Posted in books, culture, movies, intercultural on Apr 8th, 2007 No Comments »
Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook looks so much like a beautiful piece of candy that it is difficult to resist the temptation to pick a copy up when coming across it in a bookstore. And “eye candy” it certainly is, with great illustrations by Kazumi Nonaka and graphic design by Izumi […]
Posted in books, culture, architecture, anime, museums, kyoto on Feb 23rd, 2007 No Comments »
The Kyoto International Manga Museum rides the high tide of interest in Japanese popular culture, and is housed in a beautiful old school building, but curious visitors will not find much to see inside. Unless you want to observe how blissfully quiet kids can become when they sit reading manga books…
The walls of the long […]
Posted in writing and poetry, books, history on Feb 23rd, 2007 No Comments »
The great Japan scholar Donald Keene does not need an introduction to readers of this blog, as anyone even slightly interested in Japan is bound to have come across his many translations of Japanese literature, new ( for example, After the Banquet and Thirst for Love by Mishima) and traditional (Essays in Idleness, The Narrow […]
Posted in writing and poetry, books, culture, travel and places, intercultural on Dec 26th, 2006 No Comments »
Hyakunin Isshu (”One Hunderd Poets, One Poem Each”) is Japan’s most famous compact anthology of classical poetry. About 800 years ago, Fujiwara Teika, himself an accomplished poet, compiled it in his residence on Mt Ogura, in Arashiyama near Kyoto, by selecting the in his view best waka poems from previous imperial collections.
Thanks to the […]
Posted in books, culture, life on Dec 26th, 2006 No Comments »
When I studied Chinese characters (kanji) my teacher strongly advised me to practice by writing them. Only after you remembered the strokes with your pen (or pencil or writing brush), he said, could you also remember them with your eyes.
I was reminded of my kanji practice of more than thirty years ago by the recent […]
Posted in writing and poetry, books on Dec 2nd, 2006 No Comments »
Basho is by far the most popular Japanese author. Strangely enough, there still is no annotated scholarly translation of his complete work. The Narrow Road has been translated tens of times, and a few hundred of his most popular haiku exist in countless versions (there is even a whole book dedicated to different versions […]
Posted in books, movies on Nov 11th, 2006 3 Comments »
The first Japanese film I ever saw was Rashomon and since that momentous evening I have been hooked on samurai films (and Japanese film in general). This was about 20 years ago, at a time when it was still difficult to find Japanese films. The situation improved after I moved again to Japan in the […]
Posted in Japan, books, travel and places on Nov 5th, 2006 No Comments »
Eric Talmadge is a Tokyo news editor for the Associated Press who has lived longer in Japan than in his native country. In Getting Wet, Adventures in the Japanese Bath (Kodansha International, 2006) Talmadge combines work and hobby by trying out the whole spectrum of Japanese bathing culture and serving that up in what can […]
Posted in books, movies, history on Oct 12th, 2006 No Comments »
Why is swordsman Miyamoto Musashi so popular? We know almost nothing about him and what we know with any certainty is not very spectacular. Is it because he is the author of The Book of Five Rings? Or is it thanks to the novel by Yoshikawa Eiji and the films by Inagaki and other directors? […]
Posted in books, culture, religion and philosophy, intercultural on Jul 16th, 2006 No Comments »
What can go wrong when a foreigner who knows no Japanese but has very romantic ideas studies a particular Japanese “way” (Do) under a somewhat eccentric Master? Everything, according to The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery by Yamada Shoji (published in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies). Surprisingly, the foreigner in question […]
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