I’m fairly sure that this microscopic ramen thing is a hoax, but I hope to whatever higher power that Be that it is not.
my favorite part about the CNN story on the microscopic ramen (does it not do your soul good to hear the words “microscopic ramen”?) is that they say this nano-ramen is “believed” [...]

this here photo is of a travel agency – Japan Associates – on U Street and 17th in DC. You probably can’t read the sign, because I took the photo on my iPhone which means I couldn’t zoom in on the relevant part – but if you could read the sign you’d see that it [...]

wee update: Continental Airlines loves Momofuku Ando, too!  Here is a short piece I wrote about the Instant Ramen Museum, published in Continental’s April issue.

Momofuku Ando, father of instant noodles, died a couple of days ago

Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles after World War II
when people in Japan were hungry and
had to wait in long lines [...]

If you find yourself flying All Nippon Airways this month, you can read my story about trying – and failing – to learn how to snowboard in Niseko, a very very snowy area near Sapporo. Yes, indeedy, I tried to snowboard, and tried the patience of my poor snowboard instructors.
this is a snowboarder in [...]

The article I wrote about two fantastic Tokyo dog stores – Water Dog Garden and George, related to San Francisco’s George – is out in this month’s The Bark.
Among these stores’ big sellers are t-shirts and other dog clothes, by which I mean clothes for dogs to wear. I hadn’t seen a lot of [...]

two new stories came out last week, both about the past:
one, in Preservation Online is about a couple of Rhode Island paranormal investigators named Tom D’Agostino and Arlene Nicholson. One day last June, Tom, Arlene, and I went to see the Nine Men’s Misery monument in Cumberland, Rhode Island – the monument marks the [...]

I was in glorious Tokyo last week working on stories for The Bark and Cathay Pacific’s inflight magazine.
Hard to come up with a short list of what I love about that city – is it the cats in denim jumpsuits? the friendly Elvis impersonators? the bonsai-theme bars up on the fifth floor of [...]

here’s a link to an article of mine that came out this month in Pacific Magazine – it’s about these local crafts called Bo Jo Bo dolls, and a big brouhaha that ensued when the Emperor of Japan was photographed holding them.

(This story was first published in the August, 2005 issue of All Nippon’s inflight magazine. It was also published in the travel sections of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Next month, I think, it’s going to be published in GU Magazine.)

Dinner is surreal, as we might have expected – we are, [...]