Tag - kyoto

 
 

KYOTO

Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / TELLING LIVES
Dec 6, 2013
Writer inducted into intricacies of country life shares her story
Home for Rebecca Otowa is a 350-year-old farmhouse nestled on the edge of a tiny village in Shiga Prefecture, where generations of her husband's family have lived. It is a lifestyle she has grown to cherish since arriving in rural Kansai as a bride more than 30 years ago.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 2, 2013
Sweet times beside a scary Kyoto mound
"You have big hands, so make it a little larger," Kataoka-san said, referring to the piece of sweet mochi (glutinous rice cake) I'd been shaping as dexterously as I could manage.
EDITORIALS
Oct 9, 2013
Penalizing hate speech
In the first ruling of its kind, the Kyoto District Court orders an anti-Korean group to pay ¥12 million to a pro-Pyongyang school as compensation for the group's anti-Korean protests.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 22, 2013
Volunteers work to clean up, reforest Kyoto's 'Poet's Mount'
Sitting on the northern side of the Hozu River gorge, on the western side of Kyoto, Mount Ogura has long been associated with the literary world, and is known as the "Poet's Mount."
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Aug 3, 2013
The Emperor and the general: a visit to Fushimi Momoyama
On the evening of Sept. 13, 1912, a cart decorated in gold leaf and lacquer and solemnly hauled by a team of oxen left the Imperial Palace in Tokyo along with a phalanx of people carrying banners, torches and weapons and beating drums and gongs. After midnight, a special train left Tokyo Station bound...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jun 9, 2013
A world of flowers and willows in Kyoto's geisha districts
'No matter what happens / I am in love with Gion. / Even when I sleep, / Beneath my pillow / The waters ripple.'
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 30, 2013
Seeking impressions in the two-dimensional
The title of Yu Kiwanami's "Confirmation of Happiness" (2013) is, in a sense, a kind of betrayal; for happiness cannot, in fact, be confirmed. A woman stands before a landscape, her head cropped off by the top edge of the picture in an artistic act of decapitation. With no head, we cannot see if she...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 28, 2013
A double dose of guidance offers more than usual information
SHINTO SHRINES: A Guide to the Sacred Sites of Japan's Ancient Religion, by Joseph Cali with John Dougill. University of Hawaii Press, 2012, 328 pp., $24.99 (paperback)
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Apr 23, 2013
Student seeking Kyoto flat told: No foreigners allowed
After spending 2u00bd years living the quiet life in Shiga Prefecture, Ryukoku University student Victor Rosenhoj was looking forward to moving to Kyoto, where things promised to be more lively and international.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 31, 2013
The 'eternal modern' gardens of Matsuo-taisha
When new buildings were constructed in 1971 at Matsuo-taisha in Kyoto, one of Japan's oldest shrines, the largely self-taught landscape master Mirei Shigemori was commissioned to create a series of gardens on the site.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 14, 2013
Breathing life into the forgotten and neglected
Painter Daisuke Fukunaga (b.1981) states: "If the world is the stage of a theater, I want to paint the bustle of the things waiting behind the blackout curtain rather than the heroine." His motifs are of things forgotten and neglected, but unlike his earlier works of 2007, which realistically depicted...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 14, 2013
Go with the flow from representational to abstract
For five years starting in 2007, Shinpei Kusanagi (b.1973) made monthly serialized paintings to accompany installments of Teru Miyamoto's novel "Mizu no Katachi" ("The Shape of Water") in the magazine éclat. Text and image had little to do with one another, though the small, standard format paintings...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jan 19, 2013
Kyoto gardens give up all their secrets during intimate guided tours
How do you appreciate a Japanese garden? The typical temple visit — where you ponder a seemingly random assemblage of rocks and raked gravel or push your way through a throng of tourists jostling for camera angles — can leave one confused and underwhelmed.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Sep 23, 2012
Adrift from Kyoto's Amanohashidate on Heaven's Floating Bridge
The Japanese have long had a fondness for categorizing impressive features of the world around them into numbered lists. And in this enterprise, trios hold particular fascination. Thus, in addition to the Three Great Festivals and the Three Great Night Views, among well over 100 prestigious triads are...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 16, 2012
Izumo: The myths and gods of Japan's history
"Shinkoku is the sacred name of Japan — Shinkoku, 'The Country of the Gods'; and of all Shinkoku the most holy ground is the land of Izumo," wrote Lafcadio Hearn more than 100 years ago in his book "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." For Hearn, it had been an ambition to visit Shimane Prefecture's Izumo,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 15, 2012
On the trail of treasures at Kyoto's Toji Temple
The man unfurled the scroll and hung it on the wall of the makeshift tent to reveal a majestic mountain soaring to the heights in bold black brush strokes. It was a scene showing nature in all its grandeur dwarfing a lone human figure halfway up the mountain.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 13, 2011
From Kurama to Kibune: Hiking in northeastern Kyoto
The Eizan Electric Railway serves a sparsely traveled route — or so I infer from the dinky two-carriage train we board shortly before it lurches out of the terminus at Demachiyanagi Station in Kyoto heading for the mountains on the city's northeastern outskirts.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Dec 20, 2009
Alexandria's library: A phoenix amid the tea fields of Uji
Recalling the glorious Heian Period in Japan's history from 794 to 1185 at once conjures up images of a world of courtiers, 12-layered kimono, elegant poetry competitions beside winding streams — and secret trysts in scented chambers.
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jan 30, 2009
Kyoto's Yufuna: The tastes of Tango
Outside, Yufuna looks like an ordinary after-work hangout, with a solid wooden counter lined with sake and shochu bottles and a blackboard announcing the daily specials. This unpretentious basement shop is surprisingly spacious inside though, with attractively decorated, cozy dining spaces beyond the...
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jan 30, 2009
An intoxicating temple in Kyoto
Emperor Go Mizuno reportedly loved fucha ryori, and likely partook of it at Kanga-an Temple in Kyoto as he gazed at the enchanting green and gravel garden.

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past