The East Village was Manhattan’s working-class Lower East Side spillover before it became the city’s countercultural engine room — punk clubs, poets, and the kind of cheap rent that let a neighbourhood get weird for a few decades. Some of that rent is gone, but the low-key, do-your-own-thing character stuck around, and it shows in…
Shibuya is the loudest neighbourhood on this list by a wide margin — the scramble crossing, the wall of screens above it, department stores stacked ten storeys high. It is also one of Tokyo’s biggest rail hubs, which is precisely why the drinking scene tucked into its backstreets, particularly the slope of Dogenzaka rising away…
Kagurazaka sits on a steep hill in Shinjuku ward, a few minutes’ walk from Iidabashi Station, and it doesn’t feel like the rest of Tokyo. The neighbourhood grew up as a geisha district in the Edo and Meiji periods, and the layout still shows it: a stone-paved main slope lined with old shopfronts, forking off…
What is an izakaya? Japan’s casual pub where you linger over drinks and small plates. Here’s what the word means, how the night flows, and why it’s sake’s natural home.
