Chancery Rosewood: Five new restaurants and bars announced at £1 billion hotel
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Out
2 hours ago
- Time Out
Pharrell Williams and Nigo to open massive lifestyle hub in Tokyo inspired by Napa Valley
From mouth-watering food and rich cultural experiences to having one of the most beautiful airports in the world, Japan already has plenty of reasons to visit. And now, there's one more: Japa Valley Tokyo, a new lifestyle hub inspired by California's famed Napa Valley. Here's everything we know so far. Japa Valley Tokyo is the brainchild of creative heavyweights Pharrell Williams and Nigo, in collaboration with Japanese hospitality group Not A Hotel. If that name rings a bell, it's the same team behind the unique concept where individuals can buy a share of a luxury holiday home to co-own and use with other shareholders. Their latest venture will take over much of the former Shin-Yurakucho Building site, transforming it into a vibrant space that blends art, fashion, food, and hospitality. Drawing inspiration from the rolling, vineyard-lined hills of Napa Valley, the Tokyo version swaps out wine for something closer to home: Japanese sake. The hub will also feature artwork by Kaws, with teaser images revealing a giant Kaws Holiday figure as a centrepiece. There will be event spaces, alongside F&B and retail pop-ups too.
Time Out
4 hours ago
- Time Out
Thousands of anime titles will soon be streamable on Delta flights
Air travel is a pain, but at least anime fans will soon have extra enticement to get on a plane. Starting later this year, the streaming service Crunchyroll will partner with Delta to provide the airline with access to its vast library of Japanese animation titles. As first reported by The Wrap, the streamer is curating a collection of 50,000 movies and TV episodes, totalling approximately 25,000 hours of content, available on 169,000 seatback screens. No specific titles have been confirmed. 'There is nothing better on a long flight than immersing yourself in the rich storytelling and world-building of anime', Rahul Purini, president of Crunchyroll, said in a statement. 'Fans can go deep on one series or sample one episode of many series – from action to adventure, romance and more'. Initially started by a group of University of California, Berkeley graduates in 2006, Crunchyroll began as a pirate site focused on East Asian media content before going legit in 2009. The platform is now jointly owned by the US-based Sony Pictures Entertainment and Japan's Aniplex. In addition to the in-flight entertainment, Delta SkyMiles members will have access to special offers, including free 24-hour trials of the Crunchyroll app.
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year's prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood's vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s. The Olympics took place in 2021, a year late as a result of the pandemic, but one curious difference has occurred: Zaha Hadid's futuristic national stadium, which in our reality was cancelled at the last minute, was in fact built. This minor change seems to have ushered in other more widespread shifts in politics and culture. Notably, a huge new skyscraper in the middle of the city is to house criminals in comfort and luxury, as part of society's debt to these unfortunate beings. A glimpse into a potential near future (which might be a dystopia or a utopia, depending on your point of view), Sympathy Tower Tokyo has some connections with Yoko Ogawa's excellent dreamlike science fiction The Memory Police (1994), as well as more distant echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Yet this is a wholly distinctive novel, alarmingly prescient and up to date. Controversy arose – and still seems to infest chatter about the book – when Qudan divulged that she used AI to write part of it. She later clarified that AI was employed only to generate specific responses in the text when a character consults a chatbot – a creative touch which, rather than representing laxity or deception, surely carries a Joycean level of authenticity. Sara Machina, a celebrated architect, is to design the building, which is to be officially called 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' – a name which irks Sara, since it uses katakana characters to approximate the English words, a common trend in modern Japanese, rather than the more difficult, but established, kanji script. Kanji are the thousands of intricately complex Chinese-origin characters children (and foreigners) struggle to learn. The more straightforward, phonetic katakana is for loanwords, buzzwords, commercial jargon and the like. Qudan uses this issue to explore how kanji might transmit tradition and certainty, katakana flexibility and ambiguity – but might kanji not also carry prejudice and the burdens of the past, which could be swept away by the invigorating, outward-looking torrent of contemporary katakana, especially when it comes to shifting socio-sexual topics such as global warming, crime and gender? Yet, if the Japanese are to change their language, will they not also lose the distinctiveness of their national identity? Readers who know Japanese will naturally get more out of this than those unfamiliar with the language, but the ideas discussed will stimulate anyone. This is a book which raises profound and ever-pressing questions about the elusive nature of words, their symbolic status, and their multi-faceted, convoluted relationship with geography, history and culture. It explores the relationship between the urban, built environment and our fabricated world of words, between social and linguistic developments, between the kaleidoscopic vogues of language, society and philosophy. And it examines the way architecture, like words, can be destructive as well as creative, while criminals can be victims, too, worthy of love and reward just as much as hatred and punishment. Told from ever-shifting verbal and textual perspectives, with playful nods to contemporary controversies (AI; the Hadid stadium hullabaloo; cancel culture; Covid; Twitter's name change), this is a spirited novel that asks profound questions, impishly worrying about the potentially flavourless future of humanity. The tower itself can re-assimilate persecuted delinquents, making society more equal, more just, (more boring?) – just as AI threatens to steal everyone's jobs and turn vibrant global languages into one bland gloopy soup: harmless but meaningless, safe but insipid. Sympathy Tower Tokyo feels so über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, and it is alive with all the tools (and fools) of modernity. Yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide, merge and inform each other throughout this relatively short novel. A contemporary gem.
