Yesterday's Weather for May 2025

Here’s the second “Yesterday’s Weather”: a short round-up of things worth eating, reading, watching, or buying, borrowing the spirit of Swissmiss’s Friday Link Pack. Some are too short to make it into a full Tokyo Culture post, or the timing’s off (like an exhibition ending too soon), but they’re all worth sharing. Enjoy!

Read

„Als Japanerin hab' ich eine Lebenserwartung von 86, da will ich mich nicht schon mit 60 begraben! Wir gehen treten in eine Bürgerwehr ein!"

Back in April, I recommended a French book - this time it’s one in German. Over on Patreon, there’s a quiet, darkly funny crime novel set in southern Japan, where the author used to live. It’s called Schöne Männer sterben leise ("Handsome Men Die Unannounced"), and chapters 1 to 19 are already up. Don’t worry - it's fully written (I’ve read it in its entirety) and scheduled to drop regularly. The author even landed a prize and an agent, but then the agent kind of… vanished? So now she’s publishing it herself. An English version is apparently in the works too!

Shimokita’ing

If you have time today and/or tomorrow, check out the Shimokita Railway Festival 2025, along the 1.7-kilometer Shimokita Senrogai promenade, between stations Higashi-Kitazawa and Setagaya-Daita stations. There’s live music, vintage shops, craft beer and coffee festivals, food stalls, workshops, family-friendly activities, and English-guided tours. The festival celebrates Shimokitazawa’s creative, community-driven spirit with something for all ages.

Text

If you’re on LINE, these stickers are absurdly cute - and unmistakably Japanese. (Depending on your OS/ location, they may or may not show up, which somehow makes them feel even more exclusive. Like a secret sticker society.)

Game

Okay, not Japanese this time - but dangerously fun. My friend C (well, technically their kid) introduced me to Little Alchemy. Consider this your official warning: it’s addictive in that “just one more combo” kind of way that turns five minutes into an afternoon-shaped void. The premise is simple, you start with earth, air, fire, and water, and combine them to discover increasingly weird and wonderful things. It’s part creativity, part chaos, and part psychological experiment in how long humans can avoid doing actual work.

Naturally, I made the mistake of showing it to another friend. Five minutes later, she was better than me. Ten minutes later, she was mad at me for ruining her weekend. Now her entire family is hooked. I even got a very earnest video from her 10-year-old son explaining how to make Darth Vader - except he has no idea what a lightsaber or Jedi is, and confidently described Darth Vader as “that mystery boss guy”. Honestly, not wrong.

After that incident, I stopped introducing friends to the game for everyone’s safety. But now that I’m a seasoned element-mixing semi-deity, I feel confident enough to share it with you. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Eat

Credit: Tokyo Node Cafe

The “Sunny Days Matcha Brunch” at “Tokyo Node Cafe” (inside Toranomon Hills) is a reservation-only dining experience launched in collaboration with Kyoto’s Yamamasa Koyamaen, offering a modern take on traditional Japanese tea culture. It includes a course menu featuring matcha shot tastings, a savoury matcha pho, and a matcha tiramisu, a total of 3,600 yen. You also get to enjoy creative matcha drinks like matcha beer and rice malt lattes.
Reservations needed.
Matcha Brunch until September 30!

Watch

If you speak Japanese (or even if you're just dangerously confident), do yourself a favour and watch the skit "International Student Tom." It stars comedian Jinnai as Tom, an overly earnest exchange student trying - and failing beautifully - to master Japanese. The entire act hinges on his valiant but doomed attempts to navigate homonyms, resulting in a cascade of misunderstandings so absurd they are plausible. Unlike most of Jinnai’s routines, this one is done fully in character, which makes it even funnier for fans. Enjoy the linguistic cleverness and this wonderful secondhand embarrassment that only language learners truly understand.

See, Read and Learn

I highly recommend "Design あ" exhibition for Japanese-language learners and native speakers alike. Super fun. Although you will need reservations. You live through the language with interactive displays built around simple verbs like "たべる" and "あるく" - and no worries if you don’t understand Japanese - there’s always the English below.

The exhibition's brilliant combination of verbs with visuals, displays, and hands-on activities means anybody can understand and engage regardless of their age or vocabulary. As with the fabulous TV program of the same name, you experience Japanese as a living tool for expression rather than just textbook material - exactly what you need to feel connected to the language beyond memorised phrases.

If you can, go on a week-day. Closest station, Toranomon Hills. Also walkable from Toranomon Station. And, again, you will need reservations.

Sing and Dance

Do give Kojima Mayumi a listen on Spotify. Her music? hmmm… I’d say 1950s oldies with jazz, but then again also French pop, Latin, Shōwa kayō, blues, and more. Her songs are sweet, sly, and unmistakably her own. There’s her very charming voice and you can feel her love for music. Each track feels like a wink and a warm hug.
Saying good-bye this month with a song about strawberry cream cake: