"I don't know of any magazine where the design and content so seamlessly
blend as Kyoto Journal. The English-language quarterly's circumspect
cultural critique is never compromised but is in fact strengthened by
the graphic design. The peaceful, stylish design is just as original and
scintillating as the magazine's approach to the ideas, interviews, poems
and discussions it contains... Kyoto Journal is forever looking
for original ways of depicting people and life... We recommend it highly."
– Marco Visscher
Ode, Jan/Feb 2005
"Kyoto
Journal, or "KJ" as it is affectionately known, provides a unique
forum for literature, poetry, art, translation, and social and cultural
commentary, not just from Kyoto, but from all of Asia..."
"Kyoto Journal Inspired"
Society
of Writers, Editors and Translators, Tokyo (SWET)
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Thought-provoking
perspectives from Asia...
A
non-profit volunteer-based quarterly magazine established in 1986, Kyoto
Journal offers interviews, essays, translations, humor, fiction, poetry
and reviews, accompanied by memorable photo-essays, original illustrations
and award-winning design. No hype, minimal advertising, maximum reading
value.
IN
DHARAMSALA
by Pico Iyer
One day, I chanced to run into Manuel Bauer, the photographer who was
compiling an extraordinary archive of the Dalai Lama by following him
around from dawn to dusk on most of his travels. As we repaired to a
nearby restaurant for lunch, he told me how he had become the first
photographer, anywhere, to chronicle the flight of modern Tibetans across
the Himalayas, to freedom, risking his life to bring back the story.
It was April when his small group left, he said, just he and a Tibetan
man and the man's daughter, only six years old. But already it was hideously
cold. Chinese soldiers were everywhere, some of them ready to shoot
simply because they were bored. Even on the brightest blue days, the
wind was so fierce that it blew snow into travelers' mouths, and the
snow entered their systems and melted inside their bodies, causing many
to die even in warm weather.
As a group of only three, he said, they moved quickly; they were able
to travel by day, because they were so inconspicuous, not only after
dark, as most refugees do, and they completed the trip in only sixteen
days. But still there was derangement.
"I lost my mind," the calm Swiss photographer said matter-of-factly
in the quiet, sunlit restaurant. "For two, three days, I was in
delirium. And in the delirium I was thinking, `This six year-old girl,
she can move so fast. Why doesn't she carry bags ? I have twenty kilos
of equipment and bags to carry.' I was aggressive with her because I
lost my mind."
When they crossed the Chinese border, he recalled, the trip grew only
more hazardous. Many Nepali officials send Tibetans back to captivity,
to satisfy the rulers in Beijing, though often they rob the Tibetans
first. Even if the refugees can get to Kathmandu, and the care of an
official from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, their problems
are not over.
"Sometimes the U.N. van, even with a U.N. person there, is stopped.
And the Nepali police take everything! These refugees, they have come
out with only a carpet, one bag, and they take that, the Nepali police,
and send them back."
The same story known around the world, among boat people from Vietnam,
or Cubans, even Chinese, trying to steal into America; refugees, already
the most vulnerable people in the world, are perfect prey for pirates
and for corrupt officials.
"So you're safe only when you get to India ?"
"No. I'm sorry to say this" – he had guessed my Indian
heritage – "but the Indian people are not always honest.
Sometimes they attack these refugees. They know they are defenseless."
"So you're really only safe when you get to Dharamsala ?"
And here Manuel said nothing at all.
"When you got there, the man stayed with his daughter ?"
The photographer's eyes were now red. The father deposited his daughter
safely in the Tibetan Children's Village, he said, assured she had a
new life and home there, and then turned around and made the long, treacherous
trip back into Tibet, alone.
This passage is taken from a new book by Pico
Iyer, called The Open Road: The Global
Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Alfred A. Knopf; New York),
and out this spring. Iyer is a longtime resident of Japan and has been
contributing to KJ almost since its first issue. See KJ online
special profile: Pico Iyer is
Lost by Mark Mordue.
