Japanese
Adventures

A different side of Japan begins where the cities end.
In this new issue of Tempura, we follow the trails, forests and mountain paths that reveal another face of the archipelago.

Japan is often imagined as a land of ultra-dense cities and perfectly raked Zen gardens. Yet beyond the concrete and neon lies another archipelago: little-known hiking trails, mountain lodges perched high above the valleys, rice fields and bamboo forests stretching as far as the eye can see. For this new issue, we laced up our hiking boots and left the paved roads behind to explore a Japan that remains largely overlooked, while reflecting on another way of relating to nature and the living world.

Join us for a breath of fresh air across the Japanese archipelago!

About Tempura

TEMPURA is the first magazine in Europe devoted to the cultures of Japan. Since 2020, our team of journalists and photographers has travelled the country from Hokkaido to Okinawa, searching for stories that rarely make it into the usual narratives.
We start from a simple conviction: the richness of Japan reveals itself only through its diversity. Work and the body, minorities and subcultures, family and gender relations, intimacy and sexuality. No subject is off limits. Issue after issue, TEMPURA sketches an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Japan. It does not claim to provide definitive answers, but it tries, at the very least, to ask the right questions.

In this issue

🧗In Chamonix, we investigate a little-known chapter in mountaineering history: the Japanese climbers whose passion for the Alps, and for the people who live there, left lasting traces.

🏕️ We pitch our tent in Japanese-style campgrounds, where heated low tables coexist with meticulously engineered high-tech barbecues.
 
📷 Wildlife photographer Manabu Miyazaki has spent decades observing animals in the forests. We meet a man who has chosen patience, solitude and a life close to the wild.
 
🖼️ Philosopher Augustin Berque helps us understand the Japanese relationship to landscape, one shaped as much by contemplation as by harmony.
 
🎒 We take you along an epic 210-kilometre trail through Shizuoka, where nature and culture intertwine at every step.

🎣 And as more Japanese women take up fishing, hiking and camping, outdoor activities are becoming a subtle form of resistance to traditional expectations and the weight of patriarchy.

Also in the magazine :

🕌 Our long-form investigation immerses readers in the Kurdish communities of Tokyo’s suburbs, caught between cultural heritage and an ongoing struggle for recognition.

🥦 Journalist Johann Fleuri recounts how she unexpectedly became vegetarian in the land of tonkatsu and ramen.
 
🚃 Travel across Japan by train and by season in our new column, One Train After Another.
 
👨‍🍳 Writer Ryoko Sekiguchi reflects on chefs without borders who constantly reinvent culinary traditions.
 
🐈 Cult author Jake Adelstein explores the Japanese relationship with pets, and what it reveals about society.
 
🛖 In the mountains of Nasu, we spend the night in a remote refuge lit by oil lamps, run by the same family for five generations.

🥾 And in Tokyo, tucked away in a discreet workshop, we meet a craftsman who has been making hiking boots by hand since the 1970s.

We are currently putting the finishing touches on the issue and plan to send it to print in mid-April. Copies should arrive in your mailbox between late April and early May.

Timeline

Preorders : March 19 to April 19
Printing : mid-April
Delivery : early May