A Timely Meetup

Today I had the great pleasure of meeting up with Jim Frederick, the Tokyo bureau chief for TIME magazine, and the man who wrote most of the excellent Cool Japan feature a few issues ago. We met at Montoak in Aoyama for lunch, where the setting was nice on the terrace, but the food was a bit less so (sandwiches with what amounted to spam – there are some places that you go for the food, and some for the atmosphere and design, Montoak definitely falls in the latter). It was great to chat with him and learn a lot about how things work at TIME (and all the different bureaus throughout Asia). Also, it opened my eyes on how the Japanese media seems to do things, and how it’s not necessarily the artists or the audience that should be blamed for the lack of exposure of Japan’s entertainment culture outside of the country.

Next time, ramen in Ikebukuro.