Rio Olympics, watching my teammates compete and thinking to myself, ‘That could have been me.’
I think when we shot ‘Tokyo Drift’ I was a little too young to really understand what made Han who he is, and then I got older, and you start to make a little bit of money, and you realize that money will never buy you happiness.
My mother used to work in a bank in Tokyo. It was a busy district, and after work, she used to go and watch films.
I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It’s a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing ‘The Lake of Dreams.’
I grew up in Paris and in Japan. My parents didn’t have any kind of glamorous jobs or anything – it just happened. We moved a lot and wanted to go to Tokyo, so we did it. They were never afraid to give up on the present and move on.
Hollywood was a detour, although my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.
We all are limited in that none of us can fly and none of us can run faster than some animals, but we figure out a way to go to Tokyo if we have to, right? Or we run faster than an animal with a race car.
My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That’s the kind of place we lived in.
As soon as we landed in Tokyo, that’s when I was like, OK. I really want to bring home a gold medal.’
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
One of my favorite cities is Tokyo because of sushi, and Asian food in general, but then also the way Tokyo operates, because it’s so clean, and there’s space for a lot of variety of stores.
I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.
Japan, not only a mega-busy city that thrives on electronics and efficiency, actually has an almost sacred appreciation of nature. One must travel outside of Tokyo to truly experience the ‘old Japan’ and more importantly feel these aspects of Japanese culture.
I always wanted to go to Tokyo. Even when I was a kid, it was one destination I always wanted to go to.
Here in Tokyo, this is one of my favorite Paralympics I’ve ever attended.
I love London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris – there are a million places I could imagine I like, but N.Y. is home.
Tokyo – still – offers the most tightly integrated infrastructure, where smooth, technology-driven experiences take place when engaging in everyday actions, such as verifying personal identity, paying for goods, and buying tickets.
What we have seen of recent American action in the Pacific, the bombing of Tokyo and the engagements in the Coral Sea, off Midway Island and at Dutch Harbour, has been sufficient indication that America is beginning to discharge her supremely important duty in the Pacific.
When I did ‘Tokyo Drift,’ a lot of the philosophy that Han lived by I have actually gone through in my own life. As I got older, I realized that I really believe in those philosophies, like the importance of family.
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