Twentythree

We try a Shine Muscat experiment that method claim lets Japan’s most delicious grapes shine in a different way.

Shine Muscats don’t really need to be any tastier than they already are. The extra-sweet grapes are among Japan’s most highly prized fruits, and with them in season right now, fans are, quite literally, eating well these days.

Of course, if someone were to figure out a way to make Shine Muscat grapes taste even better, we’d be happy to give it a try, even if it sounded kind of crazy. That’s what we recently did when we tried pickling some Shine Muscats in traditional nukadoko (fermented rice bran), and sure enough, it made their sweetness even more intensely concentrated. The results were so good, in fact, that we were planning to pickle all the rest of our Shine Muscats too, but at the last second, we set some aside for another experiment.

See, we’d also heard rumors that you can enhance your Shine Muscats with carbonated water. We’re not talking about a brief dip in a glass of soda water, either. Japanese foodies who pioneered this technique say you’ve got to let the grapes soak for a long time before you bite into them.

We were curious to try this food hack for ourselves, and the required materials/equipment make for a short list. All you need are Shine Muscat grapes, carbonated water, and a jar with a sealable lid.

Put the grapes into the jar…

…pour in enough soda water to cover them…

…then close the lid tight and let the jar sit in your refrigerator for anywhere between 12 hours and two days.

Shine Muscats are premium-priced fruit, so in the interest of not wasting any for half-effort experimentation, we were patient and held out for the full two days of soaking. When we finally took the jar back out of the fridge and opened it up, all of the carbonation had vanished from the water.

▼ Not a bubble to be seen or a fizz to be heard

We removed a grape from the jar, and set it on a place next to a control-group Shine Muscat that we hadn’t done any sort of treatment to. As you can see in the photo below, the two-day carbonated bath hadn’t done anything to change the grape’s outward appearance.

▼ Shine Muscat soaked in carbonated water for two days (left) and regulae Shine Muscat

Slicing each grape open to look at its cross section, we observed no changes to the carbonated Shine Muscat’s inner beauty either.

The rumors hadn’t said that this experiment would do anything to make the grapes look better, though. The soaking process is supposed to make the Shine Muscats more delicious, so does it? Yes and no, which might sound like faint praise, but we actually were totally satisfied.

As far as we could tell, soaking the grapes in soda water doesn’t change their flavor itself. What it does do, though, is transfer the bubbly quality into the outer layer of the Shine Muscat. Bite into one, and you’re rewarded with a burst of carbonated popping. With the Shine Muscat sweetness still fully present, it’s an incredibly refreshing combination of fun fruity fizziness.

With how simple these are to make, it’d be a snap to whip up a batch of carbonated Shine Muscats either to take to a party or to enjoy as luxurious at-home snacks for yourself. Note, though, that you’ll want to make sure to use a jar where the lid can be shut tightly, since if there’s excess slack in the seal the carbonation is going to escape into the air instead of finding a new home in your grapes.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Even if you can’t go every day, here’s why you should go to Daily Yamazaki today.

Japan’s big three convenience store chains, 7-Eleven, Family Mart, and Lawson, all sell fine baked goods. The bread is on an especially high level, though, at Daily Yamazaki. Of course, that’s to be expected, what with the chain being owned by Japan’s biggest baking company, Yamazaki Baking Co. So whenever we find ourselves inside a Daily Yamazaki branch, we always make sure to check out what’s stocked in the sandwich corner, and on a recent visit we found one of the best convenience store egg sandwiches we’ve ever had.

Really, most Japanese egg sandwiches could more accurately be called egg salad sandwiches, but Daily Yamazaki’s new Egg Sandwich with a Whole Boiled Egg (or Yudetamago Ikko Shiyo Tamago Sando, in Japanese) is true to its name, and immediately grabbed our attention with its mouthwatering appearance.

