Author: Jean Snow

  • Twinsters

    Watched this yesterday, a touching documentary that follows two girls born in South Korea who discover they are twins (they were each adopted, with no knowledge that they had siblings) after one spots the other in a YouTube video, and then they connect via social media. A story of our times – the power of…

  • Blogging Again?

    What’s this, a bunch of new posts that relate to Tokyo/Japan on the site? Are you blogging regularly about that stuff again? Consider this a result of me spending the weekend digging into the archives, going through hundreds (thousands, really) of posts, and just kinda wanting to do a bit of it again. Let’s call it…

  • Masashi Wakui

    The beautiful Tokyo street photography of Masashi Wakui is simply mesmerizing.

  • Tokyo’s Cignale Enoteca Tops Monocle’s Restaurant Awards

    Monocle’s latest “Restaurant Awards” are included in issue 4 of The Escapist (currently in shops), and it’s again topped by a Tokyo restaurant, this time the beautifully cozy Cignale Enoteca. Watch this video to have a better look at the place, as well as an interview with the chef/owner (it’s the 3rd restaurant featured in…

  • Tokyo Taxi Prices Going Down

    From the Monocle Minute newsletter: Car-hailing services such as Uber are posing a threat to established taxi companies the world over. That’s why Nihon Kotsu – Tokyo’s largest taxi operator – had the idea of lowering the city’s standard starting fare from ¥730 (€6.25) for the first 1km to ¥410 (€3.50) for 2km. But in this…

  • A Day’s Work

    I just spent the entire day — over 12 hours — working on my site/blog. That may sound crazy, but it’s been a rather enjoyable experience. The first half of the day was spent recreating posts that were missing from my archives (as I described in this post). Since then, I’ve been making my way…

  • Special Edition

    As I work at reconstructing my blog — I’m currently in the process of manually re-posting the 3 years of lost posts (2011-2014) thanks to the Wayback Machine — it has me thinking on what I want to do when I go back to older posts and start cleaning them up. I’m referring here to…

  • Digging Through the Archives

    At long last, my archives are back. Most of them at least. Some of you may recall that back in early 2014, I had the great misfortune of the web host I was using pulling the rug from under me, which meant that my entire website — which dated back to 2002 — suddenly disappeared.…