Sunday, March 14, 2010

She was a caged wife with an insatiable thirst for love and freedom. She was a famed beauty and fitness freak. She defied royal protocol and was often at odds with conservatives around her, including her mother-in-law.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

In 1965, a Dutch anthropologist named Cornelius Ouwehand sailed with his Japanese wife, Shizuko, to the remote island of Hateruma to undertake research. The series of monochrome images they took of daily life, work and ritual there were eventually published under the simple title "Hateruma."

Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010

As we walked out of the station, the sleepy town of Saijo stretched before us like a cat in the late-afternoon sun.The streets were quiet. Pockets of snow lay in the chilly shadows and melting frost dripped from the telephone wires.

Sunday, Feb. 14, 2010

After a while you tire of the easy destinations — the usual spots with their inevitable touristic clutter. So you decide on somewhere different — somewhere that's far from the madding crowds and far, too, from the yet more madding megaphone-toting tour guides.

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010

The green and white taxis are lined up outside Katsunuma-Budokyo Station like the stripes on a holiday peppermint stick. I readjust the contents of my daypack after the 90-minute train trip from Tokyo, take out my map, and hop into the back of the first cab in line with my husband in tow. We clue in the driver to our intended destination — Budo no Oka (Grape Hill), a hilltop retreat and prime wine-tasting spot in Yamanashi Prefecture.

Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010

Just 20 km east of Matsue, the impressive collection of paintings and ceramics at the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi City, Shimane Prefecture, is at risk of being upstaged by its six superlative landscaped gardens.

Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010

"Everywhere in this house and its stone walls you can find the wisdom of our ancestors and how they lived," says Masako Kinjo, as she gazes around Makabe Chinaa, a 110-year-old traditional wooden home in Itoman City in the south of Okinawa Island.

Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010

For the most part, visitors to Tochigi Prefecture hit the well-trodden tourist track to the rococo extravaganza of grandiose Toshogu shrine in Nikko. Yet those in search of a more refined showcasing of the Japanese aesthetic would be better directing themselves to a spot in the prefecture's southeast.