|
|
Selections
from Back Issues
(click on title to read the whole article)
See also KJ Encounters
- Little
Soman’s Little War – keith
harmon snow (KJ
#67)
Children not yet ten push on the barrel and run
with it, rotating the turret and running with it, around and around.
The barrel rises and falls across their chests or bellies or noses as
the ground rises and falls beneath their feet, and when they reach a
certain point in the cycle they throw their bodies over the barrel and
tuck their legs and together they are carried forward on the momentum
of a long steel pipe cast with the intent to commit murder.
- Master
Rumi: The Path to Poetry, Love and Enlightenment –
Rasoul Sorkhabi (KJ
#66)
Written for the 800th anniversary of the birth of Rumi...
A fifteenth-century Persian poet, Jâmi,
writes that one day in the late autumn of 1244, Rumi was sitting by
a pool along with his disciples and books. Shams (unknown to Rumi) came
along, greeted him and sat down. Interrupting Rumi’s lecture,
he pointed to the books and asked, “What are these?” Rumi
replied, “This is some knowledge you wouldn’t understand.”
Shams then threw all the books into the water and said, “And this
is some knowledge you wouldn’t understand.”
-
How to Move a Tree – William Stimson
(KJ
#65)
Early
one morning in a park in Taiwan I came across a man who had stopped
off on his way home from the market to harness himself to a tree. For
a moment it looked as if he were trying to move the tree to another
place, maybe drag it home for his front yard...
-
Questioning Gender: An interview with Japan-based psychotherapist Kim
Oswalt – Stewart Wachs (KJ
#64)
Spiritually
speaking, this is a very pluralistic society. My inkling is there’s
something here that makes life a bit easier for transgender people than
in the U.S. They're not told that they’re going to hell for being
transgender. God does not hate them; you don’t hear that here
in Japan. You may have social prejudice, but you also see people like
Miwa Akihiro, a transgender female with blonde hair, being consulted
on NHK-TV by everyday people, like Dear Abby, and she’s elevated.
- The
Barber – Dustin Leavitt
(KJ
#62)
My
goatee and shaved head perplex many Vietnamese because in their country
beards are for venerable old men like Uncle Ho and bald heads for monks,
and I am neither. Their confusion revolves, as so often with Americans
in Asia, around my role in life and what deference I am owed.
- Blogology
101 Robert Brady (KJ
#61)
The
term ‘blog’ is on everyone’s tongue nowadays, where
some find it not very tasteful, mistakenly believing that blogs are
rank upstarts without tradition. Neither is the case, as the following
brief history — organically commencing with what will one day
be known among blogologists as paleoblogging — makes perfectly
clear....
- Entering
the Blogoshere Ken Rodgers (KJ
#61)
Contrary
to rumor, blogging’s not just some Babel echo chamber of white-guy
geek pseudo-punditry. Blogs are a new way to see through others’
eyes, to in-vision other cultures. People around the world are now communicating
beyond geographic, political or social borders, in ways unimaginable
just a few short years ago.
- Is
Europe Western? Tawada Yoko
(KJ #61)
In Europe people like to talk of Asian
cuisine, Asian medicine, or of Asian philosophy, because they would
like there to be some sort of unified Asian culture. If they didn’t,
the existence of a European culture would be in doubt. In Asia, however,
for a variety of reasons one is happy that there is no Asian culture...
- South
of the Border: Consumed by Divisions, by Donald Kirk
(#60: KOREA)
Refugees from North Korea could tell all the tales
they wished of unimaginable suffering, of starvation and disease, public
executions, hangings and shootings, but to most South Koreans these
stories were remote, of little interest, someone else’s nightmares,
yarns they tended to skim whenever they saw them reported in the papers.
When I asked demonstrators campaigning for repeal of the National Security
Law why they never raised their voices in protest against torture and
killing in North Korea, the answers were always the same — so
similar, in fact, that they might have been taken from a textbook on
what to say when asked. “We have no proof of what goes on in North
Korea,” said one young protester. “We will know only after
the Americans have gone home and we are one country again.”
