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KJ
Special On-line Features
Kyoto Journal is basically
a print magazine, but we occasionally post some specially featured material
that appears only on our website....
KJ
Special On-line Feature: DISPATCHES
Socially
Engaged Buddhists: Reflections from the International Network of
Engaged Buddhists Conference, Chiang Mai, November 2009
By Matthew Pistono
The International
Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) held its 20th Anniversary Conference
near Chiang Mai, Thailand, in mid November 2009. Over 300 delegates
attended the conference representing most South, South East and
East Asian countries, as well as Australia, South Africa, the United
States, Holland, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
...continued.
KJ
Special On-line Feature: FICTION
Untied
By Kelly Luce (accompanying
KJ #73)
That night
at the cheap sushi place in Osaka, Yumiko was complaining about
her boyfriend with impressive fluency. As her English teacher, I
had noticed that she spoke best when upset—it took her mind off
making mistakes.
The trouble with the boyfriend was that Yumiko didn’t really love
him. He was boring; he didn’t kiss hard enough. She’d just convincingly
used the word “ambivalent,” in fact, when a purple running shoe
rounded the bend behind a tub of wasabi. I blinked and it was still
there, unhurriedly cruising the conveyor belt.
“…but love is not everything and I am getting old.” She bit her
glossy lower lip. “You understand, Natalie?”
Maguro, shrimp, melon slice, wasabi, shoe.
Yumiko saw it too. The running shoe crept by, its frayed laces dangling
over the edge of the counter, brushing the hot water taps.
...continued
KJ
Special On-line Feature: FICTION
Yellow
Elephant
By O Thiam Chin
When the wife
stepped into the flat after a long day at the office where she worked
as a paralegal, she saw the yellow elephant in the living room.The
small two-room flat, located in a rapidly-aging housing estate,
had been paid for in monthly installments for the past five years,
mostly out of her income and savings; her husband refused to chip
in after the second year of their marriage. He needed the money
to pay for a new BMW 3-series, swanky work-clothes and nights out
with his colleagues. She didn’t want to argue — they’d been having
too many fights recently –- so she left him alone. They hadn’t talked
for almost a month.
...continued
KJ
Special On-line Feature: DISPATCHES
A Minute and 100 Meters
Down the Road
by David Maney (accompanying KJ
#72, Japan's Article 9)
Urumqi, Xinjiang,
Sept. 3, 2009. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the
barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two
military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right
seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station.
Welcome to west China.
I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4000km in
a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about
the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and
Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of
Xinjiang. After four days I left with more doubts about why ethnic
tensions in Urumqi arose and how they could be resolved.
...continued
“We
Need to Eliminate War in Our Own Minds”– An interview with
Satoko Norimatsu of Vancouver Save Article 9
by Jean Miyake Downey (accompanying KJ
#72, Japan's Article 9)
Vancouver is
North America’s epicenter of support for Japan’s Peace Constitution.
At the Vancouver Save Article 9 (VSA9) launch in May 2005, Article
9 Association co-founder Shuichi Kato suggested an explanation:
"Perhaps it is not a coincidence that an Article 9 group was formed
here, because Vancouver is where the West meets the East." A Pacific
Rim crossroads, the city is home to people of diverse heritage,
many whose lives still resonate with memories of suffering wrought
by the Pacific War.
One of these Vancouverites, Japan-born Satoko Norimatsu, was shocked
into peace advocacy when she first learned about Japan’s wartime
aggression while attending an international high school in Vancouver
where she met students from Asian countries who told her about Pacific
War history she had not learned about in Japanese history textbooks.
A co-founder of VSA9, Norimatsu started the Peace Philosophy Centre
to promote peace and sustainability.
...continued
KJ
Special On-line Feature: FICTION
My
Grandson, the Marine: A Homecoming
By Connie Vigil Platt (accompanying
KJ #72, Japan's
Article 9)
I was a typical
grandmother, but I became a mother for the second time at age fifty
after my grandsons were left without a mother. My son’s wife passed
away and left him with two boys to raise. This might not be a unique
circumstance but it was certainly life-changing for all of us. When
the youngest grandson decided he wanted to join the Marines, I got
a lump in my throat I couldn’t swallow...
