Kyoto Journal Issue 56

So the authors of this Mahayana sutra were living in an imaginary world, a flat-earth world, in which you could travel long distances to the west, past imaginary lands with imaginary Buddhas. And myself, living in a temple in Kyoto these five years while serving as a kozo, I recite this sutra daily, though not as a part of their program, but rather as an individual, an eccentric meditator, in a secluded sanctuary in a far corner of the precinct. – Keisho, Going West from Kyoto 

The Lord of the Rings can serve as a Buddhist fable because it is about a spiritual quest readily understandable in dharmic terms. It provides a myth about spiritual engagement for modern Buddhists. Frodo leaves home not to slay a dragon or win a chest full of precious jewels, but to let go of something. – David Loy & Linda Goodhew, Dharma of the Rings: A Buddhist interpretation of The Lord of the Rings 

Over 150,000 non-Japanese women work in Japan’s sex trade, most of them from Thailand and the Philippines. The Hamagin Research Institute, a private think-tank attached to Yokohama Bank, recently estimated that Japan’s underground economy (including prostitution, sex-related entertainment, drug dealing and tax evasion) may rake in more than 16 trillion yen each year (roughly $140 billion U.S.). – Roderick Overaa, Foreign Imports: Tokyo’s Trafficked Sex Workers

Contents:

Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry, by Janine Beichman — Maggie Chula
The Breakaway Kitchen, by Eric Gower — Sherry and Hiro Nakanishi
Tokyo Story: The Ozu/Noda Screenplay, by Intro by Donald Richie, trans. by Eric Klestadt — Christopher Tate
Edo, the city that became Tokyo, Akira Naito, trans. H. Mack Hortonby — Jim Hathaway
Life of the Buddha, by Tezuka Osamu — Thierry Le
Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement , by Leonard Koren — Markuz Wernli

Cover Image by Stewart Wachs
98pp
published March 25, 2004

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