INSIGHTS FROM ASIA

Hearing their Voices: the Afghan Women’s Writing Project

September 17, 2019

In 2004 when Masha Hamilton first visited Afghanistan, Afghan women sought to begin careers, get educations and participate in public life…when she returned, life in Afghanistan had become more difficult, and opportunities for women were increasingly scarce. She established the Afghan Women’s Writing Project to create a forum for both women’s education and their voices.

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“We all have a brush”

September 2, 2019

“In Aikidō, the other guy may be big and strong, and you may be thrown down. But you have a chance to throw down the opponent, too. We had the nuclear arms race, that was probably the worst scenario of global collective suicide that we had faced as humanity, and we reversed it.”

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Surrounded by Trees

August 21, 2019

When I was six, I developed a grass-like skin disease around my neck after my family and I visited a hilly area in Tagaytay. My grandfather, Tatay Marcial, who believed it was a punishment from a naughty dwende (elf), warned me against expressing my admiration for plants, especially those that grow in the wild.

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Mastery of Movement

July 22, 2019

Shodō is the Japanese word for calligraphy. It means not just penmanship, but the Way, or Path of writing. In China and Japan, Shodō has long been regarded as one of the most important forms of art.

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Meld

June 7, 2019

Growing up in a rural New England suburb, the only thing different about our family was that we ate rice every night and that our ancient Taiwanese grandfather would practice tai chi on the lawn.

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Kazuo Ishiguro on Asian-British Writers

May 13, 2019

“Apart from a transient business community, there’s nothing in England that could be called a Japanese society. In addition, when I arrived in 1960, there were very few Japanese in England at all. Therefore, as I grew up, the problem of which society I belonged to never arose.  I now accept the fact that I am a mixture, a cultural compound.”

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Engawa

April 10, 2019

I slide my feet along the floor, the gray, smooth, one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old floor of plaster of lime and clay and gravel. I think of all of the feet, the generations of feet, that have shuffled across it, lived on it, of the people who’ve sipped tea standing in the same spot.

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Sar Kaley (these so-called lucky birds)

March 11, 2019

No perfect way to earn merit in the end. Even something as simple as a bird becomes complicated. Yet still those bamboo cages at the foot of the stairs, a few kyat, and you’re compelled to have this thing all threadbare and shivering in our hands. And what was the wish again?

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Tomorrowland

December 17, 2018

I have suffered all my life from what one might call nostalgia for the future. In 2011, two years before my first cancer diagnosis, my husband and I spent the summer in Japan. I thought that if the future were to be found anywhere, it would be there, in bubble-fueled, Midas-fingered Tokyo…

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The Chaebol: Geoffrey Cain on corporate governance and politics in South Korea

November 24, 2018

“If you look at the history of Korea, and even its current events the entire Korean peninsula has a kind-of dark story behind it. I think that Koreans have been disappointed by their leaders a lot and they have been disappointed by their businesses too. But the culture there is that you have to tolerate things in the national interest…”

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A Cabin In The Pines: On Urban Suffering And Chinese Landscape Painting

October 19, 2018

When I moved to San Francisco, in my early twenties, I got my ass handed to me.  Not only was I a newbie in the big bad city, I was also fresh from the woods, from a six-month stint tracking raptors as a US Forest Service biological science technician…

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Upholding Lightness

October 15, 2018

Italian and Singaporean design duo Francesca Lanzavecchia and Hunn Wai on their latest collaboration, the challenges in taking advantage of new technologies, and the tools the next generation of designers need to navigate their ever-changing field.

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The Museum of Forbidden Art

October 7, 2018

The museum’s obscurity, and Savitsky’s own lack of social standing or professional reputation in the art world, meant that no one in authority thought to look at what he was doing. Savitsky took the opportunity to quietly buy up the works of Russian painters who had been killed, sent to the gulags in Siberia, or otherwise fallen foul of the State.

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Kyoto Journal - Tree

Giant Bonsai

August 24, 2018

 “Cut it down. You’ll have a better view of the rhodies,” one neighbor suggested.

But why? I loved seeing the fir’s textured bark arcing across the backyard and then shooting up to the sky.

“This is the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen, “ my mother said. “It’s a giant bonsai without wires.”

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American Bonsai photo

American Bonsai: Life by a Thousand Cuts

August 24, 2018

My father-in-law was a flyer. A man of the air and sky. A man of dreams and bravery, of duty and responsibility. He was fiercely loyal to family and country even when they were not so loyal to him.

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The Hibakusha Peace Movement

A Distant Flickering Light: The Hibakusha Peace Movement

August 7, 2018

Mrs. Koko Kondo showing the manuscript written by her father, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, that inspired John Hersey’s classic, Hiroshima. Do you think the Hibakusha are still important? They are still very important. This is because those individuals of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only humans who have ever experienced and survived a nuclear bombing. That…

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Reflections on the Singapore Summit: An Interview with Lee Jae-bong

Reflections on the Singapore Summit: An Interview with Lee Jae-bong

July 12, 2018

This interview with Lee Jae-bong, a Professor of Peace Studies of Wonkwang University, South Korea, was conducted in the early afternoon of June 12, 2018 while the United States-North Korean Summit was taking place in Singapore. Would you please express your overall view of the significance of the Singapore Summit, which is being conducted as…

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oranguatan rescued palm oil plantation

Rescuing and Protecting Sumatra’s Critically Endangered Orangutans

February 20, 2018

The Orangutan Information Center (OIC) is a trail-blazing organization constituted of a team of dedicated Indonesian conservationists and veterinarians determined to save the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan from a host of threats…

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Kham & Larung Gar 8: A photographic meditation

Kham & Larung Gar: A photographic meditation

May 13, 2017

Politically, Kham has been, and still is, a very troubled region. In 1959 after the Chinese invasion and the national uprising many people were killed, or lost their homes and had to take refuge, mostly in neighboring India.

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mongolia invasions of japan kyoto journal

Formative Memory: The Thirteenth-century Mongolian Invasions and their Impact on Japan

April 26, 2017

The second Mongolian invasion of Japan was like a sequel to a blockbuster movie; bigger in scale, larger cast, bigger budget, and the same director (Kublai Khan).

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Unbridled Perception

September 13, 2016

The founders of the Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography bring their practice to Asia with a pioneering workshop in Japan.

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