The June issue of Tokyo Weekender magazine is now on the shelves around Tokyo – we hope you can pick your copy up soon, or at least look forward to reading our features as we post them online over the next week or so. You can also get the full magazine through the Apple Newsstand, which will bring a native reading experience to the iPad, or through Magzster.
June 2013 Editor’s Letter
“There is no such thing as a ninja costume,” said the expert to the writer – before allowing him to try on some suits for style in Shiga. We’d sent our man to find out a bit more about the history of ninja and to try and get beyond the clichés that we usually see in Hollywood movies and the like, and he had some success – have a look on page 19 to see how that turned out.
How our cover looks this month
Another trip out of Tokyo took us to Kanazawa, one of my favourite cities in Japan, and on page 14 you’ll find an introduction to the city and some particularly alluring traditional options for where to stay and get the full experience.
Speaking of travel, how often does your trip not involve leisure? When we found that the man leading one of Japan’s most recognizable brands – a hotel group that is as familiar to those enjoying their trips around Japan as to the many frequent business travellers we know are amongst our readership – was not Japanese but in fact from the Netherlands, we decided to ask him a little about how he came to be in his position. We also spoke to some of you, and got to grips with what it means to travel for work, what you are looking for and how you can occasionally mix business with pleasure.
Fans of rugby will hopefully have skipped this page and dived straight in to our interview with Eddie Jones, the man who is trying to boost the game in Japan through some results on the field, and with some harsh words for players who “aren’t aggressive enough and are perhaps too polite.” With a World Cup in Japan in the not too distant future, we wonder what the next few years will bring and will be watching Ryoto Nakamura – our cover star and the man Jones feels could be the most exciting prospect of his generation – with a keen eye.
Lastly I want to mention some great web-exclusive content we’ve had on tokyoweekender.com this month: an interview with James Blake before his Tokyo gigs was a personal highlight, and we’ve had a great response to our call for more writers to get involved and pitch us some stories. Listing and giving you a flavour of all the festivals that take over Yoyogi Park during the summer seems to have gone down well, and we reviewed a new café with a concept that can’t really go far wrong: coffee and pies. Go take a look.
Top image: Eddie Jones by Kenji Demura (RJP) © JRFU
