Love in Tokyo is a guide to contemporary, inner-city Japan for a specific kind of traveller. What kind is that? Well, it’s essentially anyone with limited patience for smug travel bloggers who’ve funded their boutique hotel room by endorsing laxative shakes on social media. 

This site is a project of three high school mates who all went their separate ways for a decade before being unexpectedly reunited over ramen one fateful night in Shibuya. Upon discovering that they were all living in Japan, it became clear that they still had a lot in common – not least, a predeliction for Japanese culture combined with a fairly pronounced lack of skill in mastering the finer points of it (such as eating rice without a fork).

Emmaline is an engineering consultant working on a year-long project in Tokyo, while Brentley is on a university travel scholarship, conducting research for his PhD on the history of silk dying. Cathy, for her part, is in the country on a holiday that’s starting to seem like a cop-out from her job as a teaching assistant. Where does she get the money? We have no idea, but suspect it has something to do with vending machines.

What do they all have in common? An insatiable desire to figure out what makes this city tick and a half-baked methodology for getting to the bottom of that (hint: it relies heavily on eating ramen). At the end of the day, they’re not experts in Japanese culture or tour guidance, and maybe they’re not even that interesting… but who knows? Maybe they’ll pop out a pearl of wisdom or two in the course of their explorations.

Join these three characters for a mix of colourful and mundane adventures that you may or may not want to emulate.