Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Drag…

This 1986 Japanese adventure game showing up on Steam in 2026 guarantees it makes my GOTY list—you've really got to play it

Relics doesn't belong in a museum: it belongs on your PC.

My Itinerant Era

Yukio Mishima

Samurai city - Works in Progress Magazine

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.

Yojimbo (1961)

A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking the name Sanjuro…

‘The devil’s child’: the rise and fall of the only female yakuza

The long read: Mako Nishimura fought her way into the Japanese underworld, but drug addiction and the slow demise of organised crime gangs almost destroyed her

Mojaland

Four pieces on Bluesky and the Atmosphere, from Japan.

Samurai Unicorn

An action horror game with retro-graphics, set in the sprawling megacity of Sydney3.

Japan design details

A long thread about 300 design niceties and nuances in Japan

Lost in Translation? A Designer’s Guide to Japanese Type – PRINT Magazine

J Type 101 takes type lovers inside the fascinating mechanics of Japanese typography, revealing the rules, rhythms, and cultural context behind the characters.

Lords of the Ring, by Joshua Hunt

The cultural politics of sumo wrestling

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture

Society cannot recover from such an epic scale of devastation - the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 - but may, instead, manifest trauma as a perpetual genetic scar—ontological chasm which moves as a consumptive demon ripping up through the generations as a peripatetic wound, egregious disfigurement banished from conscious thought, inflating to cartoon benignity in a pantomime of humanity, sutured gash badly sewn and always reopening, futile replacement of scarred mortality for the immaculate technology of machines, and finally as the wholesale abandonment of frail humanity for alternative existential states.

The Sword of Doom (1966)

Ryunosuke, a gifted swordsman plying his trade during the turbulent final days of Shogunate rule, has no moral code and kills without remorse. It’s a way of life that leads to madness.

Asian Games close in Japan after records, rancour and rain

The Asian Games in Japan closed on Sunday after a fortnight lit up by record-smashing young stars but marred by mishaps, mediocre...

Kitagawa Utamaro - Mother and Child - Japan - Edo period (1615–1868) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As in a number of the prints in this exhibition, the reflection of the mother and child in this image enables us to see the figures from two sides....

Asian Games in Japan plagued by troubles | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News

The organizers of the 2026 Asian Games currently underway in Japan have unveiled container houses for athletes, amid calls from some overseas participants for improvements to those facilities.