Is it true that only a suicide stops a Japanese train from running on time? Why did her father always ask questions about death? In his last letter he’d asked if she knew anyone who had visited Aokigahara, the so-called Suicide Forest. He said he’d read about it in National Geographic, that you could sense …Read More
Category: Featured Writings (Page 1 of 14)
Featured writing
Talk with Author Simon Rowe at David Duff’s home, April 14, 2024 Nine people gathered to listen to Simon Rowe talk about his phenomenal success in publishing and other things on April 14 in Kyoto. Thanks very much to David Duff for opening his home/library once again for an event. Due to the absence (by …Read More
Marc Keane is well-known to readers for his remarkable books on Japanese Gardens, and during his lunchtime talk for WiK last autumn he revealed that he was working on three new writing projects. One of them has now come to fruition, The Name of the Willow. Like Rebecca Otowa, whose artistic talents were evident in …Read More
In KJ102, a newly released digital issue, we bring together accounts of formative experiences, in the context of historical momentum. A good example would be Vito Tomasino’s tale of visiting Kyoto as a U.S. Marine on R&R from Korea in 1954, taking the opportunity against significant odds to throw himself briefly into judo training with …Read More
by Douglas Anthony Cooper Where a woman, hand full of sunflowersDwarfs a tyrant, shames a soldierLays a curse upon cowardsThere we who are small and watchingMerely watching, safe behind screensAre maybe redeemedAnd blue will rise over yellow And we who are breathing, poorlyAir sick with lies, alone among friendsAnd starved of wonderLook to a woman …Read More
by Stephen Mansfield Once you introduce a concept, aesthetic ingredient, or color palette into Nature in the form of a garden, you stir the wilderness, the primal pot. A space probe does something like that with the universe. It likely never occurred to eighteenth century European collectors and literati, entitled beneficiaries of a meticulous, favorably …Read More
The Memoirs of a Japanese Nurse on the Western Front (pt 3) Hajimeko Takeda’s Notes by a Japanese Nurse Sent to France Translated by Paul Carty & Eiko Araki, edited by Freddy Rottey & Dominiek Dendooven In Stand To! 122 (April 2021), the introduction, context and postscript of Hajimeko Takeda’s memoirs as a Japanese nurse …Read More
The Memoirs of a Japanese Nurse on the Western Front (pt 2) Hajimeko Takeda’s Notes by a Japanese Nurse Sent to France Translated by Paul Carty & Eiko Araki, edited by Freddy Rottey & Dominiek Dendooven In Stand To! 122 (April 2021), the introduction, context and postscript of Hajimeko Takeda’s memoirs as a Japanese nurse …Read More
KJ 100 / ‘100 Views of Kyoto’ By Ken Rodgers A very special celebratory print issue of Kyoto Journal No one on the Kyoto Journal production team has been watching the virtual Olympics. We’ve been too busy wrestling our next issue into shape, for a strict print deadline. (Yes, print!) Since it also happens to …Read More
A Meditation by Robert Weis The first time that I experienced the beauty of Sakura trees was in April 2017, at the Yanaka Cemetery in Tokyo. A delicate breeze dispersed thousands of pink petals over the graves, in a poetic momentum that touched me deeply. For sure, I had seen Sakura before, in my home …Read More
WiK Writing Competition
WiK Anthologies
The Nature of Kyoto (2023)
Eds. Lisa Twaronite Sone & Robert Weis
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Structures of Kyoto (2021)
Eds: Rebecca Otowa & Karen Lee Tawarayama
Foreword by Judith Clancy
Encounters with Kyoto (2019)
Eds: Jann Williams & Ian Josh Yates
Foreword by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Echoes (2017)
Eds: John Dougill, Amy Chavez, & Mark Richardson
Preface by Alex Kerr
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