This Month on Maction Planet – March 2026

March 2026 was relentless in the best possible way. It began in Tokyo, crossed to Singapore and Sydney, then returned to the build-up to the cherry blossoms. Whisky festivals, art fairs, mascot encounters, and a rain-soaked NPB opener at Meiji Jingu. In between: architectural revelations in Karuizawa, food time travel with an izakaya historian, Rome landing in a Tokyo bar, and more Onitsuka Tiger than most. Thirty-one days. Not one of them wasted.

Featured image: Meeting Tatsuo Miyajima, one of my art heroes, at Art Fair Tokyo was not in the script for March 2026. The 20th edition of Japan’s largest and Asia’s oldest art fair ran from 13 to 15 March at the Tokyo International Forum, bringing together 141 galleries from across the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and North America. Miyajima’s Sea of Time – TOHOKU project, created in collaboration with 3,000 people connected to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, uses blinking LED counters to carry the individual thoughts of each participant. The ambition now is to establish a permanent museum in the Tohoku region to house the work. Miyajima first came to international attention at the Venice Biennale in 1988, and his commitment to art as a form of testimony and commemoration has only deepened since. A legend.

Japan has never met a marketing problem it couldn’t solve with a mascot.

Meet ビアっくま (Biakkuma – a portmanteau of ビア (bia, beer) and くま (kuma, bear)), the official character of Perfect Beer Kitchen. This bow-tied legend suddenly appeared, his sign reading お友だち募集中 – ‘looking for friends’ – and found me, Elif, Alejandro and Justin ready for a photo op.

These encounters are unscripted… but I spend a great deal of time thinking about how to put my guests in the path of moments like this. The harder I practise, the luckier I get.

Harriet decided a mid-tour break was in order. When that moment comes, there is only one correct response: a Toyota Alphard. The Alphard is, without question, the greatest vehicle humanity has ever produced. Toyota named it after Alphard, the brightest star in the constellation Hydra – from the Arabic al-fard, meaning ‘the solitary one’. Fitting, given that nothing else on the road comes close. Comfortable enough to feel like a reward, practical enough to get you straight back into the action.

By the way, this was on 2 March, just a few hours before I. headed to Tokyo Haneda to fly to Singapore…

… where I had a very productive 15-hour stopover on 3 March. Kengo Kuma: “MAKERU” Architecture – The Ecology of Rhythm and Particles opened at New Art Museum Singapore on 24 January 2026 and runs until 14 June, and the installation that greets you is this: hundreds of pale wooden members assembled into a vast lattice that spans the ceiling before cascading down one wall in an increasingly dense weave. MAKERU – to yield – is Kuma’s central proposition: not weakness, but a rigorous method of amplifying existing forces rather than dominating them. Kuma’s portfolio includes the Japan National Stadium and the V&A Dundee, yet standing inside this piece, the scale of the idea feels more present than any building could make it. Curated by Yuko Hasegawa, former director of both the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and MOT Tokyo, this is one of the most considered architecture exhibitions I have encountered.

I flew into Sydney on 4 March and by 1800 that evening I was at Bar Besuto, one of the most serious Japanese whisky destinations in the southern hemisphere, preparing to host seventeen guests who turned out for a Kanpai Planet x Bar Besuto tasting that covered six exceptional drams.

Given the short notice with which the event came together, the turnout was humbling, not least because one couple had made the drive up from Canberra. A huge thank you to Joel [pictured] and his team for hosting, and to every guest who joined us.

On 5 March I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and watched Susan Norrie’s Transit (2011), held jointly with Tate. This 14-minute single-channel video opens with a JAXA rocket launch before moving through the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the anti-nuclear protests that followed Fukushima, and the 2010 eruption of Sakurajima, with the shaman Yoshimaru Higa providing a spoken thread throughout. For someone who lives in Japan, it was not an easy watch.

Also on 5 March, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I spotted this: a Meiji-period bronze monkey, dressed in a waistcoat and peering at a peach through a brass-rimmed magnifying glass, made around 1900 with an almost uncanny precision – individual strands of fur rendered in patinated bronze, fingers curled just so. When sword-carrying was banned in Japan in 1876, metalworkers turned their skills to animal bronzes for international export and world fairs.

The tap badge says it all: ‘Born in Manly, Japanese Style Lager’. 4 Pines Brewing Company has been brewing in Manly since 2008, and their rice lager – brewed with pilsner malt and flaked rice, now owned via Asahi Beverages through its Carlton & United Breweries subsidiary – took Champion Packaged Beer at the 2023 Sydney Royal Beer & Cider Show. It wasn’t my favourite drink of the trip, but that’s beside the point: seeing the influence of Japanese drinks culture extending into Australian craft beer is exactly the kind of thing that gets the Kanpai Planet antenna twitching. The world of Japanese drinks keeps expanding, and I’m here for it.

