Category: books
-
Why Kyoto is the way it is — A review of “Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital”
I first came to Kyoto in 1999 for university. My first jobs out of school were here. My second daughter was born here. I lived in a dorm, four apartments, and a house, all in different areas of the city. Walked pretty much every street. Even when I lived in Nagoya for those four years…
-
Best of 2022
At the very beginning of the year I created a Reading Schedule for 2022 note topped with: “Goal is 20 books. 5 Japanese books.” As I looked over the snowy countryside in Canada last January, I was thinking about how I could maintain my connection to Japan and improve my language learning from afar. I…
-
Look what arrived today! 📚 Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital by @matthew_stavros Been on my list for a while, so as soon as I found out we were relocating back to Kyoto I ordered it so I can read and visit some of the locations IRL. 🙌
-
2021 in Books
With just a couple days to spare, I made my Goodreads Reading Challenge of 40 books. It was a close thing, but I was able to make it up in the final months of the year. Here is how the numbers breakdown by genre: 7 fiction books 8 general nonfiction books 10 books on Buddhism…
-
Continuing a Japanese porcelain legacy — Review of The Art of Emptiness
In the mid-seventeenth century the nobles of Europe were thrown into an addiction crisis. With the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and the chaos that ensued, where were they to get fine porcelain to decorate their palaces? As luck would have it, a new source of kaolinite — the key mineral in the manufacture of…
-
Antiracist baby in Japanese
In the community we lived in on Ikijima there is a kids club that meets every Friday after school. A local non-profit put together a small office out of bits of wood and corrugated plastic to do its work. It had a concrete floor and big table in the center for meetings. There were strategic…
-
Women adventurers
In my previous post on adventure travel I listed a number of adventure writers that have inspired me over the years. You may have noticed that they were almost exclusively men. The reason is because I wanted to do a separate post specifically highlighting women voices in the genre. (The reason I mentioned Gertrude Bell…
-
Rural perspective — Review of “Inaka” on WiK
The Arashiyama bamboo grove is one of those must-go places when you visit. Located in the west of the city, at the foot of Mount Arashiyama, it is a major tourist area offering all the amenities you would expect of a trip to the “ancient” capital (including Rilakkuma pancakes!). Likely the most photographed sight in…
-
Nakamura Tetsu
I wrote a review of the recently published English translation of Nakamura Tetsu’s book Providence Was with Us: How a Japanese Doctor Turned the Afghan Desert Green. You can read the review on BooksOnAsia.net here, but I just wanted to say a few more things on a more personal note about this book. I knew…
-
Best of 2020
I reflected on the year using Pat Kua’s End of Year Retrospective Template. I won’t share all my results here, just a bit of a roundup below, but the questions from that document I really appreciated were: What brought you joy this year? What made you sad this year? What are you grateful for this…