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 ...
The official opening of Miyanomori Elementary School on Jan. 10 represents an important stage in restoring some normalcy to the city.
The time had come. I checked into the Japan Red Cross Medical Center in central Tokyo's Shibuya Ward on Nov. 7 and was shown to the eighth floor, where my airy private room has a shower and a sofa beneath the big picture window ...
My father went off to war and never came back to us. My mother remarried when I was 10 and my new Dad was in the Royal Navy. Until I was 13 he was mostly at sea, so lots of chores came my way. One ...
When the first Portuguese merchants and missionaries reached Japan in 1543, the warriors they encountered were armed with steel swords that were equal to, or better than, any being produced in Europe. The blades of those lethal weapons, they soon discovered, didn't start life as ...
On July 15, 2016, just a few minutes' gentle canter from our splendid Afan Trust Centre here in the hills outside Kurohime in northern Nagano Prefecture, we officially opened our brand-new, first-ever horse lodge. Designed by Nobuaki Furuya and his team at Waseda University in ...
A friend I've known for more than 20 years is now president of the Edo Wonderland Nikko Edomura cultural theme park in the Kinugawa Onsen area of Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture. That friend, Ryoichi Yuki, is also an actor and singer who is well known for ...
On Monday, June 6, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited us here at our C.W. Nicol Afan Woodland Trust in Shinano, northern Nagano Prefecture. Myself and members of the trust's staff who needed to know were informed of the impending visit three months before, but ...
