This post mainly covers Japan-related travel writing, all the best pieces I have that don’t pertain to movies (which receive their due elsewhere in my Movie-Lover’s Guide to Japan portfolio). There are 125 links here, some inbound, others outbound to Explore.com and two GPlusMedia sites, GaijinPot and Japan Today. In 2023, I poured more effort into the site you’re now reading, The Gaijin Ghost, while expanding the focus of my freelance assignments to include other places in Asia and America.

Gaijin means “foreigner” in Japanese, with GaijinPot catering to the melting-pot readership of foreigners in Japan, and The Gaijin Ghost existing as my personal portfolio: the internet ghost of an American expat named Joshua Meyer.

For six years, /Film was my home for film and television criticism. From June 2017 to June 2021, I contributed to the site on a freelance, article-by-article basis. From July 2021 to July 2023, I maintained an hourly News Writer position. More recently, I’ve branched out and contributed to Inverse and Dread Central. Pull-quotes from my movie and TV reviews have appeared on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, in the Television Academy’s Emmy Magazine, and in official AMC and Toho promos.

Usually, Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge is illuminated white at night, which may be disappointing for some visitors who have seen dynamic photos of it lit up in actual rainbow colors. According to Japan Airlines, the bridge’s real name is “Tokyo Bay Connector Bridge,” but that was news to me when I first heard it, and I’ve never heard anyone call it that. In years past, the Rainbow Bridge did sometimes live up to its unofficial name in late December.

There’s another pic here, before the fireworks video, where you can see the bridge at sunset and it’s legitimately rainbow-colored. However, when I was there last night on the north promenade, the sun went down around 4:30, and when the lights came on at 5 p.m., it was just “warm white,” the usual winter lighting pattern that they have from November to March. Tonight, it was the same color in the live webcam view from the Fuji News Network’s Odaiba headquarters.

It wasn’t until 7 p.m. last night that the lights went off and then came right back on again, with the bridge rocking the rare rainbow lighting pattern, as it did back on August 26, 2023, when it celebrated its 30th anniversary. This was part of a special, five-minute fireworks show that took place over the Rainbow Bridge on the first four Saturdays of December. The final show last night synchronized the fireworks to Christmas music, and afterward, they left the rainbow illumination on for the weekend holiday crowd to enjoy.

In Oppenheimer, the pen is mightier than the bomb, even in the context of a three-hour biopic about the bomb’s father. Christopher Nolan’s summer movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is finally available to rent in the U.S. as of this week. Yet the movie’s single most effective scene, emotionally if not dramatically, hinges on the stroke of a pen and the mention of another country, where Oppenheimer won’t receive a theatrical release until 2024.

In this scene, Japan’s presence — felt but not seen in a room full of Irish and American actors — hints at a different kind of third act that could have developed if Nolan had chosen to open up the narrative to other perspectives. In an interview with Total Film earlier this year, he addressed Oppenheimer’s point-of-view, saying, “I wrote the script in the first person,” and, “The colour scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective.” However, it ultimately feels like the black-and-white scenes just offer a second subjective viewpoint from another character.

For much of its runtime, Oppenheimer is riveting, but toward the end, as it gets caught up in courtroom drama and petty personal vendettas, it starts to feel like it’s so limited in its cultural perspective as to be almost myopic. Maybe that’s the point since it’s all about a man with supreme tunnel vision. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is focused so deeply on his scientific work that, until it gets away from him, he neglects to fully consider the collateral damage it might cause, or the damage he might cause in his relationships.

To see the fall colors in Tokyo this year, I wanted to do something a little different. Despite its suggestive name, Shinjuku Gyoen’s “Naked Autumn Night Garden” involved no nudity, but rather, light displays from the digital art collective Naked Inc. I caught the event on November 30 before it ended last night. Since it didn’t start until 6 p.m., it gave me time to head down the Oedo Line to Aoyama-Itchome Station first and see the trees along Meiji Jingu Gaien’s famous Ginkgo Avenue illuminated. The light-up there, which also ended last night, started at 4:30, right around sundown. It was free, whereas the Shinjuku Gyoen event cost ¥2,200.

For this outing, I was partially inspired by our trip to Kyoto last fall when we saw a beautiful illumination at Toji Temple one night. It made me realize that, although I had been to many of Tokyo’s most famous spots for fall color viewing already, I’d mostly seen them during the day. The autumn leaves are usually at their peak here around late November to early December.

At Shinjuku Gyoen, you could see the maple trees and London plane trees lit up, but you had to walk back to the Okido Gate, which is a bit of a hike coming from Shinjuku Station. As you can see in these 25 pictures, however, it was a nice break from Shinjuku’s neon and a nice seasonal highlight, even though we’re already into December now and the overlapping season for holiday light-ups.