Don’t miss Mrs. Tokyo’s, aka Ulrica Marshall, latest article for Tokyo publication Metropolis – an essential guide to the Expat Wife!  Be it Tokyo, London, Paris or New York – every city has its fair share of EWs. And in a slightly altered form the species can even be found here and there in Ibiza… [...]

Good old Elton insists that ‘sorry’ is the hardest word to say, but I disagree. It is without a shadow of a doubt ‘sayonara’ the Japanese for goodbye. In Tokyo we’re at the giddy heights of the sayonara season right now. Schools are about to close for a long humid summer; Champagne corks are popping [...]

Bite the dust, pop your clogs, croak, perish and kick the bucket: There are probably as many words for ‘dying’ as there are ways to die. The earthquake of March 11 in Japan gave me an insight into what my final words may have been. I would like to say that I parted with some [...]

Life would be a whole lot simpler if Mr Tokyo had decamped us to China where, with the snap of a cookie, your fortune is revealed in ambiguous terms like “Man with one chopstick go hungry” or “A bird in hand makes hard to blow nose”. In Japan, the issue of fortune is a far [...]

If vertigo is not in your hypochondric repertoire, I can advise you to book yourself on the next plane to Singapore. (A little Christmas present for yourself and maybe your other half if he or she is lucky…) Dominating the city’s skyline is the brand-spanking new Marina Bay Sands Complex; three interconnecting sky-risers topped with [...]

When the hustle and bustle of Tokyo becomes overwhelming, escape to a more zen life is accessible a mere skip and a hop away. The appropriately nicknamed bullet train, or Shinkansen, arrives in the historic city of Kyoto in a just over two hours, though this kind of speed will set you back about Euro [...]

So the trouble with Tokyo is that you can get into a whole heap of it (trouble that is) without even trying too hard.  Hot on the stiletto heels of my last column; ‘If I could party all night…’ now is probably a good time to shelve out some advice for those whose idea of [...]

What do you get when you add one Oak Door to Two Rooms?  Anywhere else in the world it might amount to a fabulous old-style suite at a top-notch hotel, but in Tokyo it is the sum of the best Tokyo has to offer; bars where everybody knows your name. Fresh off the boat (or [...]

‘Bitch’ is a word that, on occasion, expresses my resentment at others receiving a massage, pedicure or fabulous new hairstyle when I’m missing out. Never has this been more apt than when trotting around the neat streets of Tokyo in my newly-purchased Diana heels (desperately on-trend shoe Mecca over here). Every corner, middle or somewhere [...]

When my BFF Mrs Ibiza first told me she was uprooting and heading to a rustic Balearic Island, I must confess I did have a wee chuckle (okay, so I laughed myself silly). While she would be totally at home at the likes of Aura or the Blue Marlin, I could not in a million [...]