...continued
The
Colonel Gets a Visitor
Sushma Joshi (see also "Hunger" in KJ
#71)
Hello? Yes? A visitor? I’m not expecting any visitor at this
hour. It’s a young man? Ask him his name, you dhindo-eating
idiot. Dinesh Neupane? I don’t know any Dinesh Neupane. Ask
him—ASK HIM what he wants. He wants to meet me. Well, what’s
new? I’m a popular man around these parts. This doesn’t
mean I meet with every Dinesh Neupane who drops by to see me. He works
for Jagriti, you say? Jagriti is trashy, like all
newspapers, but at least they print both sides of the story. I see
they ran a story about the police IGP’s abduction the other
day — all those other Maoist rags never print anything about
anything. Trash, complete trash. That’s all they ever print.
He’s a staff writer? Oh, that young man. Yes, I remember him.
A very pleasant young fellow with glasses, and a soft-spoken voice.
Yes, indeed, I remember him. He has a brother in our prison. Absolutely,
I recall the boy now, clearly. Why didn’t you tell me that before,
Kalay? Do you expect me to remember the name of every street journalist
working for a one-paisa rag? Let him in, let him in. And
yes, bring us some tea as well, we’ll be talking for a while.
Sushma Joshi is a filmmaker and writer based in
Kathmandu, Nepal. Her company, Sansar Media, has produced documentaries
and short films.
Tea
“Beyond” Japan: Chanoyu in the Diaspora
By Lauren W. Deutsch (accompanying KJ
#71, Tea)
I am not your typical or natural tea student: a left-handed, cross-country
skiing, Jewish feminist. Studying chanoyu for the past 24
years has been both challenging and intriguing for all those reasons.
I have been fortunate to find a great teacher who can teach me.
I have been encouraged by her to make the practice my own within her
very formal teaching.
In 1987, after having studied Urasenke chado in Los Angeles
for almost three years as one of less than a handful of students of
non-Japanese heritage of the Distinguished Tea Master Sosei Matsumoto,
sensei, I was invited to apply to the Midorikai program for non-Japanese
people at Konnichian in Kyoto for the first of three short-courses
(i.e. part-time); the others being in 1989 and 1991. Now 24 years
into the practice, I’m anxious to write the next “chapter”
about American tea practitioners of chado.
continued...
Special
The
Honky-Tonk, the Gokiburi & the Yakuza
by Shane Dickey
graphics by Sam
Mooney
I had been living for three months in a rooming house in the rural
Kyoto suburb of Iwakura when I met Jo Nishitani. He was the proprietor
of a bona-fide honky-tonk restaurant just outside of town. At twenty-one,
Yatani had changed his given name to Jo and decided to embrace his
love of Hank Williams instead of becoming a policeman as his father
and grandfather had done. Not surprisingly, his family disowned him
and cast him out, a lone cowboy on an inhospitable Japanese landscape.
continued
From
our special issue Kyoto Lives
(#70)
Illustrator Sam Mooney, based in Mie Pref., has been working on
an English manga version of Urashima Taro, serialized on his blog,
starting here
Extract
In
Dharamsala
by Pico Iyer
One day, I chanced to run into Manuel Bauer, the photographer who
was compiling an extraordinary archive of the Dalai Lama by following
him around from dawn to dusk on most of his travels. As we repaired
to a nearby restaurant for lunch, he told me how he had become the
first photographer, anywhere, to chronicle the flight of modern Tibetans
across the Himalayas, to freedom, risking his life to bring back the
story.
continued
This passage is from a recent book
by Pico Iyer, called The
Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Alfred
A. Knopf; New York). Iyer is a longtime resident of Japan and has
been contributing to KJ almost since its first issue. See
KJ online special profile: Pico
Iyer is Lost by Mark Mordue.
Poetry
The
Sun in the Morning Market
You see yourself carrying a bag of food
in the morning market
A bag of
hawker’s cries,
a bag of
fats, proteins and vitamins
all at bargain prices.
A bag
filled with weight
of life
For a long long time
I continue standing at the intersection,
tasting this life of mine.
Routine is natural.
The sun carries a bag of its own light.
