“Araki Takako Retrospective”
Posted in Tokyo on January 6th, 2012“Araki Takako Retrospective”
Takako Araki (1921-2004), a native of Nishinomiya City, Hyogo Prefecture, began creating glassware around 1950. From 1956-60, she ran an art gallery in Osaka where she presented works in plaster and steel and introduced Kansai-based avant-garde artists.
In 1963, having returned to Japan from New York where she studied sculpture from 1961, Araki opened a kiln at her home in Nishinomiya. Her unique artworks of black ceramics and silk-screen printed balls garnered acclaim in the contemporary art world, and in 1979 a work in her “Bible series” won her a prize at the fifth Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition. This became a turning point in her career as a ceramist. The Bible, which has become one of her favored motifs, is symbolically used to explore themes related to the core of human existence.
Chilling In Tokyo – Dry Dock: Shimbashi

Perhaps this isn’t the narrowest bar in Tokyo, but it’s certainly the narrowest bar offering such an impressive class of craft beers, both domestic and imported. Cleverly, the tiny space is fashioned to resemble a yacht, with porthole windows and nautical decor throughout. Three small tables fill the upper deck, while the lower deck is standing-room only, with space for maybe seven or eight along the port-side bar.
New Year’s discounts in Yokohama
To celebrate the New Year, the InterContinental Yokohama Grand is holding the hotel’s popular seasonal event, the Otoshidama (New Year’s gift) Promotion.
One plan in the promotion is called New Year Two Plus One, where every third guest in a party of three, six, nine or 12 can have the near equivalent of a free meal: a 33 percent discount for the group. The offer is valid only on weekdays through Feb. 29 for five menus at the hotel’s restaurants, including the lunch buffet at Italian restaurant La Vela and the all-you-can-eat order-style dinner at Chinese restaurant Karyu.


As hotel bars go, this one takes some beating. The Windsor Bar, on the third floor of the Roppongi Prince Hotel, is divided into two spaces. Its most distinctive feature is a dramatic ceiling mural in the style of M.C Escher: a monochrome moonscape glimpsed through a perspective distorting series of pillars and arches. The rest of the bar is no less original, with lots of dark green marble and bla…
Up on the 24th floor of the Peninsula Hotel you’ll find one of Tokyo’s hippest cocktail temples, Peter. The room is decorated with metallic trees which give an ethereal indoors-outdoors effect to the space that’s already pretty striking thanks to the digitized projections on the walls…