One of our stories in this week's issue of Student Weekly is about Bangkok's latest popular dessert destination — a Japanese sweet café called Kyo. Looking at the pictures of these amazingly artistic and intricately presented dessert dishes got me thinking about how much I miss Japan.
I've been lucky enough to visit Japan a few times, and after each trip I can never wait to go back there again. I love the food, the fashions, and most of all the music scene in Japan. There are so many great bands, music venues and record shops there that visiting for a couple of weeks is never enough time to even scratch the surface.
One of the things that struck me when I first went to Tokyo was the fantastic attention to design and detail that seemed to infuse almost every aspect of life, from the architecture to shop displays to the presentation of food (as can be seen with the desserts presented in our Kyo article).
Japan is famous for having a large population crowded into a fairly small country, and in big cities like Tokyo every available space comes at a premium. As a result, the population has mastered the art of making the most of small spaces. Ingenious interior designers have created compact, miniature hotel rooms and apartments that manage to squeeze in most of the mod cons found elsewhere in more spacious living conditions. Tokyo is also full of tiny, hole-in-the-wall shops, restaurants and cafés that have beautifully designed and arranged interiors. They always manage to feel cosy rather than claustrophobic.
Even in less heavily populated parts of Japan with more open space, like the north island of Hokkaido, great attention to detail and design can be found in the packaging and presentation of just about everything. When an artistic aesthetic is applied to even the most mundane things, it tends to make you appreciate everything just that little bit more than you might otherwise.
Japan is a beautiful, exciting and fun country to visit, and I hope I can get back there sometime in the not too distant future. In the meantime, at least there is no shortage of Japanese restaurants here in Bangkok where I can get my fix of the food.
Ben Edwards
Editor
[email protected]
