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Authors who belong to Writers in Kyoto

Zen and the Corona Virus

This piece by Reggie Pawle first appeared on the Little Bangkok Sangha website, Bangkok, Thailand (11 July, 2020) and is representative of Reggie’s current interests.

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What do you say to university students who are depressed and don’t see much reason for continuing to live? For some time now students at the university that I work at have said to me that when they imagine themselves being my age (70), they see both society (due to pensions disappearing and governments being swallowed by debt) and the earth (due to environmental conditions) being unlivable. In their own experience they often have encountered social problems, like bullying and cyber-aggression. Now, with nature for now seemingly outsmarting modern medicine with the appearance of the corona virus, they feel their health future may also be affected. Many young people tell me their depression has become more pervasive.

From a Zen point of view, what can you say to these young people?

Many years ago I asked my Zen teacher, Sekkei Harada, what I should say to a group that invited me to introduce Zen to them. He said speak about the Three Marks. These are three aspects that all life has: impermanence (not fixed, transient), suffering or discontent, and no self. As these three are a part of all life, how you handle them is what is important. There are many other givens in life, but Zen focuses on these three. Why? Because how you handle these three will determine the quality of your life. 

This corona virus has thrust human beings into unprecedented uncertainty, thereby bringing into focus the first of these three: the impermanence of life. 

This means that life is a process that is forever changing and we have to be able to live in harmony with this condition.

Human bodies are built according to impermanence. One basic Buddhist teaching is the Four Kinds of Sufferings, which is that all of us are born and will age, get sick, and die. All of us are going through the human life cycle. The grossness with which this is depicted at some Buddhist temples in Asia shocks my Western sensibility. This photo was taken at Wat Damrey Sar Temple in Battambang, Cambodia:

Hopefully the reality of our death is not as gross as is depicted here, but nevertheless, the reality is that nobody can avoid these changes.             

So I say to university students that each of us needs to accept our personal life cycle and the personal difficulties that come with it. We can make our lives better, but difficulties will occur in our lives.   

Psychologically there are many examples of how we are built according to impermanence. One example is that we can’t see the future, no matter how hard we try. We don’t know who we’re going to meet tomorrow. Not knowing what is going to happen is a condition people don’t like, so they have tried all kinds of strategies to try to know their future. One common tendency is to focus on threats to their survival (google “negativity bias”) and then live adapting to this negative view of the future.

I advise young people, don’t get stuck on your depression. Remain open, to the bad and to the good. Don’t let your depression become your lens for your life.

Another way of being built according to impermanence is that our perceptual ability is limited. Even in this moment there are many things you can’t perceive. For example, the dogs at luggage carousels in airports can smell drugs in luggage, but

humans cannot. Therefore I recommend to my students that they recognize what they can and cannot understand, what they can and cannot do. It will help them understand their limits and have a healthy view of themselves.

The second mark is that all life is marked by suffering or discontent. No matter how hard you try, unpleasant things are going to happen. Our life cycle is not

only suffering or discontent, but it always includes these aspects. Suffering and discontent are two common ways that dukkha (the Pali word that according to the Buddhist tradition the Buddha used for this second mark of life) is translated.

There are very rare people who are born without the sense of pain. They usually die in their teens. This is because no matter how much others tell them behaviors like walking on a broken leg are unhealthy, they don’t understand as they don’t have the subjective experience of pain (see The Gift of Pain, by Brand and Yancey).

Pain appears because something is not right. What is important is how we handle pain. With pain comes an urge to avoid it. This is natural – you are not supposed to like pain! However, it is very easy to misunderstand this avoidance urge. If a person only avoids the pain, then they may never fix what causes the pain to appear. A person needs to develop the ability to stay with the pain, to accept it, and then to use the not liking the pain to motivate oneself to inquire into the source of it. Then, if a way to make things better is found, do that and the pain will lessen or maybe go away.

One example is people who have social anxiety. If they behave according to their anxiety urge, they will avoid social situations. However, they then will feel lonely, which will only aggravate their problem. What they need to do is tolerate their anxiety when in social situations and find ways to enter into relationships.

Buddhism asserts that we need to see reality as it is, including its suffering and discontent. Buddhism then articulates a way to end the suffering / discontent that human beings struggle with so greatly. This is elucidated in the Four Noble Truths. The essence of the Four Noble Truths is that if we deeply engage Buddhist practices, peace of mind is possible even in the midst of our suffering/discontent.

We need to commit ourselves to realizing this. We need to both accept our suffering/discontent as well as be committed to alleviating suffering/discontent as much as we can, both within ourselves and in the world. This is not just a Buddhist challenge. This is a human challenge. Viktor Frankl, who survived 3 ½ years in Nazi concentration camps (Man’s Search for Meaning), is an example of this in the Western Jewish tradition.

This is another bit of advice to young people who see only darkness around themselves. While you need to accept your suffering and discontent as a part of life, it does not have to be a part that runs your life. Rather, listen to the message it is trying to tell you. Whenever is possible, do what can be done to alleviate pain. Whatever pain you cannot alleviate you need to accept. If you handle your suffering/discontent in a healthy way, then you will be able to work with the pain in yourself and others and make whatever the situation is better. 

And then there is the third mark of life, no self. This is the most difficult mark of the Three Marks to talk about. So many masters have tried and failed, simply because words cannot describe it. No self is the realization of the indescribable, often referred to in Zen as emptiness. One way of describing the purpose of Zen practice is to realize “no self”. What follows is, with the assistance of several people, my own attempt to explicate no self.

The term “no self”, which is also referred to as not self and non self, is about self – your self, “I”. To really understand no self you need to focus on your self, on I. No self is about you and how you live.