- Korean
Protest Culture by Gabriele Hadl (#60:
KOREA)
In 1985, the struggle was reignited en
masse, and a two-year protest campaign brought down the government.
No velvet revolution here, but a series of powerful, sustained confrontations,
culminating in a radical rewriting of the social contract. Its provisions
are still being negotiated, in parliament and on the street.
Demonstrations, accepted and widespread as they are, are now but one
facet of public debate. The traditional protest repertoire of marches,
sit-ins, stones and Molotov cocktails is evolving. Some of the new techniques
remain confrontational, even violent. Others rely on technology, subtlety,
inner strength and community.
- Beyond
East and West: Reliving Iran on the road in
Burma & Cambodia, by Miro Phanruang (#59)
"When I landed at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran in late 2002, I finally
met the Iran I had glimpsed in these books — an Iran that revealed
a thousand and one stories of itself to outsiders’ dazzled, blinded
eyes, each of them circling back, somehow, to the writers’ own
secret selves. The Iran I saw held forth a fierce hybridity, passionate
struggles over ideas and over identity. As an Asian-American traveler
who is simultaneously both and neither East and West, I found unexpected
personal resonances in Iran, along with a poetry that was ineffably
and unmistakably Iran’s own."
-
Stifling Spirit: KJ contributing editor Donald
Kirk, on the ground in Baghdad, reflects on Iraq, North Korea and Vietnam
(#58)
"The war over here, and the rumors of war
over there, on the Korean peninsula, all revolve around the issue of
democracy, the credo the United States purports to want to instill or
else to defend. In the struggle for democracy, however, real freedom,
the freedom to speak and think as one wishes, appears to be a casualty
as conflicting factions speaks in the tongues of ideologues and myth-makers."
- Letting Go of Ego -
An interview with David Daigaku Rumme, by Nevin Thompson (#57)
"There's this idea in spiritual practice that you're seeking
for the truth. However, the actual way to discover that everything is
the truth is to let go of dualistic ideas: good and bad, right and wrong,
this and that.
In the West, especially in America, this idea of being somebody and
having opinions and being able to articulate your opinions and so on
is very important. If you can't do that, it's like there's something
wrong with you. On the other hand, here in Zen you have this emphasis
on letting go of your viewpoints and opinions. As Dogen says, 'To study
the way of Buddha is to study the universal Self, the Self that is one
with everything.' Okay, now how do you do that? All you have to do is
forget the ego, that thing we associate as being 'me.' In other words,
the body and all of those opinions that go along with it."
- The Clarity of Double Vision -
An interview with Mary Yukari Waters, by Stewart Wachs (#56)
"I remember as a child feeling that since
I was part Irish-American and part Japanese, I could never look at either
Ireland or Japan in a bad light. And I recall thinking that the more
mixed you were, the more countries you’d perhaps see as home.
When you are relatively familiar with two cultures, especially two as
different as America and Japan, one thing that does stick with you is
what these cultures have in common. You can see which qualities are
Japanese and which are just human and transcend all of that."
- May 4, 1989: The Road to Tiananmen - Philip
J. Cunningham (#55 - STREET)
A long line of police watch intently from the far side of the
road. They are ridiculously outnumbered and make no attempt to stop
the crowd. Immobilized automobiles get swallowed up, lapped by bodies
on all sides, like listing ships in a turbulent sea. From the north
comes a spirited procession of students from other schools, and in no
time students fill the road as far as the eye can see.
- Buddhism is Not Un-American: Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and 50 years of City Lights - Interview by Carl
Freire (#54)
"In the present American corporate culture,
the technocratic culture, the electronic culture, the mercantile mentality,
Buddhism is a dissident movement against all of that. So what the Kyoto
Journal is doing is part of this dissident movement against the
American corporate monoculture and the prevailing militarist McCarthyite
semi-fascist government that is now in power in Washington D.C. and
has hijacked our democracy."
- Living Deeds: Ashoka -
Ken Rodgers
(#53)
Ashoka (meaning in Sanskrit 'the active absence of sorrow') was named
for the 3rd century B.C emperor who unified India, renouncing violence
and dedicating his life to social justice and economic development.
