A couple years ago, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Gundam anime series, Sunrise Studios built a life-sized, 60-foot-tall Mobile Suit Gundam in Tokyo. Now, a small museum/theme park has been announced devoted to the giant robots, slated to open in April of this year. My inner child is peeing himself.

SPONSOR

What do ageing Japanese popstars with penchants for speed do when they’re bored of being busted for possession? They produce oddly catchy nonsensical tracks that set the dance floors of underground clubs in Tokyo on fire and pave the way for yet another shameless comeback.

Traverse the winding roads of Rome with your penne. Jump across the East River with your pie. Take a tour of Tokyo with your rice. No we’re not delusional, we’re just totally hooked on City Plates, which bring urban dining to a whole new level.

From New York to Rome, Shanghai to London, New Orleans, and more, these porcelain plates have each city’s downtown core stylishly splashed across its surface in homage to whatever urban jungle you roam. In case you’re keen to learn a thing or two, City Plates can be quite useful too with rivers and public spaces marked in blue and green and key buildings colored in bright red. After all, nothing says I love my city quite like dotting its iconic buildings with gravy.

My collaborative project with fellow printmaker Damon Kowarsky is going to be at Aesop Aoyama store in Tokyo. Permanent installations and temporal exhibitions on our printmaking dialogues since 2010 will be on display from Friday September 9.

Ok, let it be said: each and everyone of these subways, as compiled by our friends at Web Urbanist, leave any subway on New York’s R line for dead. And we mean that literally. Much respect to the free-thinking architects behind these underground gems. [Hover mouse over each image to discover the city it's in]

SPONSOR

Ever wished you could jump through your TV screen and live in the dreamy land of animated fairy tales? Well if you go to Tokyo, you can come pretty close — at least, for the space of an evening. Just head over to Alice in Magic World, a new café-cum-fantasy space that’s inspired by the Lewis Carroll classic (and subsequent Disney movie).

While you’re there, you can sit inside an enchanted forest, loll against leather-bound books as big as sofas, and even dine on pizza slices made to look like the tail of the Cheshire cat. ‘We wanted to give guests excitement and surprise, like an unreal world with various wonderlands’, says Eiichi Maruyama, who designed the space with business partner Katsunori Suzuki. Sounds good to us – this is one rabbit hole we’ll jump down headfirst.

Japanese math rock rippers Lite is from Tokyo. My friend just saw them open for Mike Watt and said they stole the show.

My girlfriend and I got home last Tuesday from a ten day visit to Tokyo. We experienced the earthquake that hit Japan on that Friday, and we were amazed with how friendly and helpful the Japanese people are, even in a situation like this. Before all this, I put up about twenty paste-ups in the Shibuya area of Tokyo.

Drawing it’s name from the Japanese sound of the term for ‘chit-chat’, PechaKucha is a new format of presentation taking the design world by storm. Or perhaps, not so new. Founded in 2003 at Super Deluxe, a basement bar in Tokyo, it is now celebrated in 382 cities worldwide and growing.

Anyone is welcome to participate — presenting designs, ideas, interests and dreams — and anyone is welcome to watch. It’s a brilliant, fresh, fast-paced and diverse experience to go to, and chances are, it’s already happening in your city.

SPONSOR

Eating out of a vending machine never looked so good. Let’s face it, eating this way will probably never be healthy. But could you be enticed by it’s sleek looks? Tokyo vending goers think so. Though they have had a long standing love affair with automated food dispensers (they have the highest number of vending machines per capita), we all know that Tokyoites do tend to be the harbingers of cool, especially when it comes to electronics.

New large-screen LCD touch panel vending machines have begun popping up all over the city offering a new experience to the old push-the-button dispensers. If the trend catches on, TUG loves that we won’t have to fish around for pocket change anymore since the machines will accept credit cards. Though we’ll lament the (potential) demise of retro machines where the consumer watches as their soda or candy bar is dropped to the little door below. Five hundred of these “smart” vending machines are expected to be installed all over Tokyo within the next two years.

Irish artist Craig Smith has recently released a series of illustrations, which explore his fascination with Harajuku, an area of Tokyo that’s famous for its street fashion and counter-culture.

These are some pretty insane glass ball juggling skills by a Japanese dude in Tokyo, set to a quirky soundtrack and observed by some clearly perplexed tourists (doesn’t the bald guy in the background ‘get it’, or is he recoiling after being royally tangoed?). Bowie would be proud.

Founded in 2000, the Distil Ennui Studio is the brainchild of London-based photographer Alexander James. James has over twenty years experience as an advertising photographer with past clients including the Microsoft Corporation, Peugeot, Hewlett Packard, Samsung, Versace, Shangri-La Hotels, Burj Dubai and Chanel. This work was taken in Tokyo and is part of his Taxi series.

SPONSOR

These ‘manner posters’ appeared in Tokyo subways between 1976 and 1982, informing passengers on subway etiquette and good manners. We’re not sure why it didn’t catch on elsewhere — a colourful and entertaining poster versus a crackly intercom message from a bored driver? Hmm. The posters were published in a book, Manner Poster 100′, printed in 1983 by Teito Rapid Transit Authority.

In a city like Tokyo, where high-density living has reduced green spaces to mere pockets, and Japanese food self-sufficiency has dropped below 40%, it makes sense to look to alternative forms of agriculture to feed the growing population. Enter Pasona 02, a square kilometre of underground farm located in an abandoned bank vault that prepares jobless youth for work in the agricultural industry.

A study conducted by The Tokyo Foundation in 2008 showed that agriculture is on the decline Japan, mainly due to structural reforms and advances in technology. But this decline isn’t helped by the aging of the farming workforce, which primarily consists of the elderly. This means that if Japan is to improve its self-sufficiency, it will be up to young people and places like Pasona 02 to rebuild the industry.

Splitting her time between London and Tokyo, artist Maya Hewitt has a wonderfully crude style, her almost featureless faces distilled down to pure expression and vast swaths of color in her images capturing the materiality of the ink she uses.

Leave it up to the trend hungry folks in Tokyo to create a bra that grows rice. Internationally known lingerie company, Triumph, recently revealed their Grow Your Own Rice Bra. With the intention of developing agricultural awareness, the bra can grow rice anywhere, anytime. Now, if that would only work the same for my boobs.

SPONSOR

The original New York porthole into Japanese Kyju and vinyl toy culture, Toy Tokyo is back with a new East Village storefront showcase for cutting-edge designer sculpture. Along with other luminaries such as Kid Robot, Toy Tokyo has filled the void between the comic book shop and the art gallery with some of the most intriguingly beautiful and affordable art ever created.

Ken’ichi Otani Architects have built a house in the city of Matsubara in Osaka, Japan that seems almost too clean, white, and beautiful for anyone but an OCD heir to inhabit. I wouldn’t mind housesitting there, though.

Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism, a new book by Christopher D Salyers, documents the most outrageous vending machines imaginable, from the depths of cute-kitsch-cool Japan, to the dark alleyways of New York City. With its gritty, fly-on-the-wall photography, Salyers presents a fascinating picture of the journey vending machines have taken, from ‘technologically humble beginnings to the flashy consumer environments of today’.