Current Issue: KJ #69

Cover photo of raft ice by Shimizu Takeo (click to enlarge)

Until the magazine is laid out, we never fully grasp what kind of connections might exist between its no longer separate parts.

Ice and pinhole photography; subaquatic future tourism; negatives, a book of shadows; phototherapy; China, Taiwan, Laos; lands ravaged in wartime and in peace. Genghis Khan, miniature landscapes. What alchemy unfolds?

Sunbursts, fission, flashes of illumination, Rumi's "lighted clarity," the sun in the market; silver bombers reflecting a city ablaze at night; snow streams like comet tails off Karakorum peaks; the Olympics; the Big Rainbow.

Read on....

FULL CONTENTS:

4 Pouring Light into Mombetsu: A Hokkaido Town Looks beyond Global Warming
by John Einarsen
For most of its history a community of scallop harvesters, fishermen, crabbers, miners, and dairy farmers, Mombetsu has recently suffered, like so many rural communities in Japan, from depopulation. The problem is made even worse by the decline in ice floe tourism. Recognizing that the environment really is changing, townspeople have had to come to terms with the situation. Some have seen the retreating ice as an opportunity for a slower, more sustainable approach to community, and they seek to promote Mombetsu as the “Slowest Town in Japan.”

10 Suzuka Yasu – Samsara
12 Ishihara Masumi – Connecting with healing spirit
16 Sato Tokihiro – Building a camera obscura out of ice

Pinhole cameras are less about aiming a lens than about placing a container, less about capturing an image than about gathering one in. Pinholes are slow and exploratory by nature, their images dream-like and poetic. They do not come off assembly lines (at least not until recently), but are handmade, each one a unique expression of its maker. Pinhole “slowness” entices its practitioners back to the present. All these qualities embody a gentler, more spontaneous and respectful relationship to the world.

18 Shadow Diary
Photos by James Jack

16 On the Art of Shaanxi Shadow Play
by Edward A. Burger
Shadow play is a farmer’s art. By day, the puppet-master, storyteller and their troupe work their family land like any other peasants in Shaanxi Province. But as the sun begins its slow descent towards night, something special happens. These farmers wash the earth from their hands and pick up their lutes as virtuosos in one of China’s most delicate and intricate performance arts. The quiet village night becomes a living theater of love-struck maidens, fearless warriors and righteous kings. And the shadows come out to play.

See also online feature interview with Edward A. Burger

ENCOUNTERS
28 In the Valley of Lijiang – Or Giladi
Dr Ho, a small mercurial man who appeared to be in his early eighties, shook my hand and immediately burst into a monologue about his achievements. Despite being suppressed by the authorities during the years of the Cultural Revolution, he had carried on his work and cured many thousands of patients from a variety of ailments, using locally sourced herbal medicines. His crowning achievement was curing an American patient of leukemia, and as he was telling me about it he pulled out a photocopy of an American pathology lab report as proof that the patient had been actually cured.

30 Kashgar to Tashkurgan – Notes from Far West China – Scott Ezell
We sit on the floor eating hand-made noodles, Mahoi’s sister gives me a shy smile and an extra scoop of sauce, consisting of goat meat, peppers, and pickled greens. She places coals from the stove into a steel basin for heat; we sit in a circle with our food in our hands. When the broadcast ends the radio lapses back to static. Mahoi turns it off, and the only sound is the wind sharpening itself like a blade against the corners of the hut..

POETRY
29 The Negative – Arthur Sze
33 Chinese Art and Greek Art – Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)
50 The Sun in the Marketplace – Yan Li (trans. Zhang Er & Leo Schwarz)
50 Thanks for That – Yan Li (trans. Dennis Mair)
50 A Poem on Things – Zhang Di (Trans Jeanne Hong Zang)
82 The Firebombing of Tokyo – Tony Barnstone

35 Bontei – Marc P. Keane

36 The Central Question – Paul Kahn
How the Mongols managed to take over China and Korea, the Middle East up to the borders of Syria and Egypt, and what is today known as Russia, this is not an easy question to answer. I do not propose to even try. Perhaps the more constructive question, the one we should really ask ourselves today is why it is so difficult to understand?

I would propose that the main reason is that the Mongols are identified with the stereotype of the Barbarians. Barbarians in the Mediterranean tradition are, tautologically speaking, invaders without culture who destroy civilization. In the modern world, civilization destroys less sophisticated, less advanced cultures.

CONVERSATION
38 Re-Branding China: Wang Min and the Beijing Image
When Wang Min refers to his current project as “the biggest design job in the world,” he’s not joking. His responsibility as “Director of Image and the Look” of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games includes overseeing planning and coordination of every detail of its visual appearance, from the overall color design palette to individual sports pictograms, street banners, and even the Olympic medals themselves. Worldwide, the audience for this huge event is estimated at 4.5 billion viewers.

FICTION
42 Tunnel of Love – Tze Ming Mok
It was the third time they’d met. Xiali was still a government-accredited Three Gorges tour-guide, but now did conveyor belt underwater tours through a small subaqueous village heritage museum. Harry’s Mandarin had improved.
Loudhailers were eschewed in the acoustically sensitive tunnel, where voices snapped clean and reassuringly close, like the rustle of hospital sheets. Sections of the moving belt made subtle clunks. Xiali’s voice in English was charming and upturned.
“Now here we are at Santou village, famous for being an educated, curative village of apothecaries, dentists, acupuncturists and hairdressers for the local farmers. See the quaint drawers in this shopfront, just behind that school of fish.”