One way to understand no self is in terms of what your self is and what your self isn’t. No self points to the absence of the usual self. What we commonly refer to as our self is, in fact, an on-going series of experiences, all of which fall into what the Buddha referred to as the five skandhas: form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. The self we experience ourselves as being is comprised of these elements and they condition how we think, feel, perceive, behave, etc. However, all of these are impermanent. Their true nature is that they are forever shifting and beyond our control. When we find this difficult to accept, Zen says that we respond to impermanence in three basic ways: we try to hold on to that which we find pleasant, we are indifferent to that which we don’t care about, and we reject and/or avoid that which we find unpleasant. These are all ways of trying to control the flux of nature, which only results in suffering. Life cannot be bent to our will.   

It may seem strange, but when we experience without our usual responses of grasping, indifference, and avoiding, we can let experience be as it is in each moment. We may still not like it, but we can accept it as it is and then mysteriously, somehow, peace arises. Joshu Sasaki, a Zen monk, wrote in his book (Buddha is the Center of Gravity), “You have a very bad habit of only making your home inside of whatever you like. That’s why you feel you are not free.” When we can make our home in whatever circumstances arise in life, then we can be at peace. In Buddhist language, this is because form truly is formless, or, delusion is enlightenment.

Our reaction to impermanence is motivated by our egoistic grasping, attachment, and self-concern. This clinging to our ego-self can foster mind states referred to in Zen as defilements (pollutants). These are mental factors that disturb the natural peace of mind that everybody has. The basic mental defilements in Zen are said to be greed, anger, ignorance, pride, doubt, and false views. These six are subdivided into 102 more defilements, resulting in a total of 108 mental defilements. An integral part of a person’s usual self is some combination of some of these defilements. Letting go of one’s own defilements is basic to realizing no self.

What is the realization of “no self”? Sekkei Harada said that the realization of no self is not an experience. If it is not an experience, how can it be described? Saying what is “no self” can easily result in misunderstandings. Thus Zen usually speaks in terms of what it is not, with terms like emptiness. Emptiness refers to being empty of the created self, with all of its delusory ideas, feelings, and awareness.  However, being empty of one’s created self is not a condition or a mental state of nihilism. Pointing to emptiness as indescribable, Sekkei Harada said to me once, “It is not that it is a literal void. It is just that it cannot be perceived.” As referred to earlier, our minds have perceptual limits. No self cannot be perceived with the perceptual abilities that mind has. 

Keido Fukushima, a Zen monk, did describe in an interview a positive view of no self. He said, “It’s not just a negative meaning.  It means that there is no ego.  There is no self-nature.  All is empty of self and yet you can say by cutting off the ego there’s a way in which you’re living without ego, it’s actually a very positive thing.  It’s a way of living without ego.”

This way of living is one in which a person lets go of their sense of self as a fixed identity or an existent. Then their self becomes more like a function or an activity that is constantly in flux. To accept with grace the many changes we encounter and to not take them so personally. Rather than being a person who lives trying to make their self into something it isn’t by attempting (and failing) to control life according to their desires, fears, delusions, etc., living life as non-self would mean living in a way that is responsive to the ever-changing and interconnected nature of life.

Living in this way includes exercising our will. The Buddha only realized his true nature because he was determined. He had great desire to be free of his suffering. The ever-changing and interconnected nature of life occurs, according to Buddhism, by causality, the interaction of cause and effect. Everything that happens is a result of one or a few main causes and many contributory causes. Each occurrence then becomes a cause for the next effect. Living no self means living as a very sophisticated, interconnected system with many integrated functions, without the common assumption of a controlling center like the ego-self. We need to include our will in this web of causation. We need to be active while at the same time accepting our condition as it is and having peace of mind. Sodo Yasunaga, a Zen monk, said to me in an interview that a person has to do their best, but the realization of no self occurs through conditions and circumstances outside a person. He said it is strange, but “your active effort is in vain. However, you have to do it.” Making effort is a natural function of being a human being. Finally, however, it one’s self, I, the source of one’s thoughts, emotions, and will, that is transformed.

People thought that modern medicine had eliminated plagues and pandemics and they didn’t have to pay attention to such things anymore. However, all life is still part of nature and subject to how nature works. If people live out of harmony with nature, then eventually there will be effects of this way of living.

Modern medicine has been used by society in a way that supports the illusion that living in disregard to nature is ok. When people go to see a modern doctor for some ailment, they have the choice to ignore any advice they may receive. All they must do is passively to receive the treatment and then, if it is successful, they can choose to continue to live as they did before. I knew a guy in the U.S. who had a serious heart condition. He also loved to eat steaks multiple times a week. His doctor told him that

if he wanted to live, he either had to stop eating steak or he had to have heart bypass surgery. He didn’t want to let go of his desire to often eat steaks, so rather than bringing his desires into harmony with his condition, he chose the surgery. Maybe a steak once every couple months or so would have been ok, but he couldn’t accept that. Sekkei Harada once said to me, “It is not your desires that are the problem. It is the one who is desiring that is the problem.”

Zen practice focuses on this one, which is your self, I. Who am I in truth? This is a question that every Zen student must resolve. To do so requires deep study of who am I. Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect of Zen in Japan, wrote, “The Way of the Buddha is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the ego-self.” A person must let go of living through their delusions. Rather than taking a pill or having surgery, this requires effort and changes of a person that are not so easy. To realize no self Zen practice is highly recommended.

So my advice to young people is first to take a good look at themselves, to deeply examine the ground of their self on which they stand. Make the effort, do whatever you can to realize a non-deluded self. And when you find ways that you are interfering with the interactive forces of nature, let go of your interfering, and be in the natural harmony.

Zen has these three complementary parts – making effort, letting go, and being. This is the basis of my advice to young people. I say to them, do whatever you can to help yourself and help the world, then let go, and be at peace.

