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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Mediating between Nature and Imagination: Sudo Hisao

Sudo Hisao’s latest sculpture, not yet dry, stands in his ceramic studio: a giant acorn, bursting with life, erotic tip pointing upwards…

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Mantra from Ajari-san

Ajari — “Great Teacher” — is a title conferred on monks…who have completed the great sennichi kaihõgyo training… This meditative practice involves walking a total of over 38,000 kilometers in 1,000 days, within a seven-year period.

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Crow Home

The sky seems to be a mix of dust and smoke, laced with an urban haze: something gray, something muddy, not blue at all. Maybe it had been blue once…

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The Classic Kyoto Guide

For the traveler who wants to savor the hidden charm and beauty of this ancient city’s backstreets at a leisurely pace, Diane Durston’s updated and fully revised edition of her 1986 book, Old Kyoto, offers a warm and personable guide.

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Awakening the Goddess Within: An Interview with Mayumi Oda

Graphic artist Mayumi Oda’s cultural, spiritual, and artistic odyssey has taken her through many lives, eras, countries, and incarnations…

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Chronicling Japan’s Indelible Art

Traditional Japanese tattooing is one of Japan’s high arts and is widely recognized by the rest of the world as the pinnacle of the craft, though its virtues are widely denied in its native land.

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A Year at Eiheiji

Eiheiji’s reputation as the toughest Zen training center in Japan is born out in this memoir…after Nonomura passes through the Dragon Gate with seven other acolytes (three of whom will end up in the hospital within the first six months), he enters a kind of “boot-camp” hell…

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The Shape of Tokyo’s Art Scene

Art Space Tokyo charts the ever-shifting Tokyo art scene via essays and interviews with curators, collectors, artists, journalists, art fair directors, critics and bloggers.

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Poetry, Love, Enlightenment

Eight hundred years ago, in a northeastern town of the Persian kingdom, a boy was born. When he was twelve years old, he chanced to meet the great Sufi master and Persian poet Attar, who told the boy’s father: “The fiery words of this boy will kindle the souls of lovers all over the world.”

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Alone With Your Self: The Hermit Experience

Edward A. Burger found his teacher, Master Guangkuan, in the Zhongnan Mountains in the winter of 1999. He completed his first documentary, Amongst White Clouds, about Zhongnan Mountain hermits in 2005…

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The Hosomi Museum

Hosomi Yoshiyuki is the founding director of the Hosomi Museum… The museum houses a 1,000 piece art collection representing all major periods of Japanese art from the Jomon to Meiji, featuring 30 Important Art Properties…

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The Wrong Paradise

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize, is widely considered the greatest Bengali poet of all time. He is certainly one of the finest writers of the world in the past century….

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Bontei

BY MARC P. KEANE

In making these tray gardens, I simplify Japanese gardens, creating sculptures that feature only certain elements drawn from those gardens — a stillness or a motion; a sense of time or one of timelessness; a certain color, texture or balance of parts…

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Gion Geisha: Interview with Yoshida Teruko

Yoshida Teruko is a former geiko (often called geisha outside of Kyoto). She is the proprietor of a bar in the Gion district whose clientele includes corporate leaders from Kyoto, Tokyo and other countries.

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Stories of Forgetting, Remembering and Ritual

How do you deal with trauma until this or that civil society organization and tribunal comes to you with promises to heal your wounds? Mãnoa’s Maps of Reconciliation is a compendium of writings and images that grapple with this very difficult question.

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Tea Tourism and Trade

In addition to promoting stunningly beautiful rows of tea bushes and romantic “exotic” peoples, there’s money to be made welcoming eco-tourists to stalk wild tea plants, visit plantations, gardens, processing facilities, markets and auctions.

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All the Times in the World

Time…is one of those currencies we exchange every time we cross a border. An hour in Japan (where everything is clockbound, and even televisions show the hour) is equivalent to a day in laid-back India…

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Going Geisha

After returning from Japan, I was surprised to see that the States was in a lather over “geisha chic.” Chopsticks were stuck in heads fair and dark. Fashion magazines urged women to “Geisha-ize”…