Report by Felicity Greenland (all photos by her unless otherwise stated) John Dougill’s latest book, Off the Beaten Tracks in Japan: A Journey by Train from Hokkaido to Kyushu, was launched in Kyoto on Sunday November 19. The event was held at Irish Pub Gnome, with music by Quin Arbeitman on piano, and 35 guests …Read More
Tag: John Dougill (Page 1 of 2)
Recently I reviewed a travel book by Alex Kerr, Hidden Japan (Tuttle, 2023), and in that review I extolled the virtues of “armchair travel” (traveling in one’s imagination instead of physically). At the same time as I was writing that review, I was also reading John Dougill’s Off the Beaten Tracks in Japan (Stonebridge Press, …Read More
Book review by John Dougill There’s often a mystery about why some books last and others fade from public awareness. That certainly applies in this case, because for some reason this reviewer fails to understand, A Zen Romance fails to come up in talk of best novels about Japan. Shamefully it was not even included …Read More
Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History by Michael HoffmanVirtualbookworm.com Publishing, 2020, pp.298 Book Review by John Dougill Michael Hoffman’s literary and historical articles for The Japan Times have always come across as remarkably well-informed, remarkably well written too. It led me to read his first collection of miscellaneous pieces called In the Land of …Read More
John Dougill writes… Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a most remarkable writer, at home in a range of genres. While a journalist in the US, he wrote sensational crime stories and lurid accounts of the grotesque, ranging from macabre incidents to graphic descriptions of a slaughterhouse. Later in Japan he showed himself to be adept as …Read More
Protection and Promotion — Striking a Balance Heritage and Tourism Symposium, November 8, 2019 by Rebecca Otowa This past November 8, Writers in Kyoto hosted the Heritage and Tourism Symposium with four guest speakers. Over 80 people attended the event, including WiK members and concerned members of the general public, and many interesting points …Read More
A book review by John Dougill Most Kyoto residents will be familiar with The Lady and the Monk, published in 1991, in which a foreigner in search of Zen finds unexpected love. Many may have finished the book wondering what happened to the couple. Reader, they married. Now, nearly thirty years later, we are presented …Read More
A book review by John Dougill. Stone gardens are an art form in themselves, different from other garden types and with distinctive features. As Stephen Mansfield shows in the early chapters of his book, the stone garden drew on diverse origins – animist use of sacred rocks and space; Chinese idealisations of nature; the Japanese …Read More
“”””””””””””””””””””””” A KYOTO NEW YEAR The true soul of Japan is neither Shinto nor Buddhist. It’s Shinto-Buddhist. Until the artificial split of early Meiji times, the country had more than 1000 years of happy syncretism. Born Shinto, die Buddhist is the Japanese way. Shinto is this-worldly, concerned with rites of passage and social well-being. Buddhism …Read More
John Dougill writes… Few WiK members will be aware that in a sense Writers in Oxford is our parent organisation. Not in any formal basis, but simply as a source of inspiration. The links go back to 1993, when I had returned to Oxford after a six year spell in Japan and heard of an …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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