TW Digest
Your weekly guide to Japanese culture, lifestyle and travel
September 17, 2026
Hello everyone,
This week, many of my friends have become transfixed by a new conceptual sauna coming to Roppongi in October. It’s called Sauna Mother, and it is meant to simulate the experience of being gestated and born. The “birthing” process is elaborate, and I can’t get into it here. Read on for more…
This week’s newsletter includes: a chance to peer inside the Roppongi womb sauna; our book recommendations for the fall; the best spots to gaze upon the harvest moon in Tokyo; the strange hypocrisy of corporation-owned snack bars in Shibuya.
— Callie Beusman, Editorial Director
The story we can’t stop talking about this week:
Roppongi’s New Sauna Wants You To Crawl Back Into the Womb
The soon-to-be-opened Sauna Mother takes you on a haunted house-esque route: through a sultry womb-themed room, complete with a soundtrack of heartbeats and the rushing of bodily fluids; to an enormous lap where you can rest like a newborn; to a “Mother Sofa,” where you are cradled by an amorphous, buxom entity whose face you can select from a menu. Everyone I know is desperate to go.
What’s happening in Japan
The stories, trends, events, etc. on our minds
☆ Fall is upon us, almost, so here are eight Japanese books that are ideal for curling up with during cozy season.
☆ Shibuya is building several pop-up, tourist-friendly snack bars in an empty lot. Which seems cute in concept, but less so when you consider the way that relentless redevelopment has threatened the existence of authentic snack bars — tiny, gritty sanctuaries with decades of history.
☆ To moon enthusiasts like myself, September is famous as the month of the harvest moon. If you don’t have time to make it to Lake Biwa to contemplate the night sky, Murasaki Shikibu-style, here are the best moon-viewing spots in Tokyo, as verified by an organization literally called Japan’s 100 Moons.
☆ If you’re one of those people who is really into Family Mart socks: the convenience store has released a new, limited-edition collection, with 47 designs to represent the 47 prefectures.
This fall, the city of Maebashi turns its compact downtown into an exhibition overflowing with art, architecture, poetry, film and performance.
SPONSORED POST
Mika Ninagawa with EIM, Breathing of Lives, 2023. ©Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery (reference work).
What’s on in Tokyo
What the TW team is checking out this week
Victoria, our very stylish art director, plans to stop by “Maison Martin Margiela, 1989–2009: The Private Archive Collection” at the quite literally named New Auction auction house in Harajuku. “It’s an auction of 300 pieces that were collected by Margiela through the 90s and 00s for inspiration, and is open to the public every day until September 26 when the auction ends.”
Eugenie notes that BEAMS is opening its newest Harajuku store, BEAMS RECORDS / bPr BEAMS, on Saturday the 19th — “filled with records, cassettes, stylish decor, etc.!”
I’m going to Awaji Island over the long weekend. We ran an article about a year ago about all the fantastic architecture on the island, which is also famous for its huge tidal whirlpools, but what I’m most excited to see is the Otsuka Museum of Art, just across the Naruto Strait in Tokushima. It houses 1,000 full-size reproductions of masterworks of Western art, including a fake Sistine Chapel.
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