Takeshi Iida, who has lived in New York for nine years and owns the vintage clothing store About Glamour in Williamsburg, learns where to go from these Japanese sources. “They know more about New York than us,” he said.

Japanese tourists, I am told by David Imber, who writes about New York for the trendsetting Japanese magazine Brutus, seek to bring back authentic gifts with a unique story that can involve the recipient. For the past two years, that has meant returning with something from Brooklyn. “If you give somebody something from Brooklyn, you say, ‘Oh, by the way, you might have seen this article, or seen this on NHK television.’ It’s the shared experience that’s important,” Mr. Imber said.

He assured me that there was a “torrent” of tourists from Japan coming to Brooklyn, and I began at a store he chronicled: By Brooklyn, a year-old source of artisanal kitsch on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens.

Indeed, said its owner, Gaia DiLoreto, tourists from Japan want to know the story behind the products they buy — the Brooklyn pickles, ginger syrup, dish towels, T-shirts and soy wax candles (made by a woman in her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment). Ms. DiLoreto has considered printing cards in Japanese describing the provenance of each item, as in a museum, because she gets so many inquiries from Japanese tourists.

Still, in two separate hourlong trips to the store, I did not see any of them. “They were here yesterday,” she said, the first time I dropped in and lingered. And the next time: “You just missed a couple!”

I was on a schedule and figured I would have better luck elsewhere. At the Americana shop Kill Devil Hill on Franklin Street in Greenpoint, a Japanese tourist and writer had left her dog-eared, pen-marked copy of “New York Brooklyn Neighborhood,” a guidebook, days earlier. She was nowhere to be found; I borrowed it.

I ventured to the Whiskey Shop on North 11th Street, which sells locally distilled whiskey from Kings County Distillery in plain apothecary bottles with typed labels. The Japanese Whiskey Council had contacted the store to plan an event.