There is one more very important concern that needs to be addressed when faced with this corona virus – it threatens people with death in a way that human beings haven’t felt in a long time. Even if you live in harmony with nature, you still will get old, sick, and die. As my great aunt used to say to me in her British accent, “Getting old is a dreadful nuisance”. In the entrance area of the meditation hall of almost all Zen monasteries in Japan hangs a sign, written in Chinese characters. At the monastery I have practiced at for many years next to this sign hangs a sign with an English translation:

Death is the greatest impermanence, suffering / discontent, and lack of self in life. If you can resolve the great matter of life and death, then you also resolve impermanence, suffering / discontent, and self. Then you will be at peace.

One word about trying to resolve this great matter. Don’t approach this in a linear way, as in going from not knowing to knowing. Rather, it is in the trying to resolve this itself that the resolution will appear. Keiji Nishitani, a Japanese Zen philosopher, expressed this as, “Life is transformed through trying to resolve unresolvable questions”.

The corona virus brings this great matter into clear focus. It is up to all of us to make the effort to clarify life and death. This is the heart of Zen and is the biggest challenge that the corona virus presents to all of us.

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Postscript
I dedicate this article to my teacher, Sekkei Harada, who died recently on June 20, 2020, about sunset time. He was 93. When you find a true teacher, he (she) is irreplaceable. I miss him very much.

For more about Reggie Pawle, see here.

Reminder: Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition Submission Deadline

Dear Writers,
The warmth and sunshine embracing Kyoto over the past couple of days signify that spring is in the air. This is a friendly reminder that the Writers in Kyoto Sixth Annual Kyoto Writing Competition submission deadline is March 31st JST — just a little over one month away.
An exciting array of prizes awaits the top winners, including one cash prize of 30,000JPY, inclusion in an upcoming Writers in Kyoto Anthology, and more.
In the past five competitions, our judges have had the privilege to read the works of writers from countries throughout the world who have an affinity for Japan’s ancient capital. We hope that you, too, will submit your writing for consideration.
For further information and submission guidelines, please refer to the following link:
https://writersinkyoto.com/…/writers-in-kyoto…/

We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Karen Lee Tawarayama
Writers in Kyoto Competition Organizer

Stone Bridge on Zoom

Zoom session with Peter Goodman, founder of Stone Bridge Press
(2/15/2021)

Peter Goodman, founder and publisher of Stone Bridge Press which has brought out nearly 200 books over the past 30 years. At one point he sold the company to Yohan, shortly before the distributor went bankrupt. A few years later he was able to buy it back.

On Sunday Writers in Kyoto hosted a presentation by Peter Goodman, with about 15 members participating. It provided a great opportunity to bring our scattered community together, with the speaker and three members in North America, one person in Australia, and others scattered around Japan from Yokohama to Shiraishi Island. Some were actually in Kyoto!

Peter described how he had set up Stone Bridge after working for Tuttle and Kodansha. He mentioned some of the successes the Press has had, such as being the first publisher to bring out a book on ‘wabi-sabi’, thereby. Stone Bridge worked with Donald Richie too, bringing out a new edition of The Inland Sea.

As for the present, Peter talked of the negative effect of the Olympics cancellation, the merits and demerits of amazon, and a tie up with the magazine Monkey. He also addressed the question of what every writer wants to know – how best to catch the attention of a publisher. Writers and publishers are often at odds, but thanks to Peter’s warm input this session demonstrated how they can work together to mutual benefit.

While the virus continues to linger around, WiK is looking to a spring season of Zoom events, and we couldn’t have had a better example of how fruitful these online sessions can be. Peter was also good enough to guide us through the submission process and provided the procedure for putting in proposals. His generosity of spirit was evident in his willingness to reach out to WiK, to help with publicity and in the planning of further development. We are very grateful to him for sparing the time and will certainly be keeping in touch..

Jann Williams in Tasmania listening to Peter Goodman in America, under Zoom management from Lisa Wilcut in Yokohama. Some of the other participants are visible along the top.

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The Stone Bridge Press website is strongly recommended, and its list of authors is a model of how these things should be laid out. Two WiK members are included, David Joiner and Amy Chavez. The background information about the authors makes for interesting reading in itself, quite apart from their books. Please see…https://www.stonebridge.com/authors.

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Following his Zoom talk, Peter Goodman those attending to send him brief proposals to see if there is preliminary interest. Should the answer be in the affirmative, then there are a standard set of requirements (see below).

Proposals for publication should include items from the following checklist:
___1  A one-page cover letter summarizing what the book is, who it's for, and why it's useful, important, necessary, or unique.
___2  An expanded table of contents, chapter by chapter with summaries. Indicate what will be included in the front- and backmatter (introduction, preface, bibliography, glossary, index, etc.).
___3  For fiction or translation, at least two sample chapters. For non-fiction, an introduction and one sample chapter, or two sample chapters. If a translation, what is the rights situation with the original author or publisher? Do you have permission to translate the work and seek a publisher for it?
___4  Estimated manuscript length and completion date (if it's still incomplete).
___5  Number of illustrations and what kind (line drawings, black and white photographs, maps, color, etc.). Are there any special production or handling requirements? You can attach or zip-archive low-resolution jpegs or tif files. Do NOT send original art or high-resolution (that is, large) files unless we ask you to.
___6  Information about you. Include a c.v. if you have one, and indicate your qualifications to write on your subject.
___7  A discussion of the size of the market for your book and how your book compares to its competition. What makes it different/better? What are you prepared to do to promote the book (very important!)? Do you know others in your field who will provide reviews or testimonials?
___8  Your financial and scheduling requirements, if any.
___9. Are you active in social media? Blogging?

Email your submission to:sbpedit@stonebridge.com
Send all materials to:Stone Bridge Press 1393, Solano, Avenue Suite C, Albany CA 94706, USA

Please note that we are primarily interested in books with a Japan/China/Asia connection (however tenuous). If you write genre fiction, like science fiction, war stories, mysteries, and romances, or commercial fiction, you probably shouldn't be talking to us at all. Please also do not send poetry or children's illustrated book submissions. No materials can be returned to you unless you provide us with sufficient return postage. We generally reply by email. We look forward to hearing from you.
THE EDITORS, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California
For the past three years Peter has been running a podcast for the Independent Publishing Association in the USA.

