Freelance environmental journalist Winifred Bird writes for publications including The Japan Times, Dwell, and the Christian Science Monitor. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in rural Nagano Prefecture with her husband, dog and flock of ducks.
For Winifred Bird's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Winifred Bird is the author of "Eating Wild Japan," a book that goes deep into the foraging culture of Japan and contains essays on foraging, a selection of recipes and a guide to forageable plants.
For Yoko Inoue, art is like a bomb: Throw it into a crowded street and the truth just might explode out of it. The Japanese-born, New York-based multimedia and performance artist takes aim at society's assumptions about commerce and culture using works rooted in intensive ...
Keishi looks a lot like it did when Toshiko Nakamura first moved there four decades ago. The quiet farming community in Nagano Prefecture is a patchwork of verdant rice fields, lush kitchen gardens and picturesque post-and-beam houses nestled between pine and chestnut trees on ...
For anyone who cares about nature — or their own future — Earth in the 21st century can be a worrying place to live. The planet is warming and climate-related disasters are growing more frequent; plants and animals are going extinct at rates not ...
Back in the late 1970s, the city planners of Karatsu, a fishing community on the northern coast of Kyushu, decided to build a new road. This provided a rare opportunity for local archaeologists. Seizing the chance to burrow with abandon in the densely developed ...
If you're looking for a fine piece of wood, you'd be hard put to improve on a slab of hinoki (Hinoki cypress, Chamaecyparis obtusa) from the Kiso Valley straddling Nagano and Gifu prefectures. The sparsely populated district is home to the only natural hinoki forests ...
As a child growing up in California in the 1980s, I learned my share of Japanese words. Sushi, which my family would get for a treat on birthdays. Mochi (chewy rice cake), ramen and karaoke — all encountered at the Japanese shopping arcade downtown. And ...
"Resilience" is a hot topic these days — not in self-help books, but among policymakers worldwide. As governments become convinced that climate change is a real threat, they are taking steps to ensure communities can bounce back from the increasing impact of floods, storms, ...
The dock arrived almost like a gift, not quite on the doorstep of Dr. John Chapman, but on a beach 8 km from his office at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center, on the western coast of the United States. It was massive: A ...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his administration have recently been mulling major changes to the country's farm policy. The move comes against the backdrop of high production costs and average farm size not having grown much since 1965. For decades the government has used tariffs ...
