The Kaiser’s Navy: The Final Voyage
An Osaka swordsmith has made six traditional Japanese swords using part of a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite that landed in Arizona…
Read MoreA Sense of Place: Urban Renewal in Kyoto
Of all cities in East Asia, Kyoto has the oldest and probably the strictest official preservation policy…
Read MoreThe Hollow Staff: Western Music and the Silk Road
The Silk Road would have been full of musicians…musicians from a dozen distinct traditions traveling in the same caravans, meeting around the same fires. What did they say to one another when they met…?
Read MoreGeisha Tradition
Hannari — Geisha Modern is a documentary film about the lives and arts of geisha in contemporary Kyoto filmed from the perspective of a Japanese woman.
Read MoreMetabolic Syndrome
These lucid essays discuss Japanese architecture in the aftermath of the Bubble.
Read MoreThe SoundSilence of Water
The tea-masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mostly lay adepts of Zen, were the ultimate artists in the use of water for its sound, form and haptic effects.
Read MoreKyoto Rain
Kyoto belongs to the rain. Not a place of brilliant sunlight, it is often sadly gray — an older woman who causes one to remark how beautiful she must once have been.
Read MoreA Touch of Amusement
I had never seen a funnier waiting room in my life…
Read MoreLanguage goes Two Ways
Language goes two ways: it enables us to have a small window onto an independently existing world, but it also shapes — via its very structures and vocabularies — how we see that world.
Read MoreLike Sculpting Smoke: Arundhati Roy on Fame, Writing and India
INTERVIEW BY KATHY ARLYN SOKOL
Arundhati Roy — brilliant, beautiful and rich. The brilliance and the beauty came early, the riches are of more recent vintage and allow her a new life as a self-proclaimed “cultural terrorist” who can fund her own “kiss-backs” (instants of righteous revenge). Against?
Read MoreOn Cid Corman
“(Art) confronts the livingdying going on. . . from within and letting the cry most compassionately come forth and move out – in all direction – wherever the human touches.”
Read MoreThe Last of the Smokers
Sitting on the roof the National Diet Building, under attack by tear-gas fired from the Defence Force helicopters circling above, I am smoking my last cigarettes.
Read MoreRyu and Me
Being a man with a tremendous appetite for life, Murakami Ryu began living large, traveling the planet and savoring its various pleasures. But he also began one of the most prolific and multi-faceted careers in literary history…
Read More100 Years of Japanese Cinema
As Donald Richie tells us, at the end of the nineteenth century, a cameraman from the Tokyo Mitsukoshi Department Store shot some of the first film footage in Japan, and thirty-odd years later, Japan was the world’s largest film producer…
Read MoreReel Life and Real Life: The Joys and Trials of Being Intercultural
REGGE LIFE’s moving documentaries, broadcast nationally in both countries, introduce us to scores of reflective people who in turn invite us to take a closer look at ourselves…
Read MoreFujiko Hemming, Deaf Pianist
After Toako showed her how to decipher the squiggles on the scores, Fujiko was enchanted with the magic she could conjure, but she soon shriveled under her mother’s blistering criticism and the relentless repetition…
Read MoreThe Future of Korea: An Interview with Political Scientist Lee Jae Bong
Political Scientist LEE JAE BONG explains, “ A unification policy has two conditions: First, is it really desirable? And second, is it really achievable?… “
Read MoreJapanese Constitution Cinema
Reading such a dry and formal document can be a real drag to people like me. But there are movies to boost our understanding of Japan’s Peace Constitution.
Read MoreThe Korean Dream
The two decades captured in photographer Drayton Hamilton’s book coincide with the sweeping changes that moved Korea from dictatorship to democracy, from Third-World industrialization to high-tech de-industrialization…
Read MoreFraming China
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the “frame” was of China as little blue ants or automatons. In the 1970s, following the Nixon administration’s opening, the frame was of the virtuous (entertaining, cute) Chinese…. In the 1980s, the frame was that China was “going capitalist.”
Read MoreThe Inner Teacher
It has been calculated that it would cost US $4 billion to educate 500 million Indian children conventionally to basic level — but only half that via the Net…
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