Since commencing its initial program in India in 1982, Ashoka has elected
over 1,200 Fellows, actively promoting new ideas in health, education,
civic participation, environment and economic development in 43 different
countries, including six in Asia
- Dear Leader Russell Working
(#52)
Let us call her Eun-ju,
for people may die if her real name is revealed. Her own life is in
danger, and her two sisters, her brother-in-law, and one surviving nephew
remain at large south of the Tumen River, near the port of Hongwan,
a city of apartment blocks without toilets, empty wharves populated
by slump-shouldered cranes and rusty destroyers, a train station where
the homeless sleep in the waiting room seats or on the floor with the
mice, and bony children who lie down in the streets because after a
certain point — thirty, thirty-five days, perhaps — one
cannot stand any longer.
- Getting Beyond Good vs Evil: A Buddhist Perspective on the
New Holy War - David R. Loy (#51)
One way to summarize the basic Buddhist
teaching is that we suffer, and cause others to suffer, because of greed,
ill will and delusion. Karma implies that when our actions are motivated
by these roots of evil, their negative consequences tend to rebound
upon us. That is true for everyone. However, the Buddhist solution to
suffering does not involve requiting violence with violence, any more
than it involves responding to greed with greed, or responding to delusion
with delusion.
- NonZen Poet Missing Since 9/11 - Morgan
Gibson (#51)
Expecting death, I have lived as if peace were possible, though
violence is pandemic. Buddhism opened my eyes to death-in-life and life-in-death,
their nonduality. The NonZen Poet opened them even wider. Terrorists
come and go, civilizations rise and fall, our own among them whoever
we may be, but death is always with us. As the Buddha asked, is there
a family that has never known death?
- Coyote Man, Mr. President and the Gunfighters -
Gary Snyder, (#51)
Mr. President was fascinated by gunfighters.
Expert gunfighters were invited to his White House, three thousand of
them, like guests in the house. Day and night they practiced fast-draw
and shootouts in his presence until the dead and wounded men numbered
more than a hundred a year... (After the Discourse on Swords, Chuang-tzu,
3rd century BCE)
- The Arbor of Floating Wine Cups - Kosaka
Hirokazu (#50
- Transience)
When I was eight years old, my father took me to a monastery
for training and discipline. We started in the early morning light,
on a path through rugged mountains.
- Icing on the Cake: A Day in the Life
of a Tibetan Sand Mandala
- Lauren W. Deutsch (#50 - Transience)
Stripped down to his swim trunks, a ski
jacket, a Disneyland Mickey Mouse hat and his rosary, one of the monks
said he would like to see a video if possible. "Jackie Chan, in Hindi"
was his translator’s remark. "Hindi I can’t get after 7pm,"
I replied.
- Ryu
& Me (an interview, sort of,
with Murakami Ryu) - Ralph F. McCarthy
(#49)
"Beneath the level of consciousness, we human beings have an
entire universe of darkness and chaos. The rational faculty is only
one small part of us. We try to control the dark parts with laws, morals,
common sense, and so on, but human beings are too deep, diverse, and
free to be contained by such things. Novels can sometimes depict the
struggle between reason and the darker regions of the heart."
- Imagining Lady Murasaki (#48)
Liza Dalby, interviewed and profiled
by Sally McLaren
"Her quest to bring Murasaki [author of The
Tale of Genji] to life for her novel led Dalby to blacken her teeth,
in the Heian style, and retrace the steps of the woman who single-handedly
invented the genre of the novel. Where Dalby's obsession took her and
what she had to learn are part of her experience as anthropologist turned
historical novelist, or as Dalby puts it "literary archaeologist."
- Demons, Misinformation & Kimochi -
Interview by Catherine Pawasarat
Alex Kerr on the Failed Modernization of Japan (#47)
"When information is hidden, lied about, mishandled
etc. — as it is routinely in this country, from top to bottom
— then you have a big problem from a modern technology point of
view."
- Media in Asia - Special
Theme Issue (#46)
Twelve articles from this issue are available online, here.
(Also Asia Online, with links
to hundreds of Asian media-related websites).
