World Heritage and Kyoto: An Interview with Muneta Yoshifumi

Kyoto’s conservation should be determined by residents’ quality of life, not for tourists. We have temples, shrines, forests, and small parks — we can have a good quality of life drawn from Kyoto’s traditional cultural heritage, and we can show the rest of the country what the modem Japanese way of life can be…

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Aspirin

You want to know all about aspirin then you just go get yourself a good case of sciatica, nothing will teach you about aspirin better than a good case of sciatica…

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Zen & the Art of Rejuvenation

Taizo-in launched its groundbreaking ‘Fusuma-e Project’ in the spring of 2011. The Zen temple is commissioning a young, unknown Kyoto-based artist to compose large sumi-e ink paintings on 64 new sliding doors, or fusuma…

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Blessings of the Dragon Gods

The moves of a master calligrapher resemble those of a dragon in flight. The calligraphy is so alive and vigorous that it seems to contain a dragon’s spirit flowing in the brush strokes…

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Media Critic: Asano Kenichi

Former Kyodo News Service correspondent Asano Kenichi was expelled from Indonesia in 1992 for his investigative reports on shady deals between Jakarta businessmen and Japanese politicians.

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Poetry, Love, Enlightenment

Eight hundred years ago, in a northeastern town of the Persian kingdom, a boy was born. When he was twelve years old, he chanced to meet the great Sufi master and Persian poet Attar, who told the boy’s father: “The fiery words of this boy will kindle the souls of lovers all over the world.”

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The Wrong Paradise

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize, is widely considered the greatest Bengali poet of all time. He is certainly one of the finest writers of the world in the past century….

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Stories of Forgetting, Remembering and Ritual

How do you deal with trauma until this or that civil society organization and tribunal comes to you with promises to heal your wounds? Mãnoa’s Maps of Reconciliation is a compendium of writings and images that grapple with this very difficult question.

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Tea Tourism and Trade

In addition to promoting stunningly beautiful rows of tea bushes and romantic “exotic” peoples, there’s money to be made welcoming eco-tourists to stalk wild tea plants, visit plantations, gardens, processing facilities, markets and auctions.

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All the Times in the World

Time…is one of those currencies we exchange every time we cross a border. An hour in Japan (where everything is clockbound, and even televisions show the hour) is equivalent to a day in laid-back India…

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Going Geisha

After returning from Japan, I was surprised to see that the States was in a lather over “geisha chic.” Chopsticks were stuck in heads fair and dark. Fashion magazines urged women to “Geisha-ize”…

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Bright Road

In the beginning was the yearning — to seek what could be sought, find what could be found, learn what could be known — to go beyond mountains, know beyond deserts, discover beyond oceans…

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Dear Leader

They met one afternoon in February twenty-three days after she left North Korea. An ethnic Korean marriage broker named Bong-il drove her to her new home near Yanji… “If you run away, we will find you, understand? He is paying good money for you, and we are men of our word…”

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Furuhashi Teiji and Dumb Type

“It’s more difficult to do creative theater in Tokyo. There is less pressure in Kyoto so we can be more free, more adventurous. Kyoto people are more open to something experimental…”

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Shakuhachi and Zenga

ART, MUSIC
BY PRESTON HOUSER

The player of the Japanese bamboo flute seeks to display his spirit through musicianship—even if only in a single note, a single exhalation…

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The Joy of What’s Fleeting

The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no temples or shrines or narrow winding streets of the kind, when young, I associated with the “real Japan.“

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