Posts by johneinarsen
A 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 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 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 MoreNishikawa Senrei: Nihon Buyo
“You have to tear down the old completely sometimes to build the new in the spirit of the old. When I revive a piece, everything changes. Even if the performers are all the same, we’ve grown, so through repetition the piece will change.”
Read MoreRestoring Memories Project
Tomas Svab and John Einarsen traveled to Ishinomaki, one of the cities hardest hit by the tsunami, to see if they could set up a system to restore precious photographs that had been damaged in the disaster…
Read MoreNishijin Harmonies
“I’ve always been intrigued by mastery on every level — mastery of one’s skills to use as a focus to purify oneself and to live well, to live happily, and to feel that one is living in a congruent and meaningful form.”
Read MoreThe Open Homeless
Over the past eight years, Ryuta and Chieko Kobayashi have resided in shelters made of cardboard and wood, crafted with their own hands, under the Kojinguchi Bridge on the Kamo River…
Read MoreA Vital Occupation
At 1:30 I stop a random stranger on the street, and ask how to get to Akihabara. It may surprise you, but this is one of my special duties. I’m supposed to do one of these every three hours….
Read MoreWhere is the Wild?
Henry was wild about wildness, just couldn’t stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.
Read MoreThe Pillow Book: Translating a Classic
Most people in Japan can reach back to their school days to unhesitatingly recite the famous opening lines of the thousand-year-old classic known in English as The Pillow Book. The sounds roll off the tongue like poetry…
Read MoreParabolic Paintings at Kiyomizudera
ART
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
A World Heritage site, Kiyomizu is the most visited destination in Japan… It was at this matchless and uniquely sited treasure that, on May 14th, 2011, I was given the literally unprecedented privilege of exhibiting my art — debuting my new genre of painting which I call “parabolic painting,” to a one-evening-only gathering of well over two thousand people…
Read MoreBuddhism and Science
BY RASOUL SORKHABI
The mind is a natural bridge between science and Buddhism, for Buddhism, rather than focusing on a creator god, is based on the awareness and development of the human mind…
Read MoreCurling
i have been a fern unfolding. in a forest of deep slanting shadows, close to the ground with its many tiny scratchings and slitherings, surrounded by the steady rumble and rush of a waterfall, i was a fern.
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