Culture Jammers' Guide to Enlightenment
- Gabriele Hadl talks with Adbusters'
Kalle Lasn
" TV and the mass media are to the mental environment what factories
are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollutants into the
water or air because that is the most efficient way to produce plastic
or wood pulp or steel, and the mass media pollute the cultural environment
because that is the best way to produce audiences."
- The Lists of a Lady in Waiting - David
Greer (#45)
In
The Pillow Book's opening lines, Shonagon puts things in motion
to remind us they will not last: the clouds stretch only to disappear;
the fireflies' paths do not meet again; the geese fly into the setting
sun and darkness descends. Her sentences don't end so much as they scatter,
like cherry blossoms tugged off branches in the wind — a favorite
simile of writers at the time — mono no aware. But frankly,
mono no aware was pop culture during the Heian period.
- Colonization.com - Robert
Brady (#44)
History will record that throughout its long existence Japan
was unique among Asian nations in never having been colonized until
around 1996RT (Real Time), when, as the country's elder rulers were
still pondering their next go stone placement, the nations' key virtual
real estate was being snapped up like free Gucci bags at the Gate of
Heavenly Peace.
- Hawaiian Hips - Suzanne
Kamata (#44)
Victor is always late. We practice while
we are waiting. Each of us, in our own bubble, dreams of ukelele music,
palm trees in the wind. We make fog with our arms. We plant flowers
with our hands. We move our hips from side to side and toss nets into
the sea.
In a bind, Victor will ask me to translate.
When he does, I see the ladies’ eyes darken. They do not want
to listen to me. They’d rather look at Victor—Victor’s
burnished skin and Kona-coffee eyes.
- Alice in Shikaland - Malena
Watrous (#43)
Only a week after that blue flash at Tokaimura, a mere chainlink
fence separates our vehicle from Shika's own massive nuclear power station,
the source of electricity for the Hokuriku region. At Tokaimura, workers
followed executive instructions to flout national nuclear safety laws.
They dissolved massive quantities of uranium in steel buckets, then
poured it into a tall cauldron, begetting a chain reaction and critically
injuring themselves. We crack nervous jokes about mutant vegetation.
- All
the Times in the World - Pico Iyer
(#42, a special issue on Time)
Time, like value or proportion, is one of those
currencies we exchange (at the going rate) 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; yet a single
day in Cuba (so crazily eventful) can feel like a year in any calmer
place. One of the curious paradoxes of time, as with the money for which
it is often exchanged, is that those who are richest in it are the ones
least attached to it.
- Shima Spain Village -
Bruce Caron (#41)
The nineteenth-century period of the "opening of Japan" is often
described as a time when that nation began to "learn from Europe." In
the summer of 1994, out on the Kii Peninsula, I reckoned this century-long
class was officially over when, in the middle of an outdoor arena show,
the Japanese-actor conquistadores started dancing the Funky Chicken
with other nearly naked actors (presumably Aztecs). A cartoon-costumed
hang-dog Don Quixote with a pudgy puddy-cat Sancho Panza came on stage
to save the day, and it became clear that Japan had already learned
just about enough from Europe.
- America's "Japan " -
Thom Burns (#40)
Europeans
and Americans traveling to distant parts of the world in the 19th century
were, for the most part, well grounded in generalizations about their
own culture as well as those of the peoples they encountered. Broad
concepts, such as "Christendom" and "the Orient" were more commonly
used than "the West," "Asia," or "the modern world."
- An Interview with Johan Galtung -
Philip Grant (#38, Transforming
Conflict)
I first set eyes on Johan Galtung, often referred to as the
"founder of the field of Peace Studies," in the fall of 1986. I had
stumbled into the coffee shop of my Amman, Jordan hotel after only a
few hours sleep, looking for a caffeine rush to get me through what
promised to be another raucous day of debate...
- An Interview with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi -
Debbie Stothard (#38)
"We
have said again and again that dialogue is not a debate in which there
will be winners and losers. A dialogue will be a process through which
we can come to a solution which will be beneficial to the great majority
of us, which would be of benefit to both sides, or to all participants
in the dialogue process..."