Wood and Carpentry

Japanese Wood and Carpentry Rustic and Refined
         By Mechtild Mertz

          A book review by Judith Clancy
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 Japan is a country whose primary building material is wood, ranging from delicate alcove posts to some of the largest wooden structures in the world all employing exquisitely selected wood species.

Walking the old streets of Kyoto or entering a temple reveals the legacy of Japan’s forests: the soothing symmetry of wood lattice-fronted homes, temples with lustrous pillars and wide planked flooring glowing with centuries of use.

Wood is the chosen medium for structures, ornamentation and religious images in a country that supports its craftsmen and appreciates the inherent sensuousness of wood, its color variation, grain, and sustainability.

Mertz’s book is a slim volume with an immense amount of information, full of color photographs that identify the characteristics of each wood type. It also includes photos of fourteenth century woodblock prints that show tools that carpenters used to wield their ancient craft with references known even centuries earlier. Japanese Wood and Carpentry contains an impressive amount of information regarding the grain rendered by cutting direction and the four designated roles of carpenters that judge the aesthetic, ecological and economics that determine wood selection. Mertz also has delved into the timber species presented at the Vienna World Exhibition held in 1873 that listed 133 wood species, and then in a catalog, edited by the Meiji government, listing Japan’s one hundred most important timber tree species for the World exhibitions of Philadelphia in 1876, and of Paris in 1878.

Capably edited by John Hart Benson Jr., the clearly written text makes its well-researched subject a pleasure to read and accessible to laypersons and specialists alike.

  ________________________

As an ethnobotanist and researcher specializing in Asian wooden sculpture and author of Wood and Traditional Woodworking in Japan, Mertz draws upon her great knowledge of Japanese culture and society to explain terms, history, and sources of timber, domestic and abroad. She is presently a researcher at the East Asian Civilizations Research Centre of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris.

The book is published by Kaiseisha Press and is available on amazon.jp here. For her other book, see this page.

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(Note by JD: ‘The author has close ties with Kyoto, having carried out research on traditional Japanese woodworking at Kyoto University’s Wood Research Institute for two years. She also did post-doctorate research at the Kyoto University Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere. She has participated in cooperative study programs on Japanese and Chinese Buddhist sculpture, Tibetan temples and archeological wooden remains. One of her projects investigated the remains of Kublai Khan’s sunken fleet.’
See this link for more.)

Writers in focus

Reminiscences of Donald Richie

(Photo by Everett Kennedy Brown,
from Kyoto Journal 2014)

On Jan 20, 2021, notice of the obituary of Mary Smith (1930-2020), former wife of Donald Richie, was posted on the Writers in Kyoto Facebook public page. This prompted discussion of the renowned Japanologist, which led to personal reminiscences by Alex Kerr and Everett Kennedy Brown.

John Dougill initiated the discussion: Donald Richie once recommended me to read his former wife’s portrait of him in a novel called A Romantic Education. I only got round to reading it last autumn, and was surprised by the unflattering characterisation. Brutally honest is how I would describe it, and you could say there are one or two passages in The Inland Sea too that hint at awkward truths. Now comes word that Richie’s former wife has died, apparently on Christmas Day last year. She had an obituary in the NY Times on Jan 10.

There followed comments about Richie’s sexuality, to which Alex Kerr responded as follows:

Donald Richie was a complex character. He was a scholar and intellectual who played harpsichord, read widely in all the literature of east and west, and devoted himself to the craft of writing, publishing dozens of books as well as a book review column in the Japan Times for years. At the same time, he was indeed sex obsessed, and his kinks included not only voyeurism, but a kind of exhibitionism, in which he delighted in showing people the grungy side of his own nature – which is why he wouldn’t have been offended by his wife’s book. He loved to shock, and was amused when proper people found his comments offensive. He reveled in the contrast between his Dr Jekyll literary self, and his Mr Hyde sexual adventurer. As a gay man with a curious bisexual side, his adventures were as complicated as he was.

Donald followed in the footsteps of French intellectuals such as Proust and Genet, who loved the “nostalgie de la boue” (nostalgia of the mud). In Japan, he was fascinated not by “high culture” like Noh, Kabuki, tea ceremony etc, but the low life, the soft underbelly of society, which he described like no other. He used to take me and other friends on his personal “Tokyo tour” of slums near Ueno, Shinjuku, and other places, where he was fascinated by gangsters, homeless, sex workers, foreign laborers from Iran, and so on. Nobody has written more eloquently about this seamy, usually well-hidden, side of Japanese life.

Finally, there’s another aspect to Donald Richie, which was his love of the Japanese avant garde of the 1950s through the 1970s. That led him to champion Japanese film, become a close friend of Mishima, a supporter of Butoh’s Hijikata, and many others. Few foreigners – nay no other foreigner in the 21st century achieved the kind of friendships that Donald had with the leaders of what was at the time, “counter-culture.” The Japanese avant-garde of those days was sexually liberated but also truly bizarre and kinky (see the writings of Ian Buruma, who was one of Richie’s disciples). Donald was fascinated by the way Japan ran against all the accepted life-trueisms of the West, with sex especially, but with everything else. He remained a Western intellectual to the end of his days, but he was also a product of Japan.


Everett Kennedy Brown then wrote….

I found Donald Richie very forthcoming with his stories of his experiences with gay culture in Japan. It was particularly interesting how he would describe the qualities of young men from different regions of Japan in epicurean detail. I asked him to write these stories down, maybe not to be published while he was alive, but for posterity. I don’t know if he ever did that. We first met at his apartment overlooking Ueno. He wanted to show me photos he had of Yukio Mishima standing in the snow, nude and beautiful with a samurai sword in his hand. The photos were taken by Tomotsu Yato, a talented photographer and former flamenco dancer who lived with Donald Richie and Meredith Weatherby in a fine old house near Roppongi crossing. The house and garden became the setting for many of the nude male photos Yato took during his short career.

