recommendations

The best sweet souvenirs at Tokyo Okashi Land inside Tokyo Station

Get a taste for five of Japan’s most popular snacks, all for less than US$17.

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We try five menu recommendations from a clerk at CoCo Ichibanya and almost fall in love

It wasn’t the recommendations that blew us away so much as the clerk himself!

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Five things you should eat at Muji Japan, according to staff who work there

At least one of these is guaranteed to make your mouth water.

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Three things you should eat at Denny’s in Japan, according to staff who work there

Recommendations from a staff member reveal what they really like to eat behind the scenes. 

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An expert in entertainment recommended us an Osaka sightseeing spot little known even to locals

It even gave our reporter a profound experience!

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The 10 best manga to read in 2022, as recommended by Japanese bookstores

How many of the listed titles do you recognize?

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10 amazing manga to read over the winter holidays

Here are our top ten recommendations for comics to read as the year comes to an end.

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The top 10 manga Japanese people want to see turned into anime

Every season there’s a wave of new anime shows, many of them based on some other form of media such as a manga or light novel series. Most reasonably popular manga titles seem to make it onto the screen in animated form at some point or other, so it can be galling when your favorite series is passed over by the animation studios time and again in favour of yet more giant robots and impossibly large and buoyant chests.

Read on to see which manga series Japanese readers most want to see animated, and let us know what your own picks would be.

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A skeptic’s guide to anime – Five series to ease you into Japan’s most popular export

Viewed from afar, Japanese animation may appear to be populated entirely by giant-eyed, squeaky-voice schoolgirls and young men who suffer from frequent nosebleeds. Their plots, too, can seem awfully convoluted at first glance, and so anyone who didn’t grow up with anime or have the chance to catch popular series when they were just getting started may feel completely out of their depth when trying to get into it.

If you’re the kind of person who, like me, despite being into Japan and Asia, never really understood what all the fuss was about anime, or who would like to give this strange medium a chance but doesn’t know where to start, then we have a special treat for you today: no fewer than five anime recommendations from members of our very own writing staff, guaranteed to be easy for even anime-skeptics to get into. Who knows, these might just be the gateway shows you’ve been looking for!

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