Excerpts from Whisper of the Land

“Let the photo-taking sessions be a ballet instead of a military-style attack or a grueling marathon. In the garden, drink the sun, sweep with the wind, sing like a bird, and dance with a shovel and a rake.”

Read More

Picaro Rising

n China’s major cities there is an elite one percent or so that drive nice cars, eat in nice restaurants, and generally live pleasant lives. They do so thanks in large part to the ninety-nine percent…

Read More

Poetry and Prose, Mirrors and Distance

  Poems of a Penisist by Mutsuo Takahashi. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. Twelve Views from the Distance by Mutsuo Takahashi. Translated by Jeffrey Angles. [T]he University of Minnesota has recently published two remarkable volumes of Japanese literature in translation by one of Japan’s most significant contemporary poets, Mutsuo Takahashi: Poems of a Penisist, and the…

Read More

Peace Engineering at Pangaea

Pangaea Project peacebuilding Asia Kyoto Journal Malaysia children

“Would we be able to decrease the incidence of dangerous generalizations, based solely on one’s background, if there were a place where children around the world could meet and get to know each other? How could we make that possible?”

Read More

Nature and Spirit Reunion

There is much work to be done—not only in “saving the Earth,” as the mantra of the environmental movement goes, but also in saving ourselves and our own souls in the process.

Read More

Far From Home

“The novel hinges on Rashomon-like multiple takes on the hellish circumstances in which one individual prisoner was beaten to death”

Read More

Origami Lion

He asked, “Are you really going to fight?”
“Yes,” I answered tentatively. He looked at me askance, then nodded dismissively. The wrestlers hustled me out of the room.

Read More

Eye-witness News, Revisited

Memories have inevitably faded during the 25 years that have passed since the tragic end of the 1989 Tiananmen student protests, and for the younger generation in China, it’s hardly even a blip in the country’s historical flow to present-day prosperity.

Read More

The Unyielding

Okamoto began to write prose of lyrical and, at times, hyperbolic intensity, exploring modernist concepts of the artist and/or the individual in collision with society, spiritual alienation, and the moral, ethical, and political dilemma of the abandonment of tradition.

Read More

Mishima: Creation, Love, Patriotism, Death

Persona is like a flashcard pastiche, much of it based on interviews and private correspondence fused with the historical events through which Mishima moved. Mishima’s lifelong obsession with death and suicide and his sensational death by seppuku at forty-five, haunts the biography.

Read More

Teahouse Renaissance in Taipei

Wistaria was the first intellectual style teahouse, and created a quiet, clean place to focus on drinking tea. Outside the wood and paper walls of the two-story Japanese house was a garden with bamboo and a koi pond.

Read More

The Name Game

For the Chinese understand that without nature, man is inherently insignificant. It is therefore understandable that of all of the thousands of teas in China, none were specifically named after a person, not even after any of the many emperors who were often responsible for naming them.

Read More

DMZ Diary: Surviving the Future Past Tense

by Lauren W. Deutsch

How does one casually “visit” such an area as a tourist? Should I be afraid of potential for armed attack? Is there a protocol of safe, reverential behavior? Isn’t it more a place of pilgrimage? I had 50 kilometers in Seoul traffic to think about it.

Read More

Edo Expansion in Hokkaido

The sheer lack of general information in English on the indigenous peoples of Hokkaido (formerly known as Ezo) and this book’s focus on two endangered intangible aspects of human survival – ecology and culture – attracted me. But this is no travelogue of pretty pictures and nifty rituals.

Read More