Three cross sections are on display, bulging out from between the slices of bread. Though it’s just a single-cut sandwich, as opposed to the more common two-slice varieties, the immense amount of fillings promised a hearty, eggy meal.

The boiled egg is sliced into three pieces, roughly a half and two quarter-sized cuts. And yes, there is egg salad here too, generous slathers that go all the way to the edges of the bread, making this a sort of hybrid-style egg sandwich.

▼ We flipped one piece of bread over to see if Daily Yamazaki skimps on the spread, and were happy to see that they do not.

Taking a bite, we were greeted with a deliciously rich, creamy mixture of egg white and egg yolk flavors, plus an invitingly engaging contrast of the melty egg salad and firmer slices of boiled egg.

It was kind of like eating two different types of egg sandwich at once, an exercise in enjoyable eggy efficiency. If you’re after a more focused experience, though, Daily Yamazaki also has an Ajiwai (“Flavorful”) Egg Sandwich, which finds room to add a dash of spicy dressing to its otherwise conventional egg salad filling, again with so much that it’s practically overflowing from the bread.

But even with the Whole Boiled Egg sandwich being a touch more expensive than the Ajiwai (334 yen [US$2.10] versus 284 yen) it’s hard to say no to something that looks and tastes so good, and we highly recommend it for your next cholesterol cheat day.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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If you’ve got Totoro in your Ghibli-loving heart, why not have him on your lap too?

Now that we’re past the fall equinox, we’ve got increasingly long nights and chilly weather on the temporal horizon. So Totoro is arriving just in time with a new way to help keep you feeling warm and fuzzy, in both the literal and figurative senses, as we head through fall and into winter.

Studio Ghibli anime specialty shop Donguri Kyowakoku has just unveiled their latest blanket design. Dubbed “Sound of the Starry Sky,” the blanket’s pattern features all three Totoros, big, medium, and small, perched in the treetops as the big guy and his midsize brethren have an ocarina jam session.

At 100 centimeters (39.4) inches in length and 70 centimeters in width, this a lap blanket, not sized for use as bedding, but something to curl up cozily with while lounging on the couch. Alternatively, you could take the Totoros to work with you, if your office happens to set the thermostat lower than you like.

▼ The design includes the movie’s title, My Neighbor Totoro, written in Japanese.

Along with the new Sound of the Starry Sky version, Donguri Kyowakoku has also restocked a number of its previous blanket designs featuring Totoro, the Catbus, Soot Sprites, and even Jiji, for fans of Kiki’s Deliver Service.

As with the Totoro ocarina blanket, these are all available as 100 x 70-centimeter lap blankets.

However, some of the patterns are also offered as “half blankets” (140 x 100 centimeters) and the three patterns below even come in 200 x 140-centimeter full-size versions too.

Prices start at 3,300 yen (US$21) for the lap blankets, while the half-blankets are 5,500 yen and the full-sizes either 7,700 or 8,800 yen, depending on exact pattern (order links below). So far there’s no word as to whether the Sound of the Starry Sky will be getting larger versions at some future date, but even if it stays on your lower body, it’s sure to warm your heart all the same.

Related: Order pages for Sound of the Starry Sky, lap blankets, half-blankets, and full-size blankets
Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
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Almost every country is sending more travelers to Osaka these days, with one very big exception.

With the international travel community still showing an intense interest in visiting Japan, you’d think Osaka’s inbound tourism numbers would be booming. It’s Japan’s third largest city, is situated close enough to Kyoto to be used as a livelier place to spend the night after a day of visiting shrines and temples, and it’s also a stop on the popular Sanyo Shinkansen line, making it easy to work Osaka into itineraries along Japan’s “golden route” of top travel destinations for foreign visitors.

And yet, Osaka actually saw fewer foreign visitors this past August than the city did in August of 2025, according to statistics compiled by the Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau.

At first, the data might not sound like it’s going to lead to that result. In August of 2026, Osaka had more visitors than it ever has in any previous August from the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Russia. In addition, more tourists from Italy and Spain came to Osaka in August of 2026 than in any other month before.