Alex Kerr: That house belonged to Meredith Weatherby, founder of Weatherhill Books, which published some of the great books about Japan. Urasenke’s Tankosha bought out Weatherhill and also the house which was later torn down. I used to stay there some times.

Everett Kennedy Brown: Donald and I worked on a project to make Yato’s work known. He entrusted me with Yato’s negatives to make prints that we published in the 44th edition of Kyoto Journal. Donald wrote a fine essay that I recommend anyone interested in this subject to read.

I printed the photographs in the days before negative scanners were available and I deeply regret that I did not refuse to give those negatives back to Donald. Those negatives are now gone. Nobody knows of their whereabouts. A fascinating chapter of Japanese history is again being forgotten.

Alex Kerr
What a pity! Donald talked a lot about those negatives, and I was wondering where they had gone.

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In respect of the above, John Einarsen, managing editor of Kyoto Journal, was kind enough to provide a link to a conversation with Donald Richie from the April 2014 edition, in which Richie describes himself as a self-revelatory writer. There is a strong sense of Lost Japan about the interview.

Quote: “Japanese have many times told me that they consider Tokyo to be a very cold city, compared to, say, Osaka. Of course, the coldest city is Kyoto. It’s like Boston unless you are well-connected there. This is true, not particularly of foreigners, but of the Japanese themselves. Unless they’re born there, they simply don’t want to live in Kyoto. So if Kyoto is zero degrees, we get up to a sort of livable heat in Osaka, then someplace in between is frigid Tokyo.”

Also thanks to John Einarsen for drawing our attention to Notes on Tamotsu Yato, pictured below, the photographer mentioned by Everett Kennedy Brown. The feature appeared in Kyoto Journal, no. 44.

Writings about Kyoto, whether by Japanese or foreign observers

Kyoto Director Akira Nobuchi

Photo taken in 1935 (public domain)
(From the March issue that year of Shinko Cinema, published by Eikosha)

Kyoto Stage and Film Director Akira Nobuchi
by Yuki Yamauchi

“Yes, it has been a bad dream… but a beautiful one will begin.’ So ends Monna Vanna, a 1902 drama by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. The phrase influenced Akira Nobuchi (1896-1968) so strongly that he contributed a short essay to his graduation yearbook, which ends as follows:

“Real life will begin.” As Vanna cries out at the end, this is nothing less than my voice.

A high school student from Nara Prefecture, Nobuchi began his real life in Kyoto, after he was admitted to Doshisha University for theology studies. In 1916 he stopped studying there, however, and entered Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) to deepen his knowledge of English literature, in particular Irish dramatist John Millington Synge whose play The Shadow of the Glen (1903) the undergraduate chose for his graduation thesis.

Nobuchi started his stage management career from around the time of his graduation in 1919. During the next fourteen years, he helped shingeki (Western-style drama) thrive in Kyoto Prefecture and neighboring areas while Tokyo experienced a similar theatrical change led by influential figures such as literary critic Hogetsu Shimamura, actress Sumako Matsui and authors Shoyo Tsubouchi and Kaoru Osanai. Nobuchi headed his own drama troupe Elan Vital Shogekijo, and they performed mainly at theaters in Kyoto, not only plays by Japanese dramatists but also Western counterparts including Arthur Schnitzler, Lady Gregory and Lord Dunsany.

Photo from May 1942 issue of Shin Eiga (public domain)

Among the presentations was Juno and the Paycock (1924) by Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, which was performed at the Okazaki Kokaido hall (predecessor of the Kyoto City Museum of Art Annex). This was the earliest show of the play in Japan. Nobuchi also performed the drama at the Pontocho Kaburenjo theater, which was completed in 1927.

The year 1927 also brought him a meeting with future actress: Takako Irie (1911-95). She was introduced by her brother to Nobuchi, who cast her in such plays as Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov and The Living Corpse by Leo Tolstoy. Some of her performances were seen by film director Tomu Uchida, who enabled her debut as a movie star in 1928.

However, Nobuchi suffered from various problems, ranging from poverty to censorship. There was also the rise of proletarian dramas from 1929. Nobuchi chose to leave the Elan Vital in 1933 and went on to make a foray into filmdom the following year by joining the Shinko Cinema. One of its studios was based in Kyoto, and Nobuchi’s first film was a talkie released in Nagasaki Ryugakusei.

At this time Kyoto was a centre of film making and known as “Japan’s Hollywood”. Nobuchi contributed 32 films, from his maiden work to his swan song Kaidan Botan Doro (Peony Lantern Kaidan) in 1955. At least 22 pieces were shot at studios in Kyoto. Many of the motion pictures put an emphasis on actresses and their beauty, as well as meiji-mono, or films that re-enact the atmosphere of the Meiji Period. He succeeded in both genres, notably Yoshida Goten in 1937 and Fufu Nise in 1940. The former, giving prominence to the flamboyant ambiance and the magnetism of femmes fatale, became particularly popular, as filmmaker Kaneto Shindo recalls in a 1993 book Shinko Cinema Senzen Goraku Eiga no Okoku (Shinko Cinema: The Kingdom of Entertainment Films).

Among the large number of actresses to become famous was People’s Honor Award-winning actress Mitsuko Mori (1920-2012). About half a century later, she recalls the experience:

Since it’s natural that male actors play a leading role, few taught acting to female actors except for one person – film director Akira Nobuchi who kindly told me, ‘Acting is learnt through form.’
(Nihon Keizai Shimbun, December 8, 2007)

It goes without saying that Nobuchi suffered from the growing censorship just before and during World War II. At least two of his films fell victim – the 2,000mm film of Murasaki Shikibu (Lady Murasaki, 1939) was cut by 40 percent, and he was forced to add changes to his 1943 work Hozutsu no Hibiki (Vibrancy of Artillery).

