Tokyo, Next Year

Three months in Tokyo and I came back realizing how completely false most Western writing about Japan actually is. Not false as in intentionally dishonest. False as in radically incomplete. Every English-language blog, every magazine that touches Japanese culture goes straight for anime, manga, weird video games, the strangest television shows. If it’s sexual and bizarre and anime-shaped, it gets written about. Everything else just disappears.

What I actually saw there was a whole different country. Really good photographers working on real projects. Young designers thinking carefully about how people move through space, about objects, about materials. Artists whose practice had nothing to do with tentacles or AKB48 or whatever’s trending. There’s a visual culture there—a real scene, real work—that simply doesn’t show up in English because it’s not weird enough. It won’t get clicks.

I’m moving back to Tokyo next year. Partly because I want to live there, but also because I can’t stop thinking about that gap. There’s a whole side of Japanese culture that nobody I know has ever read about, and I’m curious what else I’m missing by only reading the weird shit that travels. So I’m starting Friends in Tokyo with Sari and a couple others. Same idea: document what’s actually happening. Cover shows in Tokyo, music from Osaka, find photographers and designers and artists doing work that doesn’t fit the insane anime country narrative. Interview people who’ve left Japan and landed elsewhere. Just point at what’s there.

We’re already publishing. If you’re tired of the same anime-and-tentacles version of Japan that every blog covers, it exists. If you’re not, that’s fine too. The basic thing is: I went to Tokyo for three months, saw a place that looked nothing like what I’d been reading about, and now I want to document it differently. That’s Friends in Tokyo.