Hanamaki is a well-known hot spring resort, but more than that it is the native place of author, teacher, researcher and agricultural reformer Miyazawa Kenji. You will find more about him in the Miyazawa Kenji Museum, a short bus ride from either Shin-Hanamaki or Hanamaki Station. It presents Miyazawa Kenji from various angles and has […]
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Gestures are so different in other cultures that they are in fact an altogether different language. It is safest not to use them until you are sufficiently familiar with that other culture. There are after all several cases where the same gesture has a radically different meaning… Here is a Japanese example: you form […]
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It comes as a surprise to find an authentic, 19th century Japanese merchant’s house right in the central Osaka business center, just south of Yodoyabashi Station. The two-storied house sits in a small garden and is dwarfed by neighboring buildings, but it is a miracle that it has survived destruction. It now forms an oasis […]
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The film Onibaba (1964) by expressionist director Shindo Kaneto came as a shell shock when I finally saw it last week. It is an aggressive masterwork from the heyday of Japanese cinema that hits you squarely in the face – in a most pleasant way. Just as its contemporary The Woman in the Dunes by […]
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In his recent review of a study about funerals in modern Japan, Modern Passings by Andrew Bernstein, Donald Richie writes that what he has learned from this study, is that funerals in Japan are modern inventions. Apparently, Richie had thought that Japanese funerals were less hypocritical than in the West, and that may still be […]
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The Tsubouchi Memorial Theater Museum, Waseda University was established on the occasion of the 70th birthday of the critic and playwright Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859-1935), the first translator of Shakespeare’s complete works into Japanese and founder of the Department of Literature of Waseda University. The façade of the building is modeled on the Fortune Theater of […]
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Shibusawa Eiichi, the man behind Oji paper, was an early proponent of free market enterprise in Japan. He played a central role in the establishment of modern industry in Japan and is honored with a beautiful, new museum in Asukayama Park, the Shibusawa Memorial Museum.
[Seien Bunko Library in the Old Shibusawa Garden. Photo © Ad […]
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The first modern paper manufacture in Japan started in Oji (then a village at the perimeter of Tokyo) in 1873 by a company later named after the place, Oji Paper. The factory was established by entrepreneur Shibusawa Eiichi and still is (after several mergers and split-ups) one of Japan’s largest paper manufacturers. The Paper Museum […]
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The Senshu Bunko, or “Library of a Thousand Autumns,” comprises the collection of manuscripts, documents, paintings, and old maps of the Satake clan, the hereditary daimyo family that ruled what is now Akita prefecture. It gives a good impression of the tastes of a local ruling clan in the Edo period. Above all, it provides […]
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On the bank of Shinobazu Pond, below Ueno Park, we encounter the Shitamachi Museum, which is quite popular among foreign visitors. It is indeed a friendly place, providing an atmospheric evocation of ‘downtown’ Tokyo (called ‘shitamachi’ in Japanese) in the Ueno and Asakusa wards in the 1920s, before this bustling area was largely destroyed by […]
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