Tokyo Like a Local


Book Description

Experience authentic Tokyo with this insider's e-guide Home to glimmering skyscrapers, timeless traditions, and one of the world's most exciting art scenes, this trendy city is endlessly enticing. But beyond the monumental Tokyo Tower and lavish Imperial Palace lies the real Tokyo: a whole other realm waiting to be explored. We've spoken to the city's locals to unearth the coolest hangout spots, hidden gems, and personal favorites to ensure you travel like a local. Join the after-work crowd in the ultimate karaoke sing-along, eat and drink into the night at a tiny Japanese tavern, and get your geek on shopping at treasure troves of anime merch. Whether you're a local looking to uncover your city's secrets or seeking an authentic experience beyond the tourist track, this stylish e-guide makes sure you experience Tokyo beneath the surface.




Tokyo Local


Book Description

This gorgeous cookbook captures the vibrant heartbeat of a city obsessed with food. It’s the chicken-skin yakitori you eat at 2 a.m. in a bar the size of a cupboard. It’s the pork curry you devour after having to line up for 45 minutes with a bunch of excited teenagers. It’s the yuzu ramen you slurp after ordering it from a vending machine. It’s the tonkatsu you buy in a vast shopping-center basement. And it’s the oden that’s served to you by a laid-back surfer from Okinawa. Tokyo is an explorer’s dream and a food lover’s paradise. Featuring a gorgeous combination of studio and street photography, Tokyo Local brings you seventy recipes for the dishes that define the city. The book is divided into chapters “Early”, “Mid”, and “Late,” to create a sense of the city and the food that drives it at all times of the day. The focus of the recipes is on delicious but approachable food designed to be enjoyed with friends, so you can capture the magic of Tokyo at home.




Tokyo Vernacular


Book Description

Preserved buildings and historic districts, museums and reconstructions have become an important part of the landscape of cities around the world. Beginning in the 1970s, Tokyo participated in this trend. However, repeated destruction and rapid redevelopment left the city with little building stock of recognized historical value. Late twentieth-century Tokyo thus presents an illuminating case of the emergence of a new sense of history in the city’s physical environment, since it required both a shift in perceptions of value and a search for history in the margins and interstices of a rapidly modernizing cityscape. Scholarship to date has tended to view historicism in the postindustrial context as either a genuine response to loss, or as a cynical commodification of the past. The historical process of Tokyo’s historicization suggests other interpretations. Moving from the politics of the public square to the invention of neighborhood community, to oddities found and appropriated in the streets, to the consecration of everyday scenes and artifacts as heritage in museums, Tokyo Vernacular traces the rediscovery of the past—sometimes in unlikely forms—in a city with few traditional landmarks. Tokyo's rediscovered past was mobilized as part of a new politics of the everyday after the failure of mass politics in the 1960s. Rather than conceiving the city as national center and claiming public space as national citizens, the post-1960s generation came to value the local places and things that embodied the vernacular language of the city, and to seek what could be claimed as common property outside the spaces of corporate capitalism and the state.




Food Sake Tokyo


Book Description

Japanese cuisine.




Tokyo on Foot


Book Description

This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist's warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir. Florent Chavouet, a young graphic artist, spent six months exploring Tokyo while his girlfriend interned at a company there. Each day he would set forth with a pouch full of color pencils and a sketchpad, and visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures. It isn't the Tokyo of packaged tours and glossy guidebooks, but a grittier, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that unfold on the streets of a bustling metropolis. Here you find businessmen and women, hipsters, students, grandmothers, shopkeepers, policemen, and other urban types and tribes in all manner of dress and hairstyles. A temple nestles among skyscrapers; the corner grocery anchors a diverse assortment of dwellings, cafes, and shops--often tangled in electric lines. The artist mixes styles and tags his pictures with wry comments and observations. Realistically rendered advertisements or posters of pop stars contrast with cartoon sketches of iconic objects or droll vignettes, like a housewife walking her pet pig, a Godzilla statue in a local park, and an urban fishing pond that charges 400 yen per half hour. This very personal guide to Tokyo is organized by neighborhood with hand-drawn maps that provide an overview of each neighborhood, but what really defines them is what caught the artist's eye and attracted his formidable drawing talent. Florent Chavouet begins his introduction by observing that, "Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities." With wit, a playful sense of humor, and the multicolor pencils of his kit, he sets aside the question of urban ugliness or beauty and captures the Japanese essence of a great city in this truly vital portrait.




