Kyoto Journal Issue 99: Travel, Revisited (Digital)

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travel, revisited

This digital issue of Kyoto Journal looks at the phenomenon of travel, whether as a pursuit of a deeper understanding of the world’s diversity, as a plunge into the unknown, or a deliberate immersion in a known unknown. We also wanted to reconsider how travel is reported or discussed in travelogues or online, and to re-imagine post-COVID travel. Will new technology enabling virtual sightseeing satisfy a new generation of armchair travelers, or will a surge in domestic tourism be matched by a flowering of local cultures celebrating uniqueness in crafts, cuisine, local history and heritage, interpreted by truly local guides?

 

 

Take a peek inside the issue including the contents pages here!

 

In visually-rich KJ 99, Nigel Triffit questions how we engage with those whose lives we enter by happenstance when travelling; Jeff Fuchs and Robert van Koesveld commend guides who have helped them more deeply appreciate otherwise inaccessible surroundings, Elliot and Miyu Rowe bike across the planet, poet Luo Ying and Scott Ezell reach physical extremes on foot, while Pico Iyer, Kimberly Hughes, Prairie Stuart-Wolff, Edward J. Taylor, Chuck Kohalyk, Mormei Zanke and Robert Weis explore “domestically” within Japan. Joji Sakurai reminds us that virtual travel may be experienced through a printed page, as well as a headset, Yahia Lababidi surveys spiritual landscapes, and Yoshida Hatsusaburo maps birds’-eye views. Winifred Bird bows to Kyoto’s gastronomical shrine to bamboo shoots; Bernhard Kellerman, fresh off the boat, is smitten by his first Japanese teahouse in 1910 Maizuru, and Hans Brinckmann heads off-trail in early 1950s Wakayama. Natalie Goldberg goes in search of haikuist/painter Buson: Siddharth Dasgupta rambles through old Bombay, where “tea stirs memory”; John Brandi and Renée Gregorio take the Shatabdi Express to Agra, and readers share travel stories from Korea, Cambodia, Shiga and Taiwan.

Also featured: the iconoclastic 1970s manga artist Kuniko Tsurita, veteran Kyoto activist Aileen Smith on Minamata (and the upcoming Hollywood movie of the same name starring Johnny Depp); Roger Pulvers’ ‘The Return of Lafcadio Hearn’ — plus a selection of poetry, and a plethora of reviews. All in all, 218 pages of rediscoveries.

 

Cover: Pereval Toguz-Tro, between Jalal Abad and Kazarman, Kyrgyzstan by Elliot Rowe

219pp; published Dec, 2020

¥550 (approx US $5)

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