Excess Baggage
“Now that you’re in Japan, you must do what the Japanese do. Otherwise, it would be meaningless for you to have come here.”
Read MoreCrossing Inter-Asian Cultural Divides
Karen Ma is the author of the recently published Excess Baggage, a novel about the lives of a Chinese immigrant family in Japan.
Read MoreWe Promise to Fix it Back
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?
Read MoreKyoto Machiya Dining
Machiya, the old wooden townhouses of Kyoto, once dominated this city’s urban landscape. Long sturdy structures of simple grace, they closely lined the narrow streets of the city, their tiled rooftops rolling in waves to the surrounding hills and lapping at the edges of the great temples, shrines and villas that rose among them.
Read MoreMapping Kyoto: An Affair of the Heart
Judith Clancy is the author of three books about Kyoto, Exploring Kyoto, Kyoto Machiya Restaurant Guide and Kyoto City of Zen. She has mapped Kyoto in words and images, enabling countless people, residents and visitors alike, to explore the exceptional cultural, historical, religious and gastronomic heritage of this city.
Read MoreTone Poems: Joel Stewart’s Continuing Artistic Odyssey
The sheer variety of images ranges between the hyper-realistic and the abstract: a gleaming white-and-blue ceramic sake ewer that could almost be plucked from the panel, a quiver of glowing vertical lines reminiscent of Star Trek’s transporter in mid-operation.
Read MoreCalligraphy and Stamps from the Shikoku 88-Temple Pilgrimage
Pilgrims who follow in the footsteps of Kobo Daishi around Shikoku record their journey by collecting these goshuin, single sheets of paper, or in book form (nokyocho), from each of the temples along the way.
Read MoreThe Art of Translation
A number of years ago several of our Japanese-related journals carried an ongoing debate on the art or techniques of translating the prose literature of Japan. Some of these manifestos and arguments often degenerated into a subtle, or not so subtle, academic name-calling. But two distinct groups did emerge…
Read MoreBeauty & Power
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.
Read MoreEverything You Need to Know about Japanese Wood and Woodworking
While reading Wood and Traditional Woodworking in Japan my initial reaction was visceral and immediate: why wasn’t a book like this available much earlier?
Read MoreJapantown: Lancet’s First Novel
The novel, as the title indicates, is concerned with Japan, and this places it as one of those detective novels that aims to provide, in addition to the standard thrills and spills, an introduction to another country and culture…
Read MoreMigrating Genius: The Art & Life of Jack Madson
“There’s so much to learn from birds. When I was a child they were my first absorbing fascination in life.”
Read MoreChasing Deer
I had just cycled over seven hours through Mie Prefecture and was now stuck on this deserted mountain road somewhere in the Kasagi Mountains, approximately 10 kilometers northeast of Nara city, searching for a campsite I had circled in my Kansai Mappuru guidebook when planning the trip from home weeks before. I thought of home now back in Kanagawa, and my wife Rui, who would be sitting at the table eating dinner at about this time. Make sure you take pictures of the deer in Nara, she would remind me every evening.
Read MoreAshes to Ashes
I met my in-laws for the first time on New Year’s Day 1966, shortly before my wedding…
Read MoreEven in “Just Enough,” There is Abundance
For nearly 40 years Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic work, “The One-Straw Revolution” has lured people back to a traditional life of farming. Yoshikazu Kawaguchi, considered the leading proponent of Natural Farming in Japan, began his approach to farming by adapting Fukuoka’s method of forgoing plowing, fertilizers, weeding, and chemicals…
Read MoreWriters and the War Against Nature
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…
Read MoreThe Poetry of the Gardens
Connecting gardens and poetry, author and garden designer Marc P. Keane illuminates something that is unique to Japanese landscape-art history.
Read MoreStep Inside the World of Noh: An interview with Diego Pellecchia
“I’m hoping to transmit the ethics of Noh. Respect for the space and discipline, work ethics, orderliness, cleanliness. “
Read MoreWomen In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012
What does it mean to connect the fifty women artists of sixteen different Asian countries and regions represented in this exhibition by calling them “Women In-Between”?
Read MoreKnowing Nature
A rambling conversation between two of America’s most original poets –– clear-eyed, unsentimental outsiders, both outdoorsmen who have spent their life probing the nature of nature.
Read MoreLok Say: Hong Kong Remembers Tiananmen
…They had asked the university council to place the Goddess of Democracy — a twenty-foot statue commemorating the sacrifice of the Tiananmen students — on campus following tonight’s vigil….
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