Neighborhood Tokyo


Book Description

In the vastness of Tokyo these are tiny social units, and by the standards that most Americans would apply, they are perhaps far too small, geographically and demographically, to be considered "neighborhoods." Still, to residents of Tokyo and particularly to the residents of any given subsection of the city, they are socially significant and geographically distinguishable divisions of the urban landscape. In neighborhoods such as these, overlapping and intertwining associations and institutions provide an elaborate and enduring framework for local social life, within which residents are linked to one another not only through their participation in local organizations, but also through webs of informal social, economic, and political ties. This book is an ethnographic analysis of the social fabric and internal dynamics of one such neighborhood: Miyamoto-cho, a pseudonym for a residential and commercial district in Tokyo where the author carried out fieldwork from June 1979 to May 1981, and during several summers since. It is a study of the social construction and maintenance of a neighborhood in a society where such communities are said to be outmoded, even antithetical to the major trends of modernization and social change that have transformed Japan in the last hundred years. It is a study not of tradition as an aspect of historical continuity, but of traditionalism: the manipulation, invention, and recombination of cultural patterns, symbols, and motifs so as to legitimate contemporary social realities by imbuing them with a patina of venerable historicity. It is a study of often subtle and muted struggles between insiders and outsiders over those most ephemeral of the community's resources, its identity and sense of autonomy, enacted in the seemingly insubstantial idioms of cultural tradition.




Strong Towns


Book Description

A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.




Hong Kong Local


Book Description

The best recipes from Hong Kong, a city obsessed with food. Hong Kong is an explorer's dream and a food-lover's paradise. It's the bowl of beef sa cha noodles washed down with a hot cup of signature Hong Kong milk tea at one of the city's countless cha chaan teng. It's the bamboo baskets filled with delicate dumplings placed onto pristine white tablecloths at a Michelin-starred dim sum restaurant. It's the cocktail-fused table of friends hungrily dipping crab claws and wagyu beef into aromatic hotpot at midnight. Like the city itself, Hong Kong Local celebrates the traditional and contemporary Cantonese cuisine that is cherished by locals and fervently adored by visitors, while embracing the extraordinary influences that continue to shape Hong Kong's unrivalled food scene. Hong Kong Local is packed with delicious yet approachable recipes, so you can recreate the magic of Hong Kong at home.




DK Eyewitness Tokyo


Book Description

This fascinating city; the world's largest metropolis, is becoming increasingly popular with and accessible to foreign visitors. Few people today are not affected by the creativity, culture and economy of Tokyo, yet this megacity remains an enigma for many. Tokyo is the seat of the Japanese government and an economic powerhouse in the global financial market as well as a city at the cutting edge of fashion trends and modern architecture. This DK Eyewitness Travel Guide provides in-depth coverage of the city, from the looming skyscrapers, neon-bathed streets and flashing video screens of the labyrinthine Shinjuku district to the traditional shrine complex of Meiji Jingu and the arresting mix of contemporary building developments found throughout the city.




Tokyo Stories


Book Description

WINNER OF THE JOHN AVERY AWARD 2019 at the André Simon Awards Tokyo is rightfully known around the world as one of the most exciting places to eat on the planet. From subterranean department store food halls to luxurious top-floor hotel restaurants, and all the noodle shops, sushi bars, and yakitori shacks in between, there may be no other city so thoroughly saturated with delicious food. Tokyo Stories is a journey through the boulevards and backstreets of Tokyo via recipes both iconic and unexpected. Chef Tim Anderson takes inspiration from the chefs, shopkeepers, and home cooks of Tokyo to showcase both traditional and cutting-edge takes on classic dishes like sushi, ramen, yakitori, and tempura. Also included are dishes that Tokyoites love to eat with origins from abroad, like Japanese interpretations of Korean barbecue, Italian pizza and pasta, American burgers and more. Tim tackles his food tour of Tokyo from the ground up, with chapters broken down into: LOWER GROUND FLOOR: Tokyo on the Go (Department Store Basements, Subway Stations, and Convenience Stores); FIRST FLOOR: Tokyo Local (food traditional to Tokyo); SECOND FLOOR: Tokyo National (food traditional to Japan); THIRD FLOOR: Tokyo Global (Japanese food with an international twist) FOURTH FLOOR: Tokyo at Home (Japanese home cooking); and, FIFTH FLOOR: Tokyo Modern (experimental Japanese food found in high-end hotel bars). With Tim’s easy-to-follow recipes, this is make-at-home Japanese food, authentic yet achievable for the home chef – without cutting corners. The real thrill of eating in Tokyo is in the sense of discovery – of adventurous curiosity rewarded. And that may come in the form of an unexpectedly good convenience store sandwich, an ‘oh my god’ sushi moment, or just the best damn bowl of ramen you’ve ever had. With Tokyo Stories you can explore Tokyo and discover its incredible food without leaving your home kitchen. Featuring over 90 recipes, all set to the backdrop of Tokyo location shots, this is essential for the Japanophile in your life.