But even with all those individual-demographic records being set, Osaka still had a 9.6 percent drop in foreign visitors during August 2026 compared to August 2025. So what country has been shunning the city?

China. August tourist numbers from mainland China plummeted 59 percent compared to last year. 254,000 Chinese travelers still showed up, but the drop was so severe that it more than cancelled out the total 26.7-percent August increase in travelers from all foreign countries other than China.

The cooling off in demand from Chinese travelers stems from a warning issued late last year by the Chinese government cautioning its citizens that Japan is an unsafe country to travel to. It should be noted that this warning wasn’t prompted by any actual incident of Chinese travelers being injured or robbed in Japan, but it did come right on the heels of Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi saying in an interview that Japan would provide aid to Taiwan if it were to be invaded by the Chinese military.

With international travel generally requiring advance reservations, there wasn’t an immediate drop-off in travelers from China, but new reservations started coming in with less frequency, and when we ourselves went to check in on how things were in Osaka last December (when we took the photos seen in this article), we definitely noticed much smaller crowds in parts of the city that had, up until then, been routinely packed with Chinese tourists.

“It is a very dire situation,” said Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau chairman Hitoshi Mizohata at his regularly scheduled press conference on September 30.

▼ And yes, he delivered that somber proclamation while wearing a plushie of Osaka Expo mascot Myaku-Myaku.

Without access to Osaka travel and tourism providers’ books, it’s hard to say exactly how truly dire the situation is. Obviously, a roughly 10-percent drop in customers isn’t something that any industry is going to be happy about. At the same time, that’s not a catastrophic dip, especially considering that tourist numbers have grown far more than 10 percent compared to where they were before the international Japan travel craze. So unless the travel industry went all-in on building excessive capacity because they thought the boom times were never going to so much as slow down, they should still be doing much better financially than they used to, even if their profits aren’t quite as high as they were last August.

That said, Mizohata voiced his concern that the Chinese government hasn’t made any statement reversing its “safety” warning about traveling in Japan, and so the board has no estimation of when, or if, Chinese tourist numbers will rebound. Mizohata lamented that political disagreements aren’t being kept separate from economics, though this is hardly the first time in history for those two social sciences to affect each other.

Overall, it’s probably still too early to shed all that many tears for the travel industry in Osaka. Mizohata says that local hotels have told the bureau that they have more reservations for October and November in 2026 than for the same period last year, and premium-priced hotels reportedly are especially receiving lots of bookings. The bureau also says that, based on surveys with foreign tourists in Osaka, there’s still room to better promote awareness of Osaka’s nightlife, traditional culture, sports, and luxury leisure offerings, and it plans to increase its focus on those areas

Source: MBS via Itai News, Osaka Nichinichi Shimbun
Photos ©SoraNews24
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Three ways to deal with uncomfortably dry weather while also letting you go “Ahhhh! Isn’t Totoro/Calcifer/Jiji cute?”

Japan has a love/hate relationship with humidity. Once the rainy season starts in mid-June, you can be certain to hear people murmuring, or even groaning “Mushimushi shiteiru ne?” (“It’s so humid, isn’t it?”) until about the mid-point of September. Then, pretty much as soon as the autumn weather gets cool enough to be considered crisp, many people will start to say how the air is uncomfortably dry.

Having grown up in the atmospherically arid environment of Southern California, I’m honestly totally fine with the level of dryness in Japan during the fall and winter. As such, I’ve never personally seen much appeal in a humidifier, but even I can understand that if someone did want one, they’d want one of these awesomely adorable Studio Ghibli humidifiers.

These seasonal products are back in stock once again at Ghibli specialty shop Donguri Kyowakoku. The full lineup consists of three designs, and naturally we’re starting with a look at the Totoro one.

The water reservoir topper features both a big and small Totoro, with the larger forest spirit playing his ocarina, which the steam billows out of as the water is heated.

