EXPLORE THE KYOTO JOURNAL
Discover quality writing from Asia in our award-winning magazine. Stimulating interviews and profiles; excerpts of works translated from Asian languages; fiction, poetry and book reviews, as well as a fresh look at the city KJ calls home.
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Hope for the East Asian Peace Process
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…
Grand Master
An was wandering about in an unsettling dream when he suddenly awoke. Right before awakening, he was being chased by a suspicious stranger who had sneakily followed and approached him.
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.
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.
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.
Article 9 and Japan’s Future
Article 9 can also be seen as a gift to humanity, simply denouncing war. Simply doing that.
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.
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.
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.
Tea Beyond Japan: Chanoyu in the Diaspora
I am not your typical or natural tea student: a left-handed, cross-country skiing, Jewish feminist. Studying chanoyu for the past 24 years has been both challenging and intriguing for all those reasons. I have been fortunate to find a great teacher who can teach me. I have been encouraged by her to make the practice my own within her very formal teaching.
Much Ado About Matcha: Appreciating the Taste of Powdered Green Tea
If you think that chanoyu, the Japanese tea ritual, is primarily about enjoying the flavor of matcha … I have a bridge to sell you! Let’s call it the ultimate Japanese “urban myth”. Making matcha – mixing of hot water and a tiny bit of carefully selected, hand-picked young green tea leaves in powdered form – is merely the premise for a refined social gathering.
The Korean Way of Tea
Korea has had a “Way” of tea but it hasn’t been widely seen, much less described or studied by foreigners. This new guidebook full of color illustrations, created by Brother Anthony and Hong Kyeong-Hee is a welcome edition to one’s tea or Korean culture library.
Mekong River
Today’s flowers let me inside
into their vase-shaped bodies
Today, I swim this river
with its fish and turtles
and crocodiles…
Freedom Within Bounds: A Conversation with Donald Richie
Unlike many writers on Japan, Donald Richie advances no social theories. By portraying Japanese as individuals, and by doing so with insight and often with sympathy, Richie gives the lie to conventional notions of uniformity.
The Enlightening of Aikido: Jacques Payet on training, practice and teaching
“Through time the student would become a better person; one who is more aware of weak points, more courageous and more honest, through a body-to-body and heart-to-heart experience…”
“The Fortunate Earth is Happy”
As I sat down to read On Freedom: Spirit, Art, and State, one of the first thoughts I had was how difficult it is to peg a term as loaded as “Freedom.” At about the same moment as I had this thought, the chorus of the jaunty Calypso song on my stereo sang out, “Always remember somebody suffering more than you.
In Memorium: David Jenkins
David Jenkins, a longterm resident of Kyoto, translated medieval Japanese poetry (with his co-translator, Yasuhiko Moriguchi) — and made it timeless. He passed away on April 10th, 2000, surrounded by fully-blooming sakura; is still missed by friends and colleagues here at KJ.