Photo thought to have been taken in 1919 of the Elan Vital theater group

Japan’s defeat in the Allies-Axis war was followed by the loss of Nobuchi’s mother in September of the same year (his father had died in June 1934, a few months before his son’s debut as a filmmaker). In 1946, however, he resumed shooting films, directing stage plays, writing for magazines and creating his own original works. The years 1949 and 1950 were marked by revival of the Elan Vital at some of Kyoto’s theaters, and he also worked with the Shochiku Shinkigeki comedy troupe, which performed a dozen plays of his at theaters including Minamiza. In addition, he worked with Gion Higashi, one of Kyoto’s five geisha quarters, in the autumn of 1952.

On February 1, 1968, pneumonia took the life of Akira Nobuchi. He still lives on in the memory of shingeki researchers and fans of early Showa Period movies (also I hope of those who kindly read this article). If this write-up interests you, I humbly recommend you to visit Kyoto Prefectural Library and watch video editions of his post-WWII films Koi Jamisen (1946), starring actor Kanjuro Arashi, and Taki no Shiraito (1952), which features Machiko Kyo and actor Masayuki Mori.

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For Nobuchi’s IMDb page, please click here. For details of six of his films, see here.

Akira Nobuchi’s 1940 film Fufu Nise. (Source: Kinema Junpo No. 735, Dec. 1st, 1940)

Books set in Kyoto

Kyoto: A Literary Guide video

Kyoto: A Literary Guide which came out last year with Camphor Press was a collaborative effort by six different people, who collectively made the selection and agreed on the translation and editing.

Now one of them, Michael Lambe of the Deep Kyoto blog, has made a short five minute video with the help of his wife which showcases the content and gives an overview of the format. It’s a model of how these things should be done.

The book has received favourable reviews in The Japan Times and Kyoto Journal. It has also been lauded on amazon, including this enthusiastic response : “I really enjoyed the Kyoto Lit Guide. It’s a beautiful selection of poems and I like how it’s entirely a collaborative work and one can’t tell who translated which poem. The cover is great too. It would be so nice to use it as a tourist guide. It’s what I would do.”

Please take time out for a moment, and settle down for this five minute guided tour through a selection of Kyoto’s remarkable literary heritage.

Writers in focus

Hearn 4: The Ditty of O-Kichi and Seiza

John Dougill writes: This synopsis of a story from Shadowings (1900) is Part Four of a series covering Lafcadio Hearn’s stories set in Kyoto. (For the introduction to the series, mentioning Hearn’s visit to the city, please click here.) The title, ‘O-Kichi-Seiza Kudoki’, was taken by Hearn from a ballad that was sung by wandering biwa players. It features the very Japanese theme of a love suicide.

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‘Now hear the pitiful story of two that died for love,’ begins Hearn. The tale starts in the thread shop of Yoemon, a wealthy Kyoto merchant. One of his daughters, O-Kichi, is a sixteen year old beauty with whom a twenty two year old clerk called Seiza falls in love. Though the mother tries to stop the relationship, O-Kichi is consumed with love, ‘like ink on paper’. So the girl’s father sacks Seiza, who returns to his home in Osaka where he pines for his lost loved one.

One night O-Kichi had a vivid dream of Seiza that was so real she believed he had actually come back to her, but when she woke there was no sign of him. So she went to Osaka in search of his house, where she found his mother weeping copiously. It turned out that he had died just a week before of an illness brought on by his longing for her.

The distraught O-Kichi went to the cemetery where Seiza was buried, and so strong was his desire to be with her that his spirit rose from an opening in the grave and asked her to put flowers before the grave and to arrange Buddhist services on his anniversary days. But she could not stand to be parted from him, and so she filled her sleeves with stones and drowned herself in a moat.

In telling the story Hearn interspersed the brief incidents with the repeated Yanrei!, a chorus taken from the biwa recitals. He annotated the brief tale with explanations and parallels from English literature, making it more of a literary exercise than a simple ghost story. (His encyclopedic knowledge and academic leaning led to a successful spell teaching English Literature at Tokyo University.)

The story reflects Hearn’s fascination with spirits of the dead, as is well-known from the collection in Kwaidan. This has been attributed to his childhood in Dublin, when he claimed to have seen real ghosts. He clung to the belief in adulthood, and adapted it to the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer, whom he admired as the greatest man of the age. From Spencer, Hearn got the idea that after death cells dispersed randomly but carried within them memory of their previous existence. It explained for Hearn such mysteries as deja vu and falling in love. In claiming a scientific basis for this, Hearn was thus able to reconcile the romantic and scientific sides of his character.

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If you’d like to read the full story, please see this link and scroll down till you reach the title. For previous stories by Hearn set in Kyoto, please see ‘Common Sense‘, ‘Sympathy of Benten‘, or ‘Screen Maiden’.

Authors who belong to Writers in Kyoto

Haiku Discoveries

New to Haiku
By Sydney Solis

Sydney and husband at a Writers in Kyoto seminar led by Jeff Robbins

While living and traveling in Japan for nearly four years, I indulged myself full-steam in Japanese culture and arts. At midlife, I was looking to shift my writing focus away from the Storytime Yoga work I created, so I spent my days exploring rakugo, shodo, kamishibai, kimono dressing, chado, and attending zazen. I obsessively filled five goshuinchos with goshuins, sampled sake and tofu, marveled at sakura and more, before dutifully reporting on my adventures in my blog, SydneyinOsaka. For some reason, however,  I initially was a bit reluctant to study haiku, that epitome of Japanese culture to the West.

