Shokunin

Enomoto-san: Bamboo Weaver

The Shokunin Project is an ethnography of mastery— a study of the obsession and commitment to excellence it takes to dedicate one’s life to the pursuit of perfection.

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A House Living with Tea

Totousha teahouse Kyoto

“Inspired by tea, the housemates show us that it is possible to live creatively and mindfully in this modern day world. It seems fitting that such a place exists in Kyoto, a city that epitomizes the juxtaposition of old and new.”

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Small Buildings of Kyoto

Small Buildings of Kyoto

Small Buildings of Kyoto features 100 images of the quaint homes, businesses, workshops, as well as the occasional neighbourhood shrine and teahouse, that make up the fabric of Japan’s ancient capital.

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Engineering the Japanese Islands

inoshishi

“Like all peoples on the planet, Japan has a complicated relationship with the natural world that’s shaped by religion and economic behavior and political practices, but certainly the notion that the Japanese enjoy a greener national philosophy is misguided. It does not hold up to historical scrutiny.”

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A Universal Korean-Japanese Story

Pachinko Min Jin Lee

Lee opens this epic narrative of the lives of Korean immigrants to Japan in the fishing village of Yeongdo—“a five-mile-wide-islet beside the port city of Busan”—in 1910, the same year that Japan formally annexed Korea. She concludes it in Tokyo in 1989…

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The Green Summer Wind

basho-john-givens-fiction-kyoto-journal

The old man opened his travel pouch and removed a roll of rice paper. He lifted out his writing kit—a bronze tube ending in a bulbous bronze pot fitted with a tight lid, like a metallic leek with a metallic ball-onion fused on at one end. The tube held his writing brush, and the onion-pot was stuffed with wadded cotton fibers soaked with ink.

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Gourmet Biking in Tohoku

Gourmet Biking in Tohoku

Last autumn, Lianca Van Der Merwe was invited to participate in a “Fooding Tour” of Tono, Iwate Prefecture conducted by Tokyo-based Cuisine Press (r-tsushin.com) and “Or Waste?” (or-waste.com), an NPO aimed at combatting food waste.

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Naoko Nakasone: Rejuvenating Spirit Food in Okinawa

Ukishima Menu

“When people grew millet and grains, they didn’t need to scramble for food. Scrambling causes conflict, but in the absence of scrambling there was peace. For this reason, people really appreciated millet and served it to the gods as an expression of gratitude. “

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Victorian-era Dispatches from Meiji Back-Roads

Isabella-Bird_Meiji-backroads-Japan

“The mosquitoes were in thousands, and I had to go to bed, so as to be out of their reach, before I had finished my wretched meal of sago and condensed milk. There was a hot rain all night, my wretched room was dirty and stifling, and rats gnawed my boots and ran away with my cucumbers.”

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Moon Landings

John Einarsen Sacha Idell fiction

I let Grace pick where we lived. No, Grace had opinions about where we lived, and I did not. We were together because we had nowhere better to be.

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The Potter and the Cook

The Potter and the Cook

Soon after I met my partner, the potter Hanako Nakazato, she gifted me an almond shaped bowl glazed in gray with a silver stripe running down the center…

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Each Moment, Only Once: The Paintings of Herbert Sax

Practicing brush movement in ink allows me, even nowadays, to re-connect in meditative gestures to the unknown stream of life in my being, and gradually over the last fifteen years, I have also expanded this ability to paint intuitively in colour – and this process is still ongoing.

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Mark Edward-Harris: The Way of the Japanese Bath

Mark Edward Harris onsen Japanese bath Kyoto Journal photography

“My first Japanese hot spring experience in Beppu, a town often shrouded in water vapor on the southern island of Kyushu, converted me into a furo-holic (bath-aholic) in the early 1990s. Two decades later, I still find the magical waters an endless source of both visual and visceral pleasure.”

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The Art of Neuroscience: Greg Dunn

Synaptogenesis Neuropore

While completing his doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, Greg Dunn was elated to realize that he could fuse his passion for neuroscience and Asian art together…

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