▼ There’s a trio of shy soot sprites too!

Each of the humidifiers stands 27 centimeters (10.6 inches) tall, with a base roughly the size of a drink bottle or thermos. That compact footprint makes the Little Humidifiers, as Donguri Kyowakoku calls them, suitable for use even in compact work/study spaces or other cozy nooks of your home.

Going form forest spirits to a fire one, joining Totoro in humidifier form is Calcifer, from Howl’s Moving Castle.

Calcifer’s design lends itself even more naturally to use as a humidifier, with the steam rising out from underneath the frying pan of on his back making it look like he’s right in the middle of cooking up that bacon-and-egg breakfast.

And rounding out the group is Jiji, the black cat companion of the titular heroine of Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Jiji’s topper also has a clever place that the steam rises from, as it comes out of the coffee mug he buys while shopping with Kiki as they set up her new apartment, creating the illusion that someone has just poured a fresh cup of java.

▼ Warning! Although Donguri Kyowakoku makes no official mention of the phenomenon, be aware that using the Jiji humidifier will almost certainly make you crave pancakes.

The humidifiers are identically priced at 5,280 yen (US$33) and come bundled with their USB power cord. They’re designed to automatically shut off after eight hours of continuous use, but since the bottles are also sized to hold enough water to humidify for eight hours too, once that much time passes you’ll need to refill the bottle anyway.

The entire lineup can be purchased through the Donguri Kyowakoku online store here, and if you could use even more Calcifer in your home, these days he’s a cool candle nightlight too.

Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3)
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Featuring inspirations from kigumi wood joinery design and hand-dusted platinum, each of these limited edition watches are a unique work of art.

Bringing a fusion of ancient Japanese artistry and modern engineering to the wrists of elite collectors and timepiece connoisseurs, Casio will introduce a new member on November 13 to its flagship MR-G line in celebration of three decades since its inception in 1996. Priced at 1.1 million yen (around US$7,350), and limited to only 800 pieces worldwide, MRG-B2100HR-1A has its design centered around the theme of haruka, a Japanese concept conveying timeless strength and boundless duration.

At the heart of the watch’s artistry is kigumi, a traditional Japanese woodworking and architectural technique where timber is joined without nails, other metal fasteners, or adhesives. The woodworkers intricately carve joints that connect seamlessly and have no possibility of corrosion. Reinterpreting this into watchmaking, the dial forms an intricate, three dimensional lattice.

Above this marvel of construction, renowned metal leaf artist Hiroto Rakusho applied his craft by hand. Born in Kyoto’s Nishijin district, Rakusho is an officially designated Traditional Craftsman known for expanding Nishijin foil art onto global stages and contributing to digital archiving for cultural preservation.

Rakusho personally decorated each 3-D dial using sunago, a technique originating in the creation of picture scrolls and Buddhist texts, where platinum leaf is ground into a powder before being dusted over a surface. The delicate, uneven distribution of platinum creates a brilliance and deep gradation that exhibits itself uniquely on every single piece, guaranteeing that each watch has its own artistic fingerprint.

To mirror Rakusho’s artwork on the exterior, Casio applied structural color technology via ultra-short pulse lasers across the bezel and watchstrap. The micron-level laser texturing mimics the natural iridescence seen on butterfly wings and mineral crystals, producing a colorful beauty that changes depending on the viewing angle.

Complementing this is Casio’s advanced metal construction: an octagonal bezel, based on the popular MRG-B2100, crafted from 27 individually polished components, alongside premium COBARION (a cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloy about two times as hard as stainless steel, and which has a platinum shine) and DAT55G (a high-performance titanium alloy, around three times that of pure titanium) alloys that provide structural resilience.

By capturing the spirit of haruka, the MRG-B2100HR-1A unites Kyoto craftsmanship with modern engineering into an enduring piece of wearable art.

Related: Casio Online Store
Source, images: PR Times
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