Perhaps my insular, American-centric mind thought it cliche to study haiku. Everybody does it! It’s the first go-to for Japanese culture. I also thought of haiku as something taught beginning writers and youth, recalling memories of a 7th grade English class assignment to write a poem with the three-lined 5-7-5 syllable structure.  I still remember it:

hungry fisherman
clubs a crab over the head
guts everywhere

Well, shut my mouth. It was when I attended a Writers in Kyoto event in 2017 that hosted a talk by Basho Translator and Enthusiast Jeff Robbins who runs the website Basho4Humanity, that I realized there was so much more to haiku than I ever knew. It was the beginning of going down a very long rabbit hole of discovering the depth, power, beauty, complexity, simplicity and most of all, enjoyment of reading and writing haiku. I was hooked.

Reading The Haiku Apprentice by Abigail Friedman made me realize that writing haiku was for everybody, from average citizens to samurai to monks to the Emperor. It was an enjoyable and sustaining art for everyday life to express one’s depth and unity with nature and being alive, rather than something that celebrates only famous authors.

It was also spiritually connected to Zen. As a Buddhist, it offered me a poem written in response from an intuitive flash in relationship to nature rather than from the observing intellect. It was a meditative relief for my busy mind that tends to overthink everything. It was also intertwined with more of my favorite Japanese culture and interests – washi paper, ikebana, zazen.  Synchronized with shodo lessons, haiku also introduced me to Kanji and the fun of reading and translating haiku to learn Japanese via short lines and bilingual text.

Enter the Hailstone Haiku Circle. Now in its 20th year, the group founded by Stephen Henry Gill, consists mostly of Kansai-residing Japanese and foreign writers who meet regularly to write and study Eigo no Haiku, English Haiku. Living in Osaka I attended many of Gill’s monthly classes at Senri-Chuo Cultural Center, forcing me out of my 35th-floor Shinmachi abode where I could easily become agoraphobic. I enjoyed the monthly Midosuji subway ride, even if I got lost more times than my 50-year-old brain cared to admit, navigating Senri-Chuo’s convoluted complex to find the classroom. I also lamented missing them and other events when I could not be coaxed out of the apartment during summer heat to brave the sweltering, packed subway. I did make it once to the Kyoto class, but the three-hour round trip, because of my penchant for getting on wrong trains, prevented any more sessions in that beautiful city and wonderful group. (That goes for WIK events too!)

In October 2017,  I bravely forged ahead on a cold, wet day, after two typhoons to make it to a kukai, poetry gathering, for the Hailstone Haiku Circle’s publication of Persimmon, an anthology collecting 60 poets’ haiku and more. Held in Kyoto at Rakushisha, or House of the Fallen Persimmons, formerly owned by Basho’s disciple Mukai Kyorai, it was then that I was introduced to such a marvelous camaraderie of language lovers. I wrote a haiku of the experience I posted in the comments of The Icebox, The Hailstone Haiku Circle’s blog.

at Rakushisha
lots of rain, one persimmon
— a book of haiku

From then on it has been an endless and exciting discovery of new vocabulary, terms and rules for writing haiku and other forms of Japanese literature, of which I had never before heard of in my life. I will not dare go into detail about them here as my brain is still digesting and learning about them, along with the Japanese culture and history intertwined with them all.

The few I can list with confidence are:
* Senryū – a  short poem that tends to be about human foibles, whereas haiku is about nature.
* Renku – a popular collaborative linked verse poetry.
* Kigo – a seasonal word that must be included in traditional Japanese haiku.
* Kireji – which, depending on its location in the poem, can provide structure; closure; or a cut from a stream of thought, a pause.

Another important aspect I learned about haiku was that English haiku did not have to follow the 5-7-5 syllable constraint that traditional Japanese language haiku must. On my first visit to Japan in 2016, I was inspired to write haiku in the three-lined 5-7-5 to go with my photographs, which I made into a series of Film Haiku without knowing anything else about haiku, (and never having made a film before either. Thank you YouTube editor!)

In one of Gill’s classes, I learned that the 5-7-5 syllable constraint makes it difficult for English writers to express themselves adequately. In later classes, I learned that haiku can be on one line, or even four, a haiqua. It took me a long time to get away from three lines of 5-7-5, which I still tend to prefer as it gives my busy mind restraint! Yet, most Westerners don’t understand that and tend to think that more or fewer syllables or four lines are not haiku.  I learned that Jack Kerouac wrote haiku, and insisted that English Haiku should NOT be in 5-7-5. Surprisingly, I had never read Kerouac before. Maybe it was his haiku spirit that finally led me to his books, as his Winter Park, Florida home is not far from my house, nor is Tampa where he died.

Then I learned about Hai-Pho, or Photo Haiku, that combines a photographic image with haiku. As a photographer, I loved the discovery of a new form for me to combine text and image. Photo Haiku was tricky for me at first, as it’s not ekphrastic. The poem must be “not too far but not too close” relating to the image, according to the submission guidelines for the NHK Haiku Masters Photo Haiku Contest in Kyoto, and as Gill explained during a class.

If the photograph is of snow, you can’t just include snow in the haiku, which amounted to more frustration and confundity for my mind, but another opportunity to practice Zen to free it. Several Hailstone Haiku Circle participants formed a team and created some fine Photo Haiku for the contest, that can be seen here, here and here. I helped by offering photos and voting for the best photos to use in the competition, but unfortunately I couldn’t be on the team nor at the event because I was in Tokyo at the time.

Despite an early start when I first moved to Japan involving myself in group activities, such as being the MC for WIK’s 2018 Poetry and Improv, I succumbed to many health challenges that impeded my ability to participate in more. I lamented being unable to attend hikes and composition strolls that Gill organizes, as well as the haiku composition strolls he coordinates after volunteering to do conservation work in the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest with the non-profit People Together for Mt. Oguru.

