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…
Browsing Category books
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
From the Ruins of Empire — a review
Books On Asia asked reviewers to pick their top books for 2020. I submitted my four along with the other contributors and gave a short comment. Below is a more fleshed out review. For more…
Negotiating the seas
It has been busy recently for Japan’s three disputed territories. Early in October China opened a new digital museum about the Senkaku Islands, and China has had coast guard vessels near the Senkakus for a…