~openculture | Bookmarks (3)

During World War II, Tokyo sustained heavy damage, especially with the bombings conducted by the U.S. military in March 1945. Known as Operation Meetinghouse, US air raids destroyed 16 square miles in central Tokyo, leaving 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. Tokyo didn’t recover quickly. It took until the 1950s for reconstruction to really […]

Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great […]

We suppose it’s conceivable that a gift of a wooden Totoro figurine, hand-carved from a single block using 50 different kinds of chisels, might spark a reverence for traditional Japanese craft and nature in the next generation… Or, they may be left wishing you’d given them a vastly more huggable machine-made plushie version, especially if […]