- Down in the Country, Out in the Bush -
Royall Tyler (#37, Inaka Bookzine)
These days I am translating The Tale of Genji, so I meet
Genji often. He used to live in Miyako, too, and though he never
existed, he is far more real than most people who did. He first
traveled out of the city at eighteen, when he had malaria, to visit
a healer at a temple in the Northern Mountains (Kitayama)...
- Nakaumi - An environmental report
by Gavan McCormack (#37, Inaka
Bookzine)
This
project, originally designed to increase national food self-sufficiency
in rice, has developed into one that is destroying a major fishing
industry and diminishing sustainability...
- Siva
and Hermes - an essay by Philip Grant
(#36)
Given that all social and political ideals must today be expressed
in the language of the market, is any meaningful change conceivable?
Without the impetus of man-made and natural catastrophes, have human
beings ever voluntarily pulled back from the abyss and adopted modes
of thinking and living based on considerations of fairness, equality
and compassion?
- Salvation - Philip Hammial
(#33, Orthodoxy & Heresy Bookzine)
A
man sets out to shave the world. It's logical to start with himself,
& this he does. Plenty of lather & a sharp razor, he has
some difficulty with those in the ears & around the anus, but using
mirrors, he prevails...
- The Last of the Smokers -Tsutsui
Yasutaka (#33)
Sitting on the roof the National Diet Building, under attack by
tear-gas fired from the Defence Force helicopters circling above, I
am smoking my last cigarettes. One of my comrades, a painter called
Kusakabe, has just fallen tumbling down to the ground below, making
me the last remaining smoker in the whole world...
- Getting
the Secret Out of Cid Corman - Gregory Dunne
(#31)
In 1963, Cid arrived in Japan almost by accident.
He had applied for 27 teaching jobs in Asia, 26 of them outside Japan.
As luck, or fate, would have it, he was offered the job in Japan. Since
then, excepting a short stay in the U.S. in the eighties, Cid has remained
in Japan...
- Talisman - Yoko Tawada
(#31)
This city is full of women who wear pieces of metal on their ears.
They have holes put in their earlobes especially for this purpose. Not
long after I got here, I wanted to ask someone what these pieces of
metal on people's ears meant. But I didn't know whether or not I was
allowed to speak openly about this...
- Up
Against the Wa - F.J. Logan
(#31)
Early spring, clear, 2:30 p.m., cherry blossoms
sprinkled across the sidewalks, drifted in the gutters, mashed to atoms
on the asphalt. You're in your lovely late model white-with-maroon interior
Toyota Sprinter, northbound on Machida Kaido, closing in on Hashimoto.
But slowly...
- An American Issei - Robert
Brady (#30)
I came to Japan from the old country over twenty years ago with
no intention of being an immigrant; I was just a traveler who stopped.
Like age, immigrancy was upon me before I knew it...
- Speaking in Tongues - an interview
with David Byrne, by Robert Brady
(#29)
"Paradoxically, you appear to be an introspective
performer. Are you really a poet first and a singer second?... "
In a way; I think of myself as a poet who works in every medium available,
pretty much except poetry. It's either song, or in pictures or something
else.
- 60 Ideas to Make Kyoto a Better Place to Live (#27)
Think beyond construction project spending. Bearing in mind Kyoto's
role in the evolution of so many time-proven elements of traditional
Japanese lifestyle, its successful Meiji transformation, and current
world environmental imperatives, make the primary goal of new
Keihanna Science City the development of innovatory Green alternative
"soft" technology providing practical means to improve life and
halt environmental degradation within Kyoto, nationally, and beyond
Japan...
- Somewhere on the Water Planet -
poem by Nanao Sakaki (#22)
In the beginning
There was a forest, a beech forest.
The forest gathered rain & divided rivers..
- What
If? - Review of Chronicle: the Great Hanshin
Earthquake
Experienced overseas medical teams rush to Kobe, where they are told
that they cannot treat the injured without Japanese medical licences.
The Health and Welfare Ministry establishes an emergency HQ in the devastated
city - one week after the quake...
Subscriptions
|
