In the past year, Tokyo Survival Channel has assigned me some pretty wild tasks. I spent 24 long hours in an izakaya, tried urban camping on a Tokyo rooftop during peak summer, and did my best to learn 24 skills in 24 hours (no sleep allowed). So when they asked me to try this new…

It was 7:30am and I was squinting under a neon light in a 24-hour store in one of the grottiest areas of Shinjuku, holding a giant bottle of peach liqueur. It was the morning of my 32nd birthday and I vaguely wondered whether to question my life choices. Even by the standard of my usual…

  We’ve all been spending a lot more time at home recently and redefining our relationship with our immediate four walls, getting intimately acquainted with our surroundings and probably that ceiling crack that you never noticed before. I have learned to love my tiny Tokyo apartment, especially since I have become a Marie Konvert during…

“You were an accident, albeit a happy one,” said my mother in a statement that has somewhat set the tone of my life so far. I am accident-prone. An accident waiting to happen. And, frequently, I am accidentally inappropriate. Which is why I thought the entirely inappropriate behaviour of crashing end of year parties sounded…