There aren’t many water cruises that make us fantasize, but we’ll make an exception for the futuristic Jicoo Floating Bar in Tokyo Bay that leaves Hinode pier to Odaiba Seaside Park and back every hour. It is designed by famed manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, which explains why it looks like it came straight out of an anime.

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We thought super-cramped capsule hotels were pretty much the epitome of squeezy sleeps in Tokyo. But no, we were wrong, of course. If you stay in one of these geki-sema share houses, it’s probably not much different from bunking in a locker. Of course, toilets and shower facilities are shared and not part of the locker-like apartment — it’s not Narnia. At under US$600 a month, this is a pretty pricey locker.

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At French restaurant Ne Quittez Pas in Tokyo, which serves up southern French cuisine with fresh seafood from Misaki, Kanagawa as well as green produce, you can also find soil in your food. It’s not of the accidental variety either. Owner-chef Toshio Tanabe, who has previously worked at Michelin-starred restaurants, recently started offering customers a six-course soiled meal for 10,000 yen or nearly US$110.

Tanabe sources his chemical-free soil from a supplier in Tokyo, preparing the ingredient with some light cooking to release the flavour before running it through a sieve to remove sand grains. Dinner starts with an amuse bouche of soil soup and ends with a soil sorbet and sweet dirt gratin. The highlight is dubbed the ‘soil surprise’ or a soil-dusted potato ball with a truffle center. As one guy comments: ‘Apparently there’s about $11,000 worth of fine cuisine behind my refrigrator (sic) right now.’ He’s right. Yum.

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100,000 solar-powered LED lights were released into Tokyo’s Sumida River to celebrate the beginning of the Tokyo Hotaru festival. The thousands of glowing lights were a nod to the past and the literal meaning of Hotaru, which is “firefly”. Before pollution took over the river, millions of fireflies would gather around the shore to create beautiful light displays. The light installation was a breathtaking protest against what the river has become because of human abuse. Each tiny light was designed by Panasonic to begin shining as soon as it hit the water. They floated their beautiful course and were caught in a large net at the end to prevent further pollution of the river.

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So four years after opening a small bar in Tokyo and plenty of Whiskey Sours poured, my good friends at Kinfolk recently opened their new spot in Brooklyn, NYC. It’s got a really good stocked bar and I also hear the food is some New York’s finest. Get down and check them out if you’re in the area. It’ll be worth your while.

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The new album Stories from Tokyo math-rock fourpiece Zazen Boys is an extension of the same progressive-funk mania that characterised 2008′s Zazen Boys IV but is perhaps even better. This track, built solely around an undeniable twitchy groove, occasionally sounds like a nervy, modern Japanese XTC. Go forth.

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When looking for couples to model for both this series, Couple Jam, and his ever popular work, Flesh Love, Tokyo-based photographer Hal goes to underground bars in Shibuya and Kabukicho (Tokyo’s Red Light District), places he describes as ‘luscious nighttime bee hives’.

Musicians, dancers, strippers, service workers and businessmen are all fair game as models as long as they are willing and able to contort their bodies to fit in the confined spaces Photographer Hal obviously has an affinity for. These photographic “events” take place in the models bathrooms. Photographer Hal explains, ‘I think of the bathroom as being one of the most private and intimate place in anyone’s home, this provoked a shyness in the models, and created a unique excitement and inspiration in the scene’. [via Feature Shoot]

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Photographer Adrian Storey has some fascinating pictures of Tokyo denizens who fall into a stupor in public spaces, some sprawled, some hunched over, in train stations, on the streets, by the road, everywhere. When you gotta sleep, you gotta sleep.

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Originally from Sydney, but currently based in Tokyo, Grace Lee is an illustrator who draws things in the most charming way. Her choice of subject matter is unique and interesting, but her eye for detail never fails to capture the most attractive parts and gives her work a playful and delightfully quirky look. Check out her inventive series of Tokyo shop fronts, too.

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Tucked in a second-floor among the many micro-bars that make up Tokyo’s Golden Gai is La Jettée (after Chris Marker’s mind-blowing 1962 experimental short). Though the place can hardly hold more than 10 people, it serves as a mecca for film lovers to film stars and anything in between. Last time I visited, I ended up discussing contemporary French cinema with two young music executives and the owner (Tomoyo Kawai, a true film buff if there ever was one), while sitting next to Fanny Ardant.

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Yusuke Hayashi studied Architecture and Installation in college. However, he was always fascinated by the beauty of the flower after working in 2009 part-time at a florist. After graduation and working at a flower design company, he now works independently, exploring the powerful potential of the nature in our world. This work shows the reversed relationship between human and nature. In this piece, the human is the vessel; the plants are in charge. Now the plants have a stronger will and the human, who used to be in charge, has turned into an object.

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We all grew up and started creating craft with simple art supplies, such as colored paper and glue. Japanese artist Yumiko Matsui plays with these simple art supplies again to re-create lovely 3D miniature pieces of Tokyo. As she states, the concept of her work could be expressed as: ‘Feel as if you are here’.

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Mogra in Akihabara, Tokyo, was established in August 2009 as a club at the center of Japanese Otaku (diehard fan) and anime culture. At Mogra, you can listen to anime songs, game songs, and vocaloid Hatsune Miku, as well as house music and dubstep. If you’re looking for real underground dance music from Tokyo, this is the one place you must check out.

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Katsuyo Aoki is a Japanese sculptor from Tokyo who uses porcelain to create her series of skull shaped works, entitled Predictive Dream. As she says: ‘The decorative styles, patterns and symbolic forms I allude to and incorporate in my works each contain a story based on historical backgrounds and ideas, myths, and allegories’. These sculptures take me back to that childhood movie, The Dark Crystal, or even The Predator.

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Cat’s Forehead is a project by BUILDING, a Tokyo-based graphic artist agency, as a new platform to connect different cultures around the world. You will enjoy the weirdness as you read the cultural articles they provide. It’s as if we are all in one world as small as a cat’s forehead.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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