This small memoir, that ends on a tone of desillusion, is one of the best accounts of a Westerner coming to terms with Zen and meditation. The Empty Mirror, Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, written by the Dutch adventurer, businessman and author Janwillem van de Wetering, is not perfect (the end is a bit [...]
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Cult director Miike Takashi pulls out all stops in big budget Sukiyaki Western Django, his very post-modern, Japanese “Sukiyaki-style” take on the Spaghetti Western. And this “fusion Western” is not such a bad idea at all. In the fifties and sixties, the great Kurosawa Akira made The Seven Samurai, which was later remade as The [...]
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A most useful article in the Japan Times by Mark Schreiber addresses the pitfalls of telephone etiquette in Japan. If you handle this correctly, the person on the other end of the line will think you are 100% Japanese and even ignore your foreign accent… a smooth elevator to making that all-important appointment… Use [...]
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John Burdett (”a nonpracticing lawyer who worked in Hong Kong for a British firm until he found his true vocation as a writer”) is the author of several thrillers set in Bangkok and featuring detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Royal Thai Police. Sonchai is the son of a Bangkok prostitute and unknown American serviceman. In [...]
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I am not much of a thriller or detective reader anymore, although I must confess I have devoured a lot of them in the past. But I am making an exception for the novels by Sujata Massey because her suspense fiction is written from an interesting intercultural viewpoint. The heroine of the novels, Rei Shimura, [...]
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Japanland contains the year-long Japan-experiences of Karin Muller, an American writer and documentary filmmaker who before starting on this adventure already had walked the Inca Road and hitchhiked through Vietnam. Thanks to the humor and vivid style, reading Japanland is a breeze - it is a most enjoyable book.
As a travel memoir this is of [...]
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Summer in Japan is hot and sticky – after two years of cool (and wet) Dutch summers, I have to face that reality again – and I am not even living in Kyoto at the moment. But nowadays all big city summers in Japan are terrible because of the heat-sink phenomenon, Kyoto is nothing exceptional [...]
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Although less well-known outside Japan than cherry blossoms, in Japan the koyo or colored leaves of autumn are just as big an event. Like hanami or blossom viewing, momijigari (”hunting for colored maple leaves”) draws huge crowds. Not only the famed “sakura zensen,” but also the “koyo zensen” or “front map of autumn colors” is [...]
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Japan is the last hypermarket at the end of the world, the great display case where everything that has been made anywhere anytime ends up, the ultimate dustbin of cultures and styles. That is not only true for the huge variety of articles in its shops, but also for its food which ranges from Chinese [...]
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Posted in Intercultural on Oct 14th, 2006 No Comments »
PingMag has an interesting article on the ingenious forms advertisements in Tokyo’s train stations can assume to attract the attention of commuters. Advertisements are everywhere in Japan and companies have to make an effort to get noticed. Ten types of ad-tricks are identified, from plastering over a whole station or train, to mega-stickers, give-away goodies [...]
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How clean is your toilet? As the Mainichi Daily News tells us, there are people in Japan who believe that a spic-and-span toilet is responsible for a bright future. The cleaner the pot, the higher the amount of money that rolls into your bank account, they think. A whole host of books, websites and blogs [...]
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For the French author Marcel Proust fragrances called up the strongest memories, also of forgotten things from a long past childhood. An accidental whiff of roses and you are a small child again, riding your bicycle in the old garden; the penetrating smell of charcoal fires and I am walking in the alleys of Kyoto, [...]
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What can go wrong when a foreigner who knows no Japanese but has very romantic ideas studies a particular Japanese “way” (Do) under a somewhat eccentric Master? Everything, according to The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery by Yamada Shoji (published in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies). Surprisingly, the foreigner in question [...]
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Posted in Intercultural on Jun 20th, 2006 3 Comments »
Gestures are so different in other cultures that they are in fact an altogether different language. It is safest not to use them until you are sufficiently familiar with that other culture. There are after all several cases where the same gesture has a radically different meaning… Here is a Japanese example: you form [...]
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Posted in Intercultural on Jun 4th, 2006 1 Comment »
TV commercials are influenced by culture, even the basic way they are made. For one thing, the commercials I am forced to watch when I am in the Netherlands could not be more different than the ones that flashed over my TV screen in Japan.
Interestingly, the one basic difference reminds me of the basic difference [...]
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Faces are open books, but in case of an other culture, you may have to learn a foreign language.
I mean, what do you look at when you look a person in the face? Do you watch the mouth or the eyes? This is culturally determined: Westerners usually look at the mouth, because we use the [...]
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