FRONTIER
COUNTRY:
The political culture of logging and development
on the periphery in Laos
Benjamin
D. Hodgdon
It is dusk when Khampone and
I arrive at the edge of his village, in the Xekong river valley
in the remote southeast corner of Laos, about fifty miles from the border
with Vietnam. As the sun drops below the horizon behind us, some of
the heat lifts, but it is still in the high nineties, and there is no
breeze in this valley in April, nearing the height of the dry season.
Around us the trees of the dry tropical forest have dropped most of
their leaves, revealing in the distance the foothills of the Annamite
mountains, the beginning of the frontier, where the upland forest tends
into evergreen.
Khampone’s village is a collection of a dozen thatch-roofed houses
on six-foot stilts, arranged in a circle around a central communal structure,
in the style typical of the ethnic minorities indigenous to this part
of Southeast Asia. Each house is home to a family of five to ten people,
making this village small, even by the standards of the indigenous groups
in this thinly-populated part of Laos.
Tonight, however, there are several more inhabitants making their presence
loudly known: a crew of Vietnamese loggers camped out by the near-dry
creek that runs behind Khampone’s house. They are done with their
tree-felling work for the day, now concentrating on an aggressive game
of cards spiked with rough rice whiskey. A boom box hooked up to a corroded
motorbike battery blares out the plaintive pop of a well-known Vietnamese
diva.
“The logging started a few years ago, first at the south edge
of the village, now around the middle and towards the mountains,”
says Khampone, who like most indigenous people in Laos uses only one
name. “We don’t agree with the decision to log, but their
bosses come with government officials from the province, with papers
signed by the Governor himself. They have made it legal, so what can
we do?”
Online
Special: In Translation
The
Man Who Believed in Fairy Tales
by
Ho Anh Thai
trans. Ho Anh Thai & Wayne Karlin
That morning, waking
up in the United States, I was frightened to find that I had turned
into an American. Both the bathroom and the bedroom mirrors—two
severely realistic rectangles that refused to flatter anyone facing
them—assaulted my eyes with the face of a guy with blue eyes and
an aquiline nose. The image I saw, if decked out with a wide-brimmed
hat and frayed leather vest, could pass anywhere for a genuine cowboy.
I began to feel panicked, since I was sure I was really Vietnamese.
I had only come here for a six-month training session. Worse luck, today
I had planned to display myself before Nu’s family. She was Vietnamese-American
and loved the home-country Vietnamese qualities she saw in me. When
her grandparents and parents and aunts had heard that Nu was in love
with the genuine article, they had agreed instantly to the match. Today
the whole family would be gathering to view my true Vietnamese characteristics
and merits...
continued
"The
Barter," by Ho Anh Thai, is featured in KJ#69's In Translation
section.
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Contact
KJ at
feedback[at]kyotojournal.org
Online
Special Features:
Retrospect
Looking Back at the
Tet Offensive
by Donald Kirk
Interview
Alone
With Your Self:
The Hermit Experience
An Interview with Edward (Ted) A. Burger,
director of Amongst White Clouds
by Lauren Deutsch
The
Sun in the Morning Market
You see yourself
carrying a bag of food
in the morning market
A bag of
hawker’s cries,
a bag of
fats, proteins and vitamins
all at bargain prices.
A bag
filled with weight
of life
For a long long time
I continue standing at the intersection,
tasting this life of mine.
Routine is natural.
The sun carries a bag of its own light.
–Yan
Li
Translation by Zhang Er
& Leonard Schwartz
(from a selection of contemporary Chinese poets in #69)
In October 2007, KJ was short-listed again, for the 11th
consecutive year, in the
Utne
Independent Press Awards, once again under
the category of General
Excellence.
In 2004 KJ was nominated for
General Excellence, Design, and
Cultural/Social Coverage.
Previous nominations include
Art & Design Excellence (award winner, 1998),
Local/Regional Coverage, Writing
Excellence,
Design, General Excellence,
and Best Essays.
Many thanks (again!) to all our
volunteer staff and contributors!
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