Japan Navigator

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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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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My first encounter with Japanese terror in the form of a yokai monster came in the early eighties, when I studied in Kyoto. It was a double punch as I more or less simultaneously discovered the manga of Mizuki Shigeru, and the Kwaidan tales of Lafcadio Hearn. Mizuki Shigeru (born in the Tottori town of […]

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Yatadera stands high on a wooded hillside outside the town of Yamato Koriyama, the castle town and governmental center of Nara in the Edo-period (before that, Kofukuji Temple served as both religious and worldly authority in the area). We traveled to the wrong station - the JR Station, and had to walk through […]

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Yesterday, when the weather cleared a bit, I went out towards the middle of the afternoon. As I could not go far, I visited the (free) Sawanotsuru “Traditional Brewery” Museum, the only sake museum in the Kobe area I had not yet seen. It stands south of Oishi Station on the Hanshin line, in one […]

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It seems to be out of print now, but perhaps it will bounce back as it has done so many times since it was first published in 1964: Gouverneur Mosher’s Kyoto: A Contemplative Guide. This was my first guide to Kyoto when I arrived there as foreign exchange student of Kyoto University in 1982. There […]

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Ottmar von Mohl (1846-1922) was a German diplomat who from 1887 to 1889 was advisor of the Japanese government. Together with his wife, a countess, he was stationed with the Imperial Household Ministry to introduce European court ceremonials and protocol to the new Meiji court. In 1904 he wrote a book about his experiences in […]

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The Tatsuuma Collection of Fine Art, next to Koroen station on the Hanshin line between Osaka and Kobe, is an interesting example of a museum set up by a sake brewer: Tatsuuma Etsuzo, the man who in 1862 founded the Hakutaka Brewery by splitting off from the main Tatsuuma family and its Hakushika Brewery […]

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The last weeks I have been introducing regional sake from the Kansai area: from Kyoto, Hyogo, Osaka, Nara, Shiga and Wakayama (I have recently fine-tuned all articles, for example by adding more information about individual breweries as well as translations of the sake label names, so you may want to have another look!).

[Miyamizu wells, Nishinomiya]
Kansai […]

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It is time for a modern writer and we start with Murakami Haruki. I have been reading his books since the early eighties, from the first novels Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 73. I bought the Japanese pocketbook-size Kodansha translations by Alfred Birnbaum (for Japanese learners of English), and at the same time read […]

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In 1949, the Dutch Sinologue and diplomat Robert van Gulik translated an 18th century, anonymous Chinese crime novel under the title “Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee.” He found the original novel in a second-hand bookshop in Tokyo and hoped it would teach Japanese and Chinese authors of detective fiction something about their own rich tradition. […]

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Wakayama is the warmest prefecture on Honshu - the place where spring arrives earlier than elsewhere. That does not make it very suitable for sake brewing, for which a colder climate is necessary. On top of that, 80% of the prefecture consists of forests and mountains (my favorite Kumano area in the south, as well […]

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The Zhuangzi has always been one of my favorite texts, thanks to the humor, the wild flights of fantasy, the imaginative stories and parables, the poetry of its language. And of course its philosophical stance, which is a combination of relativism and skepticism, bound together by an all-pervading holism. At the same time, it is […]

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Although Shiga Prefecture boasts some excellent local makers, it is an area of only small breweries. Shiga used to be the central rice producing area of the Kansai, but urbanization and industrialization have taken their toll. You only find unspoiled landscapes in the far north (round the northern tip of Lake Biwa) and in the […]

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