Kyoto Journal is an award-winning,
quarterly magazine founded in Kyoto, Japan,
presenting cultural and historical insights from
all of Asia since 1987.
- ALL
- Fiction, Poetry & Reviews
- Hidden Japan
- In Translation
- Insights From Asia
- Our Kyoto
- Tokonoma
Searching for the Self
“In Japan,” the French-born American novelist and diarist Anaïs Nin writes in her Diary in the summer of 1966, “I had a weeping fit. The sweetness, kindness, consideration touched me. For once in my life I felt I was treated as I always treated people.”
Invitation to contribute – KJ 107 (Fire & Kyoto)
Fire transforms, renews and purifies. It is deeply embedded in the culture of Kyoto as a powerful destructive force, sacred agent and essential component of everyday life. The Repeated disastrous conflagrations over its long history have left an indelible mark on the psyche of the city, even today. Fire remains an integral part of spiritual and cultural practices in Kyoto, and the prevention of fire is an ever-present concern.
Trigger of Light
I live in the spare, high desert of the American Southwest, a land of apparent and often illusory emptiness, a blinding bowl of light that triggers one to write with an economy of words. The eye follows winding arroyos, mouse tracks, and blowing seed. The breath gathers momentum along ridges, faults, and prehistoric waterlines. Fossils scatter at the feet, clay shards glisten after a sudden rain.
A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki
As a Nowhere Man, Suzuki was the perfect catalyst for an emerging Western strata of neo-transcendentalists, heirs to Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, yet burdened with a psychological stigma as America gazed West across the Pacific and envisioned an Asia in ruins.
Thorns of Suffering
Hiromi Ito’s remarkable work, The Thorn Puller, takes readers on a pilgrimage across time, space, and literary genres. First serialized between 2006 and 2007 in the magazine Gunzō as Thorn Puller: New Tales of the Sugamo Jizō (Toge-nuki Jizō: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi), the work won the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize in 2007 and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize in 2008 before appearing as a single volume published by Kōdansha in 2011.
Photography Without Borders: Kyotographie 2023
One of the pleasures of KYOTOGRAPHIE has always been the opportunity to explore Kyoto spaces that are not normally open even to longtime residents, and to appreciate the imaginative ways in which the exhibitions have been staged in them. This year, the number of main venues has expanded to 15, while their geography has contracted, presumably to accommodate the influx of day trippers and international visitors. At the same time, the number of KG+ satellite exhibitions in far-flung locations around town has increased to 92, in addition to the 10 KG+ Select and 9 Special exhibitions.
The 72 Japanese micro-seasons
Ever since our ancestors gazed skywards or closely observed the wonders of the natural world around them, they saw patterns in cycles and found ways to recall them. Different cultures around the world have developed systems to mark the passage of time, and every calendar reveals something about how the people who created it related to the world around them. The ancient Japanese almanac of 72 micro-seasons provides a map of time that is a fascinating mixture of culture and nature.
Kyoto’s Suburban Rice-fields
As recently as the early 20th century, verdant and productive rice fields dominated the flat lands on the northern outskirts of Kyoto, squeezing small villages up against surrounding foothills. However, in post-war years this fertile farmland has been encroached on and overwhelmed by waves of suburbanization.
Resisting Democracy’s Death by a Thousand Cuts
Part memoir and part manifesto, How to Stand Up to a Dictator is Ressa’s look back at her early life in the Philippines and the United States, a chronicle of her personal rise through the news industry as one of the most respected broadcast journalists in Asia, and her forward-looking call to action to save democratic societies from dying by what she calls “a thousand cuts” of intimidation and injustice that add up over time. The dictator in question here is as much Big Tech as it is Big Brother.
Meeting the Challenges of One’s Times
Toshi (1901-1995) is perhaps most famous for her anti-war activism and The Hiroshima Panels, a series of artworks on the aftermath of the atomic bombing, both of which she carried out in conjunction with her husband Maruki Iri. Given this legacy, it is all the more salient that in a late interview she called herself “a war criminal.” Toshi explained that during WWII she took commissions for children’s picture books glorifying the war. Though she did so to prevent from starving, she felt that this did not absolve her of her guilt. The Art of Persistence is about this tension between moral imperative and survival, not only during this particular time but throughout the whole of Toshi’s life.