On Being Alone in a Room in Japan
I once saw a man staring at a handheld television set on a train, eyes swelling with tears, looking at what might have been video footage of a woman gazing back at him, her eyes wet with empathy and...
View ArticleOn Writing About Rain in Japan
It’s tsuyu, rainy season, a designation determined by a group of experts without regard to actual rainfall. It rained once on the day after they had declared the end of rainy season, and that rain was...
View ArticleOn Forgetting Your Umbrella in Japan
When the weather changes, so does your life. In my university days, an exasperated Japanese teacher came in to greet my dripping-wet class. He asked why we were wet. “Oh that’s right. Because Americans...
View ArticleOn Turning on the Japanese Air Conditioner
There’s nothing simple about turning on an air conditioner in Japan. In trains and public offices across the country, the air conditioner is controlled, as are all things, by a faceless bureaucracy....
View ArticleOn the Neighbor’s Children
The neighbor’s children wake up early on the weekend. They gather in the courtyard and perform a choreographed stretching exercise. Children across the country learn this routine, set to a piano piece,...
View ArticleA Neurotic’s Travel Guide to Kyoto, Part 1
Kyoto is for lovers! Shijo Dori Some might say that Kyoto is not about romance. There are temples and shrines everywhere, some of the oldest in the country, and so Kyoto could be considered the...
View ArticleThe Neurotic’s Travel Guide to Kyoto, Part 2
You can read part one of the Neurotic’s Travel Guide to Kyoto here. Yasaka Shrine There is no ignorance, and no end to ignorance. There is no old age and death, and no end to old age and death. There …...
View ArticleOn Having No Comment in Japan
In July of 1945 the United States prepared to test the first atomic bomb in a dusty corner of New Mexico. Amongst the small cadre of scientists who were aware of the Trinity Project – even the US Vice...
View ArticleOn Praying to a Fox in Japan
Nobody in Japan seems to know anything about Shinto. Stop by a shrine and watch people. You’ll see plenty of variety in what you’d think would be a ritual. People approach the temple and ring the bell,...
View ArticleOn Festivals in Japan
If you really want to express your feelings, it helps to carry a one-ton shrine around the city at 5 in the morning while having cold water poured on your back. Every summer you’re bound to run into a...
View ArticleOn Caring About Your Lonely Friends in Japan
Not everyone who moves to Japan is lonely when they arrive, but most are by the time they leave. One can’t reasonably complain about it, of course: We do it to ourselves. But we can try to understand...
View ArticleOn Finding God in a Gourd in Naoshima (In Japan)
“Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.” ― Louis Kahn Freud claimed God was only the lingering memory of our...
View ArticleOn Driving a Train Off the Rails in Japan
It was just after the morning rush on an April day in Amagasaki, a city of about half a million people close to Osaka. A JR commuter train was taking a bend on the track when it derailed, crashing into...
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