REALIZATIONS
52 Land and Money – William Stimson
“Where I’d like to go,” I said, “is to your mother’s rice paddy and to your grandmother’s village. And maybe also to see your father’s factory.” I didn’t want to be a tourist. I wanted to see the real Taiwan.
I’d asked over and over to see those places. There was something about Taiwan that still didn’t seem quite right to me. I needed to fit this place I’d come to somehow with the one I thought I was coming to. I had this notion that I could understand Shuyuan’s family and her people if I could just spend some time at her mother’s rice paddy.

58 Frontier Country – Benjamin Hodgdon
... It is a reality that stands in stark contrast to the image of Laos touted by the tour books: the “Shangri-La” of Southeast Asia, the new hip destination for a growing number of eco-chic travelers drawn to Laos as an unspoiled natural wonder, where the “real Asia” can be experienced. Beyond the high-end ecotourism retreats, in frontier country, logging and the timber trade are stripping countless villages of their most valuable resource – the timber removed from Khampone’s village last year alone was worth upwards of half a million dollars – while enriching a small clique of the Lao political elite and Vietnamese sawmillers, all in the name of economic development.

52 IN TRANSLATION
Troopers’ Inn – Takenishi Hiroko, trans. Lawrence Rogers
The maid, fuming, was at the sink washing dishes and talking to herself.

“That fool officer! Why didn’t he let his men eat? We made a special effort for them! An officer who can’t feel for his men can’t be a decent leader!”

She went on vilifying the officer. Hisashi’s mother sensed the maid’s complaints were on the mark. She began to think that the officer had not even considered their feelings, let alone what his men felt, but then she reconsidered. No, she decided, she couldn’t expect it to not have been a trial for him as well. How much easier it would have been to have given the rice cakes to his men. Putting it in that light, she felt sorry for the officer as well, not just his men.

72 The Barter – Ho Anh Thai (trans. Ho Anh Thai & Wayne Karlin)
While I was studying in India, I had a German classmate with whom I also shared a room in the hostel. In a word, we were roommates.
The first day we met, he introduced himself with these words: “I am Heinrich, from Bavaria, located in the south of Germany.”

I told him I had read the work of the German poet Heinrich Heine, his namesake. He shrugged—nowadays, he said, everyone was writing poetry. I abandoned nineteenth century German literature and mentioned Heinrich Boll and Erich Maria Remarque. He looked at me suspiciously, as if I were trying to trap him into admitting some association with criminals wanted by Interpol.

See also online feature "The Man who Believed in Fairy Tales" by Ho Anh Thai

76 CONVERSATION
Zen at War: The Buddhist Enablement of Japanese Militarism
Kathy Arlyn Sokol talks with Brian Daizen Victoria
We tend to believe that in certain doctrines – for example, the doctrine of Jihad in Islam – that if those people would just get rid of Jihad and the idea of Jihad, then Islam wouldn’t be so bad. But what I’ve tried to show is that unless we also explore the economic pressures, political pressures, the sociological pressures, the psychological pressures, and all of those various aspects, then we are not going to understand what it is that’s going on that leads all religions, at one time or another, to sacralize violence.

82 REVIEWS
A History of Japanese Body-Suit Tattooing, Mark Posden & Marco Bratt, reviewed by Dustin Leavitt
Haiku Humor, Wit and Folly in Japanese Poems and Prints, Stephen Addisswith Fumuko Y. Yamamoto and Akira Y. Yamamoto, reviewed by William J. Higginson
For Gods, Ghosts & Ancestors, Janet Lee Scott, reviewed by Lauren W. Deutsch
Plastic Culture: How Japanese Toys Conquered the World, reviewed by Eric Luong
JAPANAMERICA: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S., Roland Kelts, reviewed by Ken Rodgers
The Politics of Nanjing: An Impartial Investigation, Kitamura Minoru (trans. By Hal Gold), reviewed by Russel Moses
Amongst White Clouds; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, ...and Spring; Why Has Bodhidarma Left For the East?, reviewed by Lauren W. Deutsch (See also online feature interview with Edward A. Burger, director of Amongst White Clouds)
Women of the Way: Discovering 2,000 Years of Buddhist Wisdom, Sallie Tisdale, reviewed by Lauren E. Bean
Losing Kei, Suzanne Kamata, reviewed by Colleen Shiels
The Magical Butterfly and Other Stories, Sherry Nakanishi, reviewed by Justin Ellis
Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron, reviewed by James Dalglish

88 BLOGOLOGY
Making a Difference: Tales of an American Physical Therapist in Vietnam
www.steadyfootsteps.org

98 RAMBLE
The Big Rainbow – Robert Brady
We behold full and long-term rainbows all the time out here in the countryside, as compared to the couple of minutes of barely distinguishable fragments of arc we used to see between buildings in the city sometimes, already kind of faded and archaeological, like a suddenly exposed artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern air, such as that is, but these gateways of light we see arching from mountains to Lake are real rainbows, wide ones, deep and full ones, all the way from here to there, in the true meaning of those terms as used here in the countryside...

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