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.
Read MoreAwakening 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…
Read MoreChronicling 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.
Read MoreA 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…
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MorePoetry, 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.”
Read MoreAlone 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…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreThe 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….
Read MoreBontei
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…
Read MoreGion 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.
Read MoreStories 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.
Read MoreTea 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.
Read MoreAll 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…
Read MoreGoing 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”…
Read MoreBright Road
In the beginning was the yearning — to seek what could be sought, find what could be found, learn what could be known — to go beyond mountains, know beyond deserts, discover beyond oceans…
Read MoreDear Leader
They met one afternoon in February twenty-three days after she left North Korea. An ethnic Korean marriage broker named Bong-il drove her to her new home near Yanji… “If you run away, we will find you, understand? He is paying good money for you, and we are men of our word…”
Read MoreSynthetic Dreams: The Art of Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori’s themes are eclectic, embracing the fantasies of post-everything Japan and its extreme experimentation while recontextualizing traditional customs, mannerisms, and trends…
Read MoreFuruhashi Teiji and Dumb Type
“It’s more difficult to do creative theater in Tokyo. There is less pressure in Kyoto so we can be more free, more adventurous. Kyoto people are more open to something experimental…”
Read MoreThe Joy of What’s Fleeting
The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no temples or shrines or narrow winding streets of the kind, when young, I associated with the “real Japan.“
Read MoreKatsura Kan: Butoh Dancer
At 36, Kyoto-born butoh dancer and choreographer Katsura Kan has survived as an independent dancer, working outside the established butoh companies…
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