Amusingly, the obligatory maiko reference was illustrated with an image of regular women who happen to be wearing kimono. It’s a lesson to the real maiko that they needn’t bother with all that make up and hair hoo-ha.

“Patron is a phenomenal drink. It sells phenomenally well, grew phenomenally fast, is phenomenally well marketed and tastes like licking a plumber’s fingers.

The next time someone tells you it’s the world’s best tequila, poke them in the eye and tell them it’s not.”

Read more: Tequila: More than the drink of mere champs | CNNGo.com

“New rule: If you’re going to talk or write about the Park Hyatt Tokyo’s New York Bar, you have to do so without mentioning the movie. You know the one. Enough is enough. It’s been eight years.
Here’s a new, non-celluloid, and much better reason to like the place — next week the hotel is flying in four top mixologists from the United States to turn the New York Bar into a real New York bar for six nights.”

etc etc. Click the link to read it.

“Tokyo ought to rank somewhere between Lagos and Tehran for quality of life. It’s the focal point of the most populous conurbation on the planet, and is one of the most crowded cities. It’s often expensive, always cacophonous and, at first glance, ugly as sin. The tourist bureau likes to show pictures of cherry blossom and Shinto shrines, but the real icons of this city are grey boxy offices and salarymen being stuffed into rush-hour trains.
Yet Tokyo is consistently rated one of the world’s most livable cities, and rightly so. It may not be as pretty as Paris, Athens or Rome, but it works like nowhere else on Earth. Those commuters that ride nose-to-stranger’s armpit arrive at their destination unruffled and on time, then set about making this extraordinary city tick.
I’m writing this in a coffee shop whose owner says, in seriousness, that his skills are comparable to the lightsaber technique of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He says it takes five years to learn how to make a
cappuccino, and he refuses to serve espresso after 2pm because he says he has to share the power grid with too many other people so the extraction will be too weak. He’s perfect fodder for a quirky Japan story. But you have to take him seriously because his coffee is sensational.

etc etc blah blah blah.”

Grab the pdf here

“How do you excite consumers when a key part of your retail proposition is a line-up of laminates, adhesives, filters and films? Multinational manufacturing conglomerate 3M’s response is its first-ever store – a dazzling design fest on Tokyo’s high-fashion Omotesando Boulevard.

As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, 3M Japan is trying to boost brand awareness and is introducing new ways of using its products with its first global outlet.

On a Tokyo street synonymous with megabrand boutiques – in a space most recently occupied by cosmetics brand Shu Uemura – 3M has opened a pop-up store for the final months of 2010.”

And that’s all you get unless you cough up for a subscription.

“… yet to find their first locations, Russian design firm Arch and Barcelona-based Dream & Fly have both developed all-in-one, standalone micro rooms designed for airports.

Arch’s Sleepbox will appeal to the Mac crowd with its all-white interior and curved edges, and comes equipped with wifi and fold-down laptop trays with power sockets. The boxes are designed to be self-sufficient, with payment made at a terminal. Sheets are wound around rollers, enabling them to be changed automatically.

Dream & Fly’s Bubbles are remarkably similar in design, and vary in size from 5m sq for single users to “family-sized” 10m sq. Each includes an LCD screen giving the latest flight info.”

Then Stylus hired me to write about the 75 most interesting or inspirational places in Tokyo, with a brief that gave me almost completely free reign. Here’s the result. Actually, here’s a tiny screen grab of part of the result, because it’s a subscription-only site and I’m guessing it costs a great deal of money to get in.