Last week, Japanese-American historian Bill Tsutsui found himself in Tokyo in the middle of the earthquake: “We were outside this hotel and the earth started moving.  And all of a sudden people started running out.  First just a few, but then wave after wave.  And after it was ...

Fans of the Fox series "Glee" are known for their passion and enthusiasm.  Some "gleeks" are so dedicated to the show and its elaborately staged musical numbers that they perform their own versions of songs from the show and post them on YouTube.  Now perhaps the ...

A couple weeks ago, Kurt spoke with director James Cameron about his spectacular new movie Avatar.  He told Kurt that while the technology he used to craft the movie is important, at heart it's a love story: it's just that instead of boy meets girl, it's boy meets twelve-foot blue humanoid-cat... by posing as a virtual twelve-foot blue humanoid cat, himself.

Instead of drinking my daily 8 cups of water, I've kept myself hydrated (and warm) this winter with tea. I once thought making tea was as simple as boiling water. Oh, how wrong was I. Everything I now know about tea I learned on Malian Dao, a mile-long street in Beijing exclusively devoted to the wholesale of tea. When my legs were tired, I picked a random store and asked the sales clerk to pin cha or tea taste. What I thought would be a 20-minute errand turned into a three-hour lesson in how to enjoy a cup of tea.

In this month’s Vanity Fair, contributing editor Jim Windolf tries to analyze the wave of cute overtaking our culture.  From Hello Kitty to the laughing baby (you know which baby) (yes you do) (you don’t?  Really?), Windolf leaves no fuzzy, big-eyed stone unturned.  And he thinks it’s getting worse.  Why now?

Blogger Lisa Katayama took Kurt to Tokyo's girl haven: the sticker picture booth.

We proudly present the complete Studio 360 in Japan episode!

Check out our website for more Japan stories, video and photos.

Greetings from Studio 360's home base in New York City!

After weeks of listening to tape and mixing (and remixing) our stories, we're proud to post the first sounds of our trip to Japan. On this past week's show, we broadcast an interview with the writer Pico Iyer in ...

10 years is how long Hachiko waited for his master at Shibuya station. Every day from 1925 to 1935, the dog would go to the station and wait for the afternoon train, the train that his master used to take home from work. Only he wasn't coming because he was ...

Last night Roland brought me along to his friend's kimono Party. Yes, you guessed it, a kimono party is a party with people dressed in kimonos. Of course it was somewhat tongue in cheek, but as most Japanese these people were dead serious about their hobby. There was ...

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 ...

More great design solutions that I wish we could bring back with us to the US:

ITEM 1:

Say you're shopping in a department store with your toddler and you need to go to the bathroom... where do you stick the kid? TOTO, maker of the world's most amazing (and ...

This afternoon, Leital and I were hitting up some souvenir shops when we spotted this building across the river.  We were just as surprised when we found out what company it represents.

Any guesses?

===============

THE ANSWER:

Indeed, it is ...

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 ...

While the Japanese are known to be secular or atheist, at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples you'll often see people dropping coins in an offering box and praying (albeit briefly). Another ritual at these sites is to get a fortune, or omikuji. At the Akasuka Temple in Tokyo, you ...

I was alone in Kyoto part of last week getting tape for a story.  One night after doing an interview, I was looking for something to do... and I stumbled into one of the city's gigantic pachinko parlors.  The sliding doors opened to a wall of sound -- a cacophony ...

Buddhist word of the day: On the overview map of Kyoto train station I noticed this funny thing, instead of saying 'You are here' it simply said 'Now'. I guess it comes to the same, except 'Now' would be true not just for the Kyoto train station map, but for ...

Kurt Andersen and most of the staff are in Japan. Who's minding the shop?

So get this: the world's first novel came from Japan -- and it was written by a woman -- and it's all about sex.

Japanese literary buffs and commoners alike are celebrating the 1000th anniversary of The Tale of Genji. The author Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973 - c. 1014 ...