Tag - koenji

 
 

KOENJI

American Gregorio Narvasa has gone from baking cookies in his spare to time to working with major Tokyo companies from his new Koenji shop.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jul 7, 2024
Koenji gets a new cookie shop. Its owner gets a community.
After several years of sharing his creations at pop-up events scattered across Tokyo, Gregorio Narvasa opened a physical bake shop in Koenji on April 20 of this year.
Koenji-based dance troupe Tengu-ren performs at an Awa odori event in Tokyo's Kagurazaka neighborhood a month before the Koenji Awa Odori.
CULTURE / Longform
Aug 26, 2023
The party returns to Koenji
While the COVID-19 pandemic put a temporary pause to one of Tokyo’s biggest festivals, its dancers never stopped practicing their steps.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / DESSERT WATCH
Aug 1, 2020
Sweet dessert discoveries in Koenji
Kichiraku specializes in amazake (sweet, low-alcohol sake) yogurt and smoothies, which you can customize with plenty of toppings.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / 2010s: Decade in Review
Dec 5, 2019
Trendy neighborhoods in Tokyo came and went during the 2010s, but did capitalist conformity move in for good?
The protester, the party animal, the professional millennial — it seems like the Japanese capital had a place for every foreign stereotype imaginable in the past decade. We look back on a few favorites.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Feb 24, 2017
Koenji's alehouses and brewpubs put the craft back in beer
Often touted as Tokyo's apex of cool, Koenji is a maze of narrow mixed-use streets, where the city's trendsetters, en route to hip cafes, cross paths with pensioners browsing cheap vegetables and various knickknacks.
Japan Times
CULTURE
Aug 25, 2016
Koenji's Awa Odori festival celebrates 60 years
For the past few weeks, visitors and residents in Koenji have been haunted by a song — a plaintive, pentatonic melody that seems to circle endlessly, never quite resolving. You can hear it playing over speakers on the station platform just before the train doors close. It's there again as you walk...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Feb 5, 2016
Craft Beer Market Koenji: A refuge for beer lovers with 30 local brews on tap
Sometimes you just want to hunker down somewhere simple. You're not looking for anything cutting-edge or fancy, just a place where the welcome is warm and the food is good, plentiful and satisfying — and ditto the beer. If you're anywhere near the Koenji neighborhood just west of Shinjuku, there is...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 26, 2016
Theater academy pulls no punches
In a rehearsal studio at the Za-Koenji theater in west-central Tokyo's Koenji district, trainee actress Yuuhi Suenobu was striving to act the role of a frightened young woman wandering aimlessly in a chaotic wasteland with her injured mother.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE KIDS' TABLE
Feb 17, 2015
Kiddie comfort food reigns supreme at Baby King Kitchen
Blink and you might miss it, but tucked away on a side street, off the old-school shōtengai (shopping street) in Tokyo's Koenji neighborhood, is Baby King Kitchen, an establishment where even adults eat off the kid's menu.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / KANPAI CULTURE
Apr 8, 2014
Koenji brewpub takes an experimental approach
Growing up, I'd always thought that drinking before dusk was considered something of a no-no. When my friend suggested on a recent Sunday that we stop by Koenji Bakushu Kobo to try some jikasei (homemade) beer at 3 p.m., I pushed it to the more respectable hour of 5. By the time we arrived, though, the...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Mar 8, 2013
Bite into the journals of a Japanese burger critic
Many Japanese foodies are enamored with the hamburger, in much the same way that their American counterparts are often besotted with ramen. The number of hamburger shops in Tokyo has exploded in the last decade, but there are also signs that the fascination runs deeper: There are books, magazines and...

Longform

Sociologist Gracia Liu-Farrer argues that even though immigration doesn't figure into Japan's autobiography, it is more of a self-perception than a reality.
In search of the ‘Japanese dream’