Kurt Andersen

You’d think that a New Yorker wouldn’t succumb easily to urban claustrophobia. But when I finally got to the fields and mountains of rural southern Japan — three trains and four hours later — the sense of relief and calm I felt were palpable. I was making a pilgrimage to Naoshima (pronounced NOW-she-muh), an island […]

Yesterday the whole team was in Nara (30 minutes by train from Kyoto) to meet with the writer Pico Iyer — we’ve turned to him several times on the show for his keen, beautifully expressed observations of life in various corners of the world. Pico first came to Japan 20 years ago — and although […]

I will probably never be an expatriate. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize in every foreign city I visit about which neighborhood I’d live in. In Tokyo, I think it’d probably be on the Naka-meguro canal, a quiet, Amsterdamish stretch of just-hip-enough gentility only two subway stops from the high-rise neon clangor of Shibuya. […]

Last night I visited the new highrise called Tokyo Midtown, which is the tallest building in the city and on its lower floors contains — thanks to vast swaths of wood, elaborate lighting, and other beyond-the-call-of-duty architectural and furnishing details — the most convincingly, tastefully luxurious shopping mall I’ve ever experienced. And the luxury extended […]