–Yan
Li
Translation by Zhang Er & Leonard Schwartz
(from a selection of contemporary Chinese poets in KJ #69)
Interview
Alone
With Your Self: The Hermit
An
Interview with Edward (Ted) A. Burger, director of Amongst White
Clouds
by Lauren Deutsch
"There’s
a difference between romanticisation and inspiration. Over the years
I’ve realized, and I think this is something that influences
my filmmaking, that romanticizing masters or hermits or Buddhas is
this subtle way we have of shirking spiritual responsibility. It puts
them and what they are, “out there” somewhere. The Dharma’s
central message is that we are all Buddhas already, ready and ripe
for liberation, peace, Buddhahood. In a way we don’t believe
it or our little hang-ups tells us not to believe it. It’s like
the little demon on your shoulder whispering in your ear. These hermits
are just practitioners, practitioners at a very advanced level, typically,
but in any case, they are doing what we should all be doing- recognizing
our potential as Buddhas and going for it. To romanticize them is
to, in some ways, ignore our own potential and load it all on some
“other” beings".
continued
In
Translation
The
Man Who Believed in Fairy Tales
by
Ho Anh Thai
trans. Ho Anh Thai & Wayne Karlin
That morning,
waking up in the United States, I was frightened to find that I had
turned into an American. Both the bathroom and the bedroom mirrors—two
severely realistic rectangles that refused to flatter anyone facing
them—assaulted my eyes with the face of a guy with blue eyes
and an aquiline nose. The image I saw, if decked out with a wide-brimmed
hat and frayed leather vest, could pass anywhere for a genuine cowboy.
continued
Retrospect
Looking Back at the Tet Offensive
Donald Kirk
The
lunar new year conjures memories of a lunar new year 40 years ago
in February 1968 when some of us were covering the Tet offensive as
it raged across the land we knew as “South” Vietnam. I
was in a bunk in the U.S. Marine Press Center in Danang the day before
Tet, when we heard rockets exploding and small arms fire crackling
down the street. The rockets were all “incoming.”
continued
Donald
Kirk, KJ contributing editor, covered Vietnam first for
the old Washington (D.C.) Star and then for the Chicago
Tribune. He also wrote numerous articles for The New Leader,
The New York Times Magazine and others as well as two books on
the war, Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos,
1971, and Tell it to the Dead: Memories of a War, 1975,
republished in expanded form in 1996 as Tell it to the Dead:
Stories of a War.
Fiction
Peace
Hotel
Wayne
Karlin
(an extract from forthcoming novel, Marble Mountain)
Kiet walked out of the terminal. The heat slapped her, the sun blinding
her, so that the people milling if front of the exit doors were at
first a blurry, shifting mass that slowly distilled into individual
faces: cone-hatted, baseball-capped, bare-headed, her own mirrored
face breaking into a thousand reflecting shards. A taxi-driver reached
for her bag, and she showed him the address of the mini-hotel she
had booked, the Hoa Binh.
continued
"Peace
Hotel" and “The Stone Carver” (published in KJ #68)
are extracts from the novel Marble
Mountain, to be published in 2008. In 1973, author Wayne Karlin
contributed to and co-edited the first anthology of fiction by U.S.
Vietnam veterans, Free Fire Zone. In 1995 he co-edited and
contributed to The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese
and American Writers, with Le Minh Khue & Truong Vu, an anthology
covering all sides of the war.
Poetry:
Supplication
For freedom, make me an albatross
Wings embracing the wind
Curving between the waves and sky
For constraint, make me a tree
A juniper, rooted in stone
Ancient upon the mountainside
For ignorance, make me a person
Such as I am
Lifelong student of the wrong things
For wisdom, make me a person
Again, a person
Lifelong student of the wrong things
–Pepper
Trail
(See also website
and Earth Precepts)
Profile
Pico
Iyer is Lost
by Mark Mordue
Photo by Derek Shapton ©
 Pico
Iyer is lost. It’s a condition he uses to great effect in his
increasingly internalised travel books as we find him on the road
to somewhere he’s not sure of. Wandering through dark and foreign
backstreets or along paths tinged with feral emptiness, sensitised
to a world in which he almost always appears to be, even in the company
of such luminary figures as Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama, somewhat
alone in spirit.“For me,” Iyer says, “being a traveller
means setting yourself new challenges even when you are sitting at
your desk.”
continued
Mark Mordue is the author
of Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Hawthorne Books; Portland
USA). He contributed "Lightning Storm Over Calcutta" to
KJ#61, and "Roadkill" to KJ#65. This article first appeared
in Planet magazine.
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