How do you appreciate a Japanese garden? The typical temple visit — where you ponder a seemingly random assemblage of rocks and raked gravel or push your way through a throng of tourists jostling for camera angles — can leave one confused and underwhelmed. Kyoto-based ...
Monte Cassim, 65, slips effortlessly from English to Japanese and back, as befits one of the few non-Japanese to have served as president of a major Japanese university. After heading Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, from 2004 to 2009, the Sri ...
The blonde man in shorts and a baseball cap, sporting a lopsided grin and a dangling backpack and parking a rusty bicycle, looked less like a captain of industry than a superannuated college student. Yet American Chuck Grafft, 50, is founder and CEO of ...
Climb the stone walkway, stippled with fallen red camellia blossoms, that leads to Kyoto's Honen-in Temple, past a mossy thatched gate and raised platforms of sand combed in tight patterns of waves and chrysanthemums, and you enter a hushed and otherworldly space at the ...
Professor Giuseppe Pezzotti, 51, a materials scientist at Kyoto Institute of Technology, effortlessly switches from a newspaper interview in English to discuss research collaboration with a colleague in fluent Japanese. Even sartorially, he straddles East and West: While his torso is clad in button-down ...
Woodblock prints, or moku hanga, may seem to be the quintessential Japanese art, but they have been embraced by artists around the world. American artist Richard Steiner, 72, has practiced woodblock printing for most of the 41 years of his residence in Japan. As a print-making ...
Nineteen university students and civic-minded Kyoto residents squat on a mountain pass on a cloudless afternoon in early October as a tall British poet, Stephen Gill, 58, reads from a collection of haiku. In British-inflected but fluent Japanese, he recites poems about this mountain, Mount ...
On a Sunday in early August, American trumpeter James Barrett led his band through a set featuring rhythmic jazz and world music beats as part of the Saiin Music Festival in western Kyoto. Tall and lanky, modestly clad in a T-shirt and beige jeans, the ...
According to Rebecca Ogamo Teele, an American instructor, performer and mask carver for noh, falling asleep is a perfectly respectable response to attending such plays. In fact, she would almost recommend it. A noh performance can be likened to a meditative state, with a rhythm forged ...
A town hall located several kilometers inland was the designated disaster evacuation site in Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture. Immediately after the magnitude 9 earthquake hit Tohoku on the afternoon of March 11, a young town employee broadcast an urgent evacuation order to local residents. Her ...
