INSIGHTS FROM ASIA

hiroshima couple

Holding the Ashen Bark: Voices from Hiroshima on the Historic Visit by President Obama

July 28, 2016

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” President Obama asked himself and the world in his historic speech on May 27th, 2016. I too, ask myself why I’ve been to Hiroshima over and over, and why I took the chance to witness this historic visit by the then-sitting US president.

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Boundaries

July 17, 2016

I look outside again and something happens, at once strange and wonderful. I breathe, deeply, and the universe inhales with me. Suddenly, and with great force, the air expands…

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The Things We’ve Gone Through Together: Children orphaned by AIDS build a loving family in rural Cambodia

December 26, 2015

I have come as a volunteer from the United States, to live with children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic that has raged in Cambodia since the 1990s…

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Darjeeling

Tibetan Butter Tea and Pink Gin: Life in Old Darjeeling

September 5, 2015

My grandmother compiled a cookbook, written out in a foolscap quarto notebook in her small, neat hand. It had recipes for everything from aloo dhum potato curry to hot ale punch to American fudge, and included meal plans and guest lists…

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My Part in the Downfall of Ferdinand Marcos

July 21, 2015

Tabasco sauce? Great topping for ice cream. Jalapeños? Mild, mouth-refreshing chewing gum… I’d graduated, man. Nothing could touch me now…

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Meeting With Sanshin: An Interview with Hiah Park, Lover of the Mountain God

February 16, 2015

Manshin is a title of respect identifying a mudang, a female Korean shaman. For centuries manshin had been openly persecuted, their practices disrupted and shrines destroyed, their artistry desecrated to entertainment…

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Kim Keumhwa’s Everyday Shamanism

February 8, 2015

Kim Keumhwa, Korea’s renowned charismatic naramansin, “national” shaman, is already awake…preparing to greet the spirits lodged in her small sindang (spirits’ shrine room) next to her bedroom.

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Remembering the 2004 Tsunami

December 16, 2014

My friends and I fled the approaching wave in a mad scramble up a dense jungle hill, and during the hours that followed it seemed that the world as we knew it had ended.

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Excerpts from Whisper of the Land

December 10, 2014

“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.”

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Filmmaker and Activist Kamanaka Hitomi

December 3, 2014

Like other artists and activists before her who have unequivocally opposed nuclear technology in all its forms, Kamanaka Hitomi doesn’t regard her own ideology as a matter of present-day left and right.

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Pangaea Project peacebuilding Asia Kyoto Journal Malaysia children

Peace Engineering at Pangaea

November 11, 2014

“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?”

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hope east asian peace process Kyoto Journal Japan China Korea

Hope for the East Asian Peace Process

August 9, 2014

With the human race as a whole increasingly threatened by global climate change, overpopulation and food scarcity, our very survival depends on our ability to overcome history-based animosities…

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Teahouse Renaissance in Taipei

May 13, 2014

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.

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The Name Game

May 13, 2014

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.

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DMZ Diary: Surviving the Future Past Tense

May 13, 2014

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.

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Karen Ma Excess Baggage Portrait

Crossing Inter-Asian Cultural Divides

December 27, 2013

Karen Ma is the author of the recently published Excess Baggage, a novel about the lives of a Chinese immigrant family in Japan.

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We Promise to Fix it Back

December 27, 2013

Will this catastrophe in Japan change us and lead to a more innovative, caring and interconnected way of living? Will the outbreaks of altruism and civic enthusiasm propel us to take similar steps? Will we demand ingenious forms of accountability?

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Beauty & Power

October 27, 2013

In front of us stood a statue of Buddha, about three meters high, surrounded by swirling painted blues and reds and browns — flanked by two smaller statues of guardians. The light from the open doorway fell on the Buddha and suffused throughout the space.

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Migrating Genius: The Art & Life of Jack Madson

September 7, 2013

“There’s so much to learn from birds. When I was a child they were my first absorbing fascination in life.”

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Ashes to Ashes

August 15, 2013

I met my in-laws for the first time on New Year’s Day 1966, shortly before my wedding…

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Writers and the War Against Nature

June 29, 2013

Although human beings have interacted with nature – both cultivated and wild, for millennia, and sometimes destructively so, it was never quite like “war.” It has now become disconcertingly so…

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