MOD. Dining occupies the lower level of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Naala Badu building, and its raspberry and lemon myrtle Japanese cheesecake is reason enough to visit independently of the art. The Japanese cheesecake – soufflé-style, characteristically light and barely sweet, its texture achieved by whipping egg whites separately and baking in a bain-marie – was the creation of Tomotaro Kuzuno of Kobe’s Morozoff, inspired by a German käsekuchen he encountered in Berlin in 1969. It has since spread far beyond Japan. Here it arrives topped with cream and freeze-dried raspberries, and it was excellent.

Also at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and one of the highlights of the visit: Yayoi Kusama’s Flowers that Bloom in the Cosmos (2022), commissioned specifically for the Sydney Modern Project with funds from the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation and the Gandel Foundation. Kusama, born in 1929, grew up surrounded by plants in her family’s nursery; her signature dots trace back to childhood hallucinations in which she saw light and flowers all around her.

The Maction Planet Onitsuka Tiger World Tour continues.

Founded in Kobe in 1949 by Kihachiro Onitsuka, the brand eventually merged with two other firms in 1977 to form ASICS Corporation, before being relaunched in 2002 as the fashion-forward offshoot it is today. Here it is at 395 George Street on a Sydney evening – and yes, I am sponsored by ASICS but in the worst sense where I pay full price for the shoes and they have absolutely no idea who I am.

I’m back! Just in time for this, which started four hours later:

I’ve been to 109 countries and have met very few people as remarkable as Chris and Sarah. We first crossed paths over 15 years ago on an Intrepid tour through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania – a month of shared adventure that forged a friendship I’ve treasured ever since. Our last day together had been in Zanzibar. When they got in touch to say they were coming to Japan and wanted to book a tour, I couldn’t have been happier. Here we are under the アメ横 (Ameyoko) arch, large smiles very much speaking for themselves.

Meet Orante-kun, the orange hand-shaped character of Asakusa’s Orange Street (オレンジ通り) – a yurukyara who has been cheerfully presiding over this shopping street for years, most famously perched atop the local post box. He was delighted (I assume) to meet Jim and Sheila… and if he wasn’t, I was.

It was an honour to guide Jim and Sheila on a Maction Planet full-day tour before their cruise and to support them to make sure they had a fantastic time on their return.

The Uchimura Kanzō Memorial Stone Church in Karuizawa’s Hoshino Area is one of the most extraordinary pieces of architecture I have encountered anywhere. Completed in 1988 and designed by American architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg – a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright – it was built to honour Uchimura Kanzo (1861–1930), founder of Japan’s Nonchurch Movement, who believed that faith should be personal rather than institutional. The overlapping stone and glass arches seem to grow from the forest floor rather than having been built upon it.

The Birch Moss Chapel at the Karuizawa New Art Museum is the work of Kengo Kuma, completed in May 2015. Its 66-square-metre interior incorporates nearly a hundred white birch trunks into the structure itself – the forest brought inside, or more precisely, the building made indistinguishable from the forest around it. All-glass walls slide fully open; the roof and the 42 chairs within are also glass. Kuma’s stated aim was to challenge the fundamental purpose of a building – to separate inside from outside – and to create instead what he called ‘an open and tolerant place’. Standing in it, you understand exactly what he means.

Aloha Whisky Rising #29 on 14 March was a blast. The event was Session #2 of The A,B,C of Scotch. This edition featured nine drams from Fettercairn, Dailuaine and Edradour, with participants challenged to identify older expressions, peated variants, sherry casks and ABV rankings before attempting to name the distilleries blind. I came joint top – and would have taken the win outright had the tiebreaker not been settled by rock-paper-scissors. In reality, everyone who attended was a winner!

The Japanese Craft Whisky Festa 2026 took place on 15 March at EBiS303 in Ebisu, organised by the Japan Whisky Promotion Committee and run by the Whisky Culture Research Institute. Now in its second edition, following a well-received debut in October 2025, the morning session brought together some of Japan’s most exciting smaller producers – distilleries that can sometimes get lost in the shadow of their larger peers at bigger events. It was a genuine pleasure to give them the focused attention they deserve.

Here I am in conversation with Tetsuya Nishibori, head distiller at Nikko Kaido Oyama Distillery in Oyama City, Tochigi – Tochigi’s first whisky distillery, established in 2022 within the historic Nishibori Sake Brewery. A University of Tokyo philosophy graduate who turned sake brewing expertise into whisky, Tetsuya is doing things nobody else is doing. Thank you to the Whisky Culture Research Institute for putting on such a fantastic event.

