Vassal Beats Lord: Benkei and Yoshitsune in the Noh Play Ataka
Ataka reveals an aspect of unique Japanese spirituality. While it is a challenging performance for actors that requires subtle skills instructed orally by a master, the story structure involves a powerful psychodrama, and the roles and presentation evoke the audience’s emotions directly by the senses without depending completely on the words.
Read MoreThe World, the World
Monks and horsemen
move through wind-churned ice crystals
scaling vertical circles of sound.
In the Realm of the Bicycle
I first noticed them, the fact of their everywhereness, during my daily commute to and from work, as they stood and leaned and laid and zipped around in all the conditions of life itself…
Read MoreRediscovering Kyoto
I work as a guide for foreign tourists and though I mean to introduce them to the charms of Japan, instead it is often they who remind me of my country’s beauty.
Read MoreTurtles All the Way Down
To add credence to our myths, we enmesh them in Big Stories, such as the Bible and Buddhist sutras. These Stories try to explain it all, but inevitably fall far short. Their promise of absolute truths is empty since these Big Stories too were (and forever are) constructed.
Read MoreThe Dazzling Night
A Noh Play in English about Katherine Mansfield.
Read MoreNama Chocolat Organic Teahouse
Nakanishi Hirofumi’s signature Sweet, Bitter and Matcha nama chocolates reflect modern tastes while paying tribute to Kyoto and its centuries-old artisan heritage.
Read MoreUnbridled Perception
The founders of the Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography bring their practice to Asia with a pioneering workshop in Japan.
Read MoreHalf-Awake
Dalai Lama Awakening is a documentary film by director Khashyar Darvich. In what the director claims is an uncompromised version of his previous film Dalai Lama Renaissance, 40 Western thinkers gather in India to meet with the Dalai Lama to transform the world.
Read MoreThe Garden View
“My idea was to create photographs that explore this undefined border between private and public space by photographing the garden from deep inside the temple, balancing the areas of the tatami/ meditation space and the garden space equally in the image.”
Read MoreBalinese Canoes
When I speak of the disappearance of boats, I do not mean pleasure yachts, nor do I mean the monoliths of modern merchant ship navigation like super tankers…. Rather, I am talking about the canoes and planked craft of indigenous watermen the world over…
Read MoreHolding the Ashen Bark: Voices from Hiroshima on the Historic Visit by President Obama
“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.
Read MoreBoundaries
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…
Read MoreDream Corridor
It all began in 1980, when I was 29, with the first of a series of vivid dreams. These occurred at dawn and continued through four summer mornings. I would find myself in an unfamiliar yet comfortable foreign land, with men, women and kids whom I cared for, yet could not upon waking recall ever having met…
Read MoreJapanese Courtyard Gardens
The tsubo garden is contained inside a building, like a jewel in a box…
Read MoreThe Breast
A noise . . . something was making a noise. . . . Concentrating all the strength she could muster in her semiconscious state on that thought, Hiroko began to awaken with difficulty from the depths of a deep, dark sleep.
Read MoreThe Things We’ve Gone Through Together: Children orphaned by AIDS build a loving family in rural Cambodia
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…
Read MoreKyoto Waters
Kyoto exists in layers of wildness and control; something built juxtaposed with something natural: one against the other, layered, intertwined, spiraled infinitely around the plain, a kind of DNA of place.
Read MoreWhere Ainu food, culture, and community meet: Interview with Teruryo Us
“Ainu food is more based on the natural flavors of ingredients, rather unlike Hokkaido foods, which rely on strong flavors. We just use salt for seasoning; no additives. Nowadays more and more people, kids and adults alike, have allergies… Kids with wheat or butter allergies can eat our dumplings or rataskep here safely.”
Read MoreFacing Self, Reality
Naikan, which means “introspection” in Japanese, implores us to look not merely within but beyond ourselves by routinely asking a set of three questions…
Read MoreThe Bride of Boneyard Kitaro
When Nunoe’s uncle told the family he’d found a match for her in a 39 year-old veteran who’d lost his left arm in the war and wrote comic books in Tokyo, Nunoe’s father rubbed his chin and said “make it happen.”
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