Japan Navigator

Are you worried about fatty foods? Are you worried about the carbon footprint of foods brought from afar? Do you fear toxic plastic bottles? The melting of the ice-caps? That your cellphone may be causing brain cancer? Or that you may plunge into a wormhole transporting you to another universe?
No need to worry, says the [...]

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We are in for the Big One – anywhere, anytime. The whole country of Japan seems to be shaking recently. Ten percent of all of the world’s earthquakes take place HERE, in Japan… So what can you do to prepare? Before making my own check-list (which will take some time to come) I found a [...]

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When you have noticed my slow speed of posting these days, you may also have guessed what is the matter: I am fighting Natsubate, “summer fatigue”… My body feels like a piece of lead, and my head is troubled by a persistent cloud of sleepiness…
I am therefore employing several shrewd tricks from the Japanese summer [...]

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Summer is the season of fireworks. When I was in Tokyo yesterday, I saw many people clad in colorful yukata, for it was the day of the Sumida River Fireworks. Through August, there will be many firework displays all over Japan. They are usually held at lakes, rivers or at the seaside. This custom of [...]

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In the process of reading Lafcadio Hearn for my “Canon of 108 best books,” I came across this short story Hearn calls “A Fragment” (from In Ghostly Japan). As a Buddhist look at life, it is worth quoting in full:
And it was at the hour of sunset that they came to the foot of the [...]

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Professor-emeritus Lewis Lancaster is a distinguished scholar of Buddhism, founder of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to use the latest computer technology to map the spread of various strands of Buddhism from the past to the present. Here is a video of a lecture he gave at the University of California, “Buddhism in a Global [...]

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Some of the earliest translators of Chinese and Japanese poetry into a Western language were made by poets who could not read the original sources. They knew no Chinese, no Japanese. The resulting poems have not surprisingly little to do with the originals.
Strangely enough, this is a discussion that even now sometimes flares up: should [...]

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My copy of The Inland Sea, the great travel book by Donald Richie, is dated 1978 (the book was originally published in 1971), a big, sturdy paperback by Weatherhill, a small and excellent publishing firm that unfortunately went under – it was taken over by Shambala in 2004. So I must have bought the book [...]

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Cup sake was introduced by Ozeki in 1964, as a convenient way to have a swig while watching the Tokyo Olympics (even today, sake is allowed in Japanese stadiums). The cup is a kind of sturdy glass, with a content of 180 ml., and covered with a metal cap. In the case of Ozeki, you [...]

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The last few weeks, in bookshops here in Japan, my eye was struck by stacks of red-covered paperbacks, piled up high in the bestseller section. On closer inspection, the title of those books turned out to be Kanikosen (“The Factory Ship”), what I remembered from Donald Keene’s monumental history of Japanese modern literature Dawn [...]

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