And then it begins.

Tokyo’s cherry blossom season is not a single event but a procession. Japan recognises over 600 varieties of sakura in total – wild species, natural hybrids, regional cultivars and registered types – though the roughly 60 most commonly planted ornamental varieties are what most people encounter in parks and along streets. The season opens in early March with the kawazu-zakura and other early bloomers, but it is from mid-March that anticipation genuinely builds, as multiple species come into flower in overlapping waves.

Here I am at Sensoji with Parul and Elina under a magnificent shidarezakura – the weeping cherry. I spent three full days with these guys at the start and end of their Japan trip, allowing us to catch the start and the full bloom of the blossoms together.

Another magnificent weeping cherry provides the backdrop for this group shot – me with Lee, Will, Debbie and Eliana. We spent four days together exploring the world’s greatest metropolis, covering serious ground: the cherry blossom spots, the hidden corners, against the backdrop of a city-wide hunt for Onitsuka Tiger shoes that took us from one side of Tokyo to the other. Everything is connected.

A brief interlude from the guiding. Starbucks Japan launched two limited-edition spring drinks on 13 March – the Choux Cream Frappuccino and the Choux Cream Latte, available until 20 April and making their Japan debut, having already been popular spring releases at Starbucks Korea. Both are inspired by the choux cream pastry: the Frappuccino is built on a vanilla-flavoured milk caramel base with custard whipped cream and crunchy pastry pieces on top; the Latte combines espresso with the same base, where the bittersweetness of the coffee balances the custard sweetness. I tried the Frappuccino at the Starbucks overlooking Shibuya Crossing. Both receive the Kanpai Planet stamp of approval.

Here’s Jogu, the Engle’s mascot, is enjoying teamLab Borderless.

Who isn’t happy at Shinjuku Gyoen? The Bernsteins, guests of Maction Planet for 3 days, certainly were.

On 25 March, I attended the Japan Sake and Shochu Information Centre’s sake seminar, ‘History of Izakaya as Japanese Drinking Culture& – a fascinating evening exploring the roots of Japan’s drinking culture in the Edo period, with sake sampling and authentic Edo-style appetisers to accompany the talk. The special guest was food culture historian Ryoichi Iino, a graduate of both Waseda and Meiji Universities, board member and lecturer at Hattori Nutrition College, and author of works including The Birth of the Izakaya and Sushi, Tempura, Soba, and Unagi. His argument – that understanding the Edo-era izakaya deepens any modern visitor’s experience of its descendant – is one I find entirely persuasive. A privilege to meet him.

When Lokesh and Elina returned to Tokyo for their tour on 26 March, some Somei Yoshino trees were in full bloom!

Catherine, Brian and Charlotte Hunnicutt trusted me with their time in Japan, and that trust is never something I take lightly. Planning their whole trip, and guiding them in Tokyo was a genuine honour – the kind of work that reminds me why I do this. Delivering an experience that far exceeds what people hoped for never gets old.

On 27 March, I headed to Quarter Room in Shimokitazawa for Hijack Room Vol. 26, a guest bartender event featuring Tumi Sachs, head bartender at Il Marchese in Rome – Europe’s first amaro bar, home to over 500 varieties of the Italian bitter liqueur alongside several house-made expressions. I had met Tumi at the izakaya event earlier in the week and went along to show my support. The evening paired Japanese amaro Scarlett with Italian amaro cocktails, a collision of two botanical traditions that worked rather well. Amaro – the word simply means “bitter” in Italian – has its roots in ancient herbal tonics, traditionally made by macerating herbs, spices, roots, citrus peel and bark in alcohol, and it has become an increasingly familiar presence in Japan beyond dedicated bartending circles. Tumi brought Rome to Tokyo for one night. Worth every sip.

31 March brought the opening game of the 2026 NPB season at Meiji Jingu Stadium – Tokyo Yakult Swallows vs the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, and the rain that had fallen all day did nothing to dampen the occasion. Lindsey, Matt and their boys were there for the opening ceremony, a beautiful rendition of the national anthem, and the early innings – what a way to be introduced to Japanese baseball.

The Swallows ran out 8–3 winners, leaving them unbeaten through the first four games of the season. A magnificent start to the year for the home side, and a privilege to share it.

And finally… the 5th anniversary celebrations continue on Kanpai Planet with a video revealing the channel’s top five most popular videos of all time as voted for by YOU in our 5th anniversary survey. Was your favourite selected? Watch to find out!

Maction Planet runs bespoke Private Tours and Experiences in Tokyo, and beyond. To book yours, or to purchase a gift card, contact us at info@mactionplanet.com

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