{Inter} Cultural Japan

With sadness we note the passing of Clifton Karhu on March 24 at age 79, the great American-born blockprint artist who made Kyoto his home. Karhu’s prints are known for their strong lines and vivid colors and his themes pay tribute to the beauty of Japan’s old capital. Norman Tolman, founder of the Tolman Collection gallery and friend of Karhu, wrote a memorial in the Japan Times.

Businessweek.com carries an interesting report on Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, which until its demise last year, was probably the world’s oldest continuously operating family business - since 578! Building temples, apparently, has been a very stable sector of Japanese industry through the ages. Why the company went under? Greed - the company invested heavily in real estate during the bubble years and was brought down by its accumulated debts.

While Nagoya is transforming its cityscape with the proliferation of new highrises around the central station, the old shopping arcades (shotengai) in the city hope to keep afloat on the broad back of nostalgia, as Asahi.com reports.