Logistics and money
Marcus Webb
Published work
45 signed pages across 7 collections, biggest section first. Every one carries this byline.
Restaurants 12
- KikunoiKyotoThe most famous kaiseki room in Kyoto. The price is real, the booking is difficult, and lunch is two-thirds cheaper than dinner.Read
- IzuuKyotoA Gion counter that has been pressing mackerel and kombu onto vinegared rice since 1781. The hours are published. The prices are not.Read
- KikkoyaKyotoHome-style Kyoto cooking at a counter that understands people eating alone. It also lets people smoke, everywhere, all evening.Read
- IzusenKyotoBuddhist temple cooking, served in stacking lacquer bowls in a sub-temple garden. Open every day of the year except the last four of December.Read
- MatsubaKyotoA soba house by the Minamiza theatre that put dried herring on buckwheat noodles in 1882 and has been doing it ever since.Read
- Okutan KiyomizuKyotoSimmering tofu in an earthenware pot, in a garden a few minutes below the busiest temple in Kyoto. Bring patience and check it is open.Read
- MizunoOsakaThe okonomiyaki that made the Michelin list, cooked in front of you, with a queue and no reservations and no closing day any more.Read
- Kushikatsu DarumaOsakaThe shop that invented the dish’s modern form, still on its original corner, still with twelve seats and a queue down the street.Read
- Tonkatsu MinatoOsakaTen seats, two services, one dish, and a Bib Gourmand awarded in 2026. The hardest reservation in this guide and the best value on it.Read
- Kushikatsu GojoyaOsakaWhat happens when a Shinsekai street food is cooked one skewer at a time by somebody with a tasting menu’s worth of intent.Read
- HarukomaOsakaOsaka sushi rather than Tokyo sushi: generous, cheap, loud, and served on the longest shopping street in Japan.Read
- Takoyaki Doraku WanakaOsakaOsaka’s benchmark takoyaki at the price it should cost, two minutes from the strip where it costs more and is worse.Read
Where to stay 10
- Hoshinoya KyotoKyotoTwenty-five rooms on the Oi river with no road to them. The boat is the only way in, and the price is whatever the date says it is.Read
- HiiragiyaKyotoTwo centuries of the same family, twenty-odd rooms, and a service tradition that survives because it never had to be revived.Read
- Ace Hotel KyotoKyotoThe best-located big hotel in Kyoto, in a restored Modernist telephone exchange with a courtyard that anyone can walk into.Read
- Piece HostelKyotoDorms and private rooms done properly, in the two most useful locations in Kyoto. The March 2026 tax change made the budget end relatively better value.Read
- The Ritz-Carlton, OsakaOsakaThe grande dame of Osaka hotels, holding a MICHELIN Key, in the district with the best rail access in the city.Read
- Four Seasons Hotel OsakaOsakaThe newest of Osaka’s One Key hotels, and the only one that puts a working ryokan inside a high-rise.Read
- Patina OsakaOsakaThe least familiar name on Osaka’s Key list, which makes it the one most worth checking rates for on your own dates.Read
- W OsakaOsakaThe only luxury hotel in Osaka that is also a piece of architecture worth looking at from the street.Read
- The Okura TokyoTokyoJapan’s most argued-about hotel demolition, and the reconstructed modernist lobby that followed it. Two towers, two quite different stays.Read
- The Millennials ShibuyaTokyoThe capsule hotel reinvented as a design object: a powered bed that turns into a sofa, a ceiling projector, and Shibuya Crossing three minutes away.Read
Bars 9
- Sake Bar YoramuKyotoAn Israeli sake specialist pouring aged and obscure bottles in 60ml measures, four nights a week, to about ten people at a time.Read
- Bee’s KneesKyotoKyoto's best-known speakeasy-format cocktail bar. It keeps its hours off the internet, which is either the joke or the problem.Read
- L’EscamoteurKyotoApothecary bottles, conjuring props and flame, in a tiny room off Kiyamachi. Nobody can tell you when it opens, including the bar.Read
- Bar NayutaOsakaOne of only two Osaka bars on the 2026 Asia list, with an unmarked door and no menu to hide behind.Read
- CraftroomOsakaA six-seat bar under a 1970s station building, ranked 72nd in Asia, and the smallest serious room in Osaka.Read
- Augusta TarlogieOsakaA long-standing Osaka whisky counter where the right move is to describe what you like and hand over the choosing.Read
- Bar BenfiddichTokyoA ninth-floor room in Nishi-Shinjuku where the bartender distils, macerates and mills his own botanicals and there is no menu.Read
- VirtùTokyoA European-style hotel bar on the thirty-ninth floor at Otemachi, run by Keith Motsi, that has spent several years on the global bar lists.Read
- Golden GaiTokyoSix alleys, around 200 bars of five to eight seats each, and one widely misunderstood custom that generates most of the complaints about the place.Read
What to eat 8
- YudofuKyotoThe dish Kyoto's water and its temples produced between them. No sauce, no browning, nothing to hide behind.Read
- KaisekiKyotoA fixed sequence of courses built on the season. The range of prices is enormous and the structure barely changes across it.Read
- ObanzaiKyotoSimmered vegetables, tofu and preserved fish, cooked in the morning and eaten all day. The everyday counterweight to kaiseki.Read
- Nishin sobaKyotoA landlocked city's answer to fish. Two days of simmering go into one fillet, and the broth gets better as you eat it.Read
- TakoyakiOsakaOsaka’s emblem, ninety years old, and routinely ruined by being cooked in advance for a queue.Read
- OkonomiyakiOsakaThe single most confused dish in Japanese food writing, and the difference between the two styles is structural rather than regional pride.Read
- KushikatsuOsakaOsaka’s cheapest good dinner, governed by one rule that every shop in the city has a sign about.Read
- Kitsune udonOsakaA soft-noodle bowl with a sweet fried tofu lid, an origin story Osaka tells about itself, and a source we could not confirm.Read
Districts 2
- Downtown and Nishiki MarketKyotoA four-hundred-metre covered market with a rule most visitors break, and the flat, walkable downtown that surrounds it.Read
- ShinjukuTokyoThe busiest station on earth, a free skyscraper view most visitors pay to replicate elsewhere, and a five-alley bar district with rules worth knowing.Read
Logistics 2
- eSIMs for JapanEvery eSIM comparison names the same five providers. Almost none tells you which Japanese carrier you end up on, or what the daily cap really is.Read
- Luggage forwardingMost English guides are still quoting a fare table Yamato replaced in December 2025. Here are the current numbers, and the arguments against.Read
Sights 2
- Tokyo SkytreeTokyoThe tallest tower in Japan prices by day of week and by how organised you are. The advance-purchase deadline is the night before, not the morning of.Read
- Shibuya SkyTokyoAn open-air roof 229 metres above the Scramble Crossing, priced by time of day, that closes the good part when the weather turns and does not give the money back.Read