OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK

CW. Nicol visits Zenryoji temple in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture for a Candle Night public event, led by chief priest Tomonobu Narita, for a slow-life-themed evening.

A proposed wetland nature center in Miyagi Prefecture would give wild birds a new home while attracting bird-loving tourists to Tohoku.

A few weeks ago I had things to do in Tokyo and Yokohama, so I had a ticket booked for a late-afternoon train from Nagano on Jan. 22. Then that morning my manager in Tokyo phoned to tell me I should come early ...

We sailed from Greenland, across Baffin Bay, on Aug. 4, 2017. The sea was calm, and largely free of ice floes, although still dotted here and there with icebergs. The following day we reached the small community of Pond Inlet, more than 600 kilometers ...

I recently went out to my friend John Harris' country home in the Isumi district of Chiba Prefecture, about 100 kilometers southeast of Tokyo. His house is midway down the Pacific coast of the Boso Peninsula, close to the small town of Onjuku, which ...

Rain had started pelting the cherry blossoms when I returned from Tokyo last month, squelching the plans of countless would-be outdoor revelers. Here in Kurohime in northern Nagano Prefecture the snow was melting and the Torii River, which rises in ancient Togakushi and is fed ...

On the wide wooden sill of the large window in my living room here in Kurohime, Nagano Prefecture, sits a soapstone carving of a gyrfalcon by one of Canada's most famous Inuit artists, Lypa Pitsiulak. Lypa was born in a small hunting and fishing camp ...

In 1980, when I came to live here in Kurohime in the hills of northern Nagano Prefecture, we had neither deer, wild boar nor monkeys in this area because — so the locals said — there was too much snow in winter for them ...

First of all, I'd like to thank so many readers for your kind messages to me over the past two months. I raise a toast to all of you. After the operation in November, although the doctors said my cancer was all gone, I wasn't ...