News You Can Bruise for 2025 January 12

I've hinted at this before in NYCB but now I've got my photos organized and I'm ready to talk about the vacation I took in Japan last November. I was nominally on vacation with my friend James, but he was working most days, so I spent a lot of time walking around exploring before meeting him for dinner, which I found to be a great way to run a vacation.

I've put up a huge photo gallery of pictures full of wacky and interesting stuff, but in case you're planning your own visit, here are some of my recommendations:

• Hibiya Park in Tokyo, where they have a replica of the Liberty Bell.
• The Meguro Parasitalogical Museum
• The playful architecture of Makoto Sei Watanabe: Aoyama Technical College, the Iidabashi subway station, and, uh, the K Museum. I knew the K Museum had been shut down, but after taking a long bus ride to see its corpse, I discovered that it was also covered in tarps and undergoing demolition. Oh well, I got to see a neighborhood of Tokyo I wouldn't have seen otherwise.
• NTT DoCoMo History Square, featuring a timeline of hundreds of old cell phones. The moment in history where the iPhone is introduced looks like the mass extinction that wiped out the Ediacaran fauna. The guy who runs the museum was really excited to have a visitor, so check this one out!
• Huge tonkatsu. It's delicious. I tried the Nagoya style but I prefer the original.
• Between Tokyo and Kyoto we spent two nights at the Kashiawaya Ryokan in Shima Onsen, a place much like the onsen town in the movie River. It was great to have some downtime after a week of running around Tokyo.
• The Kyoto Railway Museum.
• The Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design. Don't be fooled by the size of the building; this a really small museum in the basement a convention center. Great museum, though.
• National Museum of Art in Osaka.
• The Silver Ball Planet arcade, also in Osaka. I'm sure there are bigger pinball arcades in the United States but this was the biggest one I've been in.
• The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima is rightfully famous but I was also struck by the actual hypocenter of the nuclear explosion, which just has a plaque next to a hospital and a parking garage.
• The Toyota Museum in Nagoya, which is divided into two parts: looms and cars. A must for fans of lean manufacturing!
• I don't want to contribute to Kyoto's overtourism problem, but the Fushimi Inari Shrine was amazing. I got there at 8:30 AM and it was pretty crowded already, but the further up the mountain you hike, the less crowded it is (and the more expensive the vending machine water is). I will tell you that I didn't get much out of the hike once I passed the scenic viewpoint about halfway up.
• The other huge overtouristed site in Kyoto, the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, is... not as amazing IMO. But, on the other side of the forest is the Arashiyama Park, which is really nice.
• Why did I call it Beautiful Soup instead of Nuts DOM?
• It took some planning but I got a great view of Mt. Fuji from the shinkansen on the way back to Tokyo. It's so much bigger than anything else in the landscape that it feels like someone landed an asteroid.
• The Tokyo Printing Museum, a museum designed to showcase the wealth of Toppan, a big printing company. But it's some pretty cool wealth. In addition to lots of old-timey prints and oboks there was a really nice temporary exhibit about linotype machines, but I've got nothing but memories from that part since photos weren't allowed in the temporary exhibits.
• There are two Tokyo neighborhoods with little whale statues, and I saw both of them in the same day: 1 2

Finally I want to mention a couple stores that I didn't take pictures of. B-Side Label has cool laptop stickers. There are a few locations; I went to the one in Kyoto.

Second, New Yorkers might remember City Bakery, which sold really great pastries including the legendary pretzel croissant, plus hot chocolate which was way too rich for my taste. In 2019 City Bakery went out of business, leaving Americans croissant-less. But there are twenty City Bakery locations in Japan! We were randomly walking through a mall in Nagoya—bam! City Bakery! Heading to the Kyoto shopping district—City Bakery! They're quite a nostalgia trip, with everything looking and tasting exactly like it did the old City Bakery on 19th street, or maybe 18th, I could never remember. Anyway, that's why I've now got a freezer full of pretzel croissants from halfway across the world.