Including one very famous monster.
Category: cultureissue2025
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Why Japan Is So Difficult to Write About
The country’s aesthetics and inventions have spread far. It still remains a singular place.
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Why Japan Counts 72 Microseasons
Periods including “fish emerge from the ice” in mid-February and “rainbows hide” in late November offer a framework for eating, gathering and celebrating.
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How Japanese Engineering Transformed Pop Music
How Japanese ingenuity transformed Western music from within.
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How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language
The greatest filmmaker of postwar Japan found a new way to show life onscreen.
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Monsters Plague Japan. But What Do They Mean?
How ancient history and modern calamities have cultivated a national obsession with menacing creatures.
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Dairy Changed Japan. Then Japan Changed Dairy.
How the 20th-century arrival of milk products shook up the country’s traditional ideas about creaminess.
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10 Japanese Innovations That Shape Our Daily Lives
The country’s objects and ideas, including matcha and emojis, that have had an outsize influence on the world.
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Why Some of Japan’s Most Exciting Cultural Figures Are of Korean Descent
The artists, musicians and writers pushing past decades of historical erasure.
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Many Cultures Borrow. Japan Transforms.
Throughout its history, the country has taken imports and changed them into something else entirely.
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How Impermanence Became Central to Japanese Thought
Transience has come to inform so much of Japan’s culture — even its sense of self.
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What Will Be the Next Big Thing From Japan?
We asked some of our favorite chefs, designers and artists to predict what will become our new obsession.