I was finally able to get it together to attend one in late 2019 which I got down and dirty helping replace bamboo fencing in the forest, earning entrance to the splendid grounds of Ōkōchi Sansō, the former home and garden of Japanese film star Denjirō Ōkōchi to stroll and write haiku. A few haiku I wrote there are published in the Hailstone Haiku Circle’s brand new book,  I Wish

One red maple leaf
in the chozubachi
Mt. Ogura

Retirement
for a samurai actor
contemplating persimmons

Little by little, my haiku skills have evolved. In 2020, I won second place in the Lafcadio Hearn English Haiku Competition sponsored by the Research Center for Japanese Cultural Structural Studies in which my haiku was made into a haiga, haiku blended with calligraphy and artwork, by Romanian Artist Ion Codrescu who judged the contest. It was featured in a 2020 Kyoto exhibition that featured a global collaboration of artists celebrating the 170th anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn’s birth. It has since been published in Lafcadio in Japan Code: Seeking a Lost Spiritual Tradition, a commemorative catalog of the exhibition compiled by organizer Masashi Nakamura that celebrated the Greek-Anglo-Irishman, whose influential writings about Japan have become classics.

In 2020 I also entered the Genjuan International Haibun Contest and received an honorable mention. I had never even heard of haibun until I came to Japan, which is the non-fiction combining of prose and haiku, as exemplified in Matuso Bashō’s classic The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Haibun became my favorite writing form and introduced me to the term haikai. Haikai can mean many things, but a haibun is to ideally contain, according to The 2021 Genjian International Haibun Contest submission guidelines, “…such features as the subtle linking of haiku with prose, omission prompting the reader’s imagination, humour and self-deprecation.”  Got that? There is still time to submit to the 2021 contest before the January 31 deadline. Join me!

Some people like hitting golf balls; I love tapping my fingers to count syllables and find the perfect rhythm, combination of images and use of craft when composing haiku. Some people watch their wedding videos over and over and over again; I remember fondly my time in Eigo no Haiku classes with its wonderful members.

Especially because those memories and writing haiku and haibun served as medicine for me to cope with a difficult repatriation to the United States in December 2019, which was perfectly timed to coincide with a year ahead of Covid-19 quarantines, mask revolts and an insurrection of domestic terrorists. My haiku was published in the 2019 Luz Del Mes Tri-Anthology, which features haiku written by 33 authors from around the world in Greek, English and Spanish, and my Quarantine Haibun published in The Luz Del Mes Tri-Anthology 2020.

More projects are in the works, such as writing mythological haiku about Japanese God Susanoo for Nakamura, and a collaboration with Greek Artist Maria Papatzelou to combine photos and haiku. You can see her past collaboration with Nakamura and Kyoto Photographer Everett Kennedy Brown in Foretold: Stories That Draped the Body — An International Collective Art Project as well as a mythological art and haiku collaboration with Nakamura in the e-book, The Liquid Sky: When Art, Haiku and Japanese Myth Connect.  And of course I will be entering something in the 6th annual WIK Writing Competition too!

There was a great sense of loss when I was unable to return to Japan for a three-month visit again in 2020. But Zen and writing haiku and haibun helped me remember that all things are impermanent and help me let go of my depression. Truly a domain perdu, I reflect on Japan and the haiku classes and events I participated in there with joy and await a time that I may return once again.

Until then, I read haiku on The Haiku Foundation website, which has many superb haiku writers featured, as well as resources for beginning haiku writers. I also read many other haibun publications, such as The Haibun Journal, where I also intend to submit. (YOU CAN TOO!!!) I read and reread Daisetz T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, which has a long, fascinating chapter on Zen and Haiku.

And I write, opening myself up to each moment of awareness to catch a beautiful flash of intuition that comes from viewing nature or any other instant in my life and emblaze its memory with the timeless beauty of haiku poetry. 

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Featured writing

Cover design (Rowe)

Birth of a Book Cover
by Simon Rowe

While working on a screenplay project in 2019, I discovered the artwork of Tokyo-based Canadian illustrator, Jeremy Hannigan. He had been commissioned to create the visual references for yokai (spirits, monsters and goblins) which appear in the script. At the time, I was looking for a unique hand-drawn design to grace the cover of my second collection of short fiction, Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere (2020). Jeremy’s linework and rendering techniques were exactly what I was after — so I got in touch and pitched my project. He agreed to take on the job, and over the course of two months, we exchanged a swarm of ideas, sketches, and weblinks, all from which, and under his steady pen, the Pearl City cover image materialised.


The following passage is taken from Jeremy Hannigan’s webpage at http://www.jeremyhannigan.com/pearl-city-2020

Himeji-based author Simon Rowe commissioned an illustration for the cover of his book Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere, a collection of short stories set in Japan, Hong Kong, East Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, France, Austria and Cambodia. Driven by characters who are tough, gritty, charming and witty, each of the sixteen tales takes the reader on a trip that ends with a twist. The stories, which carry themes of freedom, family, redemption, justice, courage, corruption, and girl power, are tied together by a single message: triumph over adversity.

Simon wanted the cover to depict the titular story’s protagonists and setting of Kobe Port and Chinatown with a vintage nighttime ‘noir’ mood. Dominating the design would be Mami Suzuki—working mother by day, private sleuth by night, who pursues a suspected pearl thief through the alleys and port precinct of Kobe in western Japan. She needed to be smouldering and sassy, but respectable and businesslike, waist-up only to maximize her presence.

In the background is Kobe Port Tower, the Rokko Mountains, a Chinatown sign, the kanji for ‘Kobe’ and ‘Pearl,’ and Mami’s friend Teizo drinking sake. Various visual references were used, from Kurosawa movies to old noir posters and James Bond stills. For consistency, the typography was laid out in a similar fashion to his previous publication, Good Night Papa, with an embossed title and byline.

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Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere is available at Amazon Japan, Amazon, and Mighty Tales.

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