Japan Navigator

Wall around a construction site in Kobe, in the area where in the 19th century the foreign settlement was.

I like that, about the tulips. This is next to the Kobe City Museum – are they going to expand the museum?

In the same neighborhood stands the Kyukyoryuchi Jugobankan – the only building left from the [...]

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More old photos, although younger than the usual Meiji collections: photos from Occupied Japan from the Ohio State University Libraries. The photographer, anthropologist John W. Bennett, took most pictures between 1948 and 1951 and also wrote the extensive comments available on the site. Also included are selections from Bennett’s professional journal of the period.

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English is the global lingua franca and not surprisingly, most literature from the Japanese has been translated into that language. That is a good thing, but there is also quite a lot in French and German, two other languages I learned in the past and am trying hard no to forget. So recently, I started [...]

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In a previous post I have written about Japan’s most interesting gourmet manga Oishinbo. Now, the SFGate reports, the first few volumes have been translated and are popular in the U.S.:

Oishinbo, or the Gourmet, is considered the comic that defined manga’s cooking genre. Created in 1983 by Tetsu Kariya and illustrated by Akira Hanasaki, Oishinbo [...]

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Enlightenment Guaranteed (Erleuchtung garantiert) is a German film from 1999 by Doris Dörrie about the tribulations of two middle-aged brothers staying in a Japanese Zen monastery. The brothers are played very naturally by Uwe Ochsenknecht and Gustav-Peter Wöhler.

The story is has a deep human touch, but is also light and humoristic – as light as [...]

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It is a mystery why publishers can’t keep their hands off titles in translation. The English title of this book, the rather bland Tokyo Fiancée is in the original French Ni d’Ève Ni d’Adam, “Neither of Eve, nor of Adam” as used in the expression “Ne connaitre ni d’Ève Ni d’Adam” which means “to be [...]

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Norma Field, writing on Ikjeld.com, has an interesting and detailed account of how The Cannery Ship rose to current popularity. She tells why the boom was improbable (left-wing writer Kobayashi Takiji was almost forgotten, the young had lost interest in politics), but also how the boom was “manufactured” by a media figure, a newspaper article [...]

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When reading up on the history of Kobe, today I came across another interesting database with old photographs of Japan, this time at Nagasaki University. It is called “Metadata Database of Old Photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period” and contains 6,000 old photographs from the University Library. Famous photographers such as Ueno Hikoma, Shimooka Renjo and F. [...]

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