Posting this here so I can point more people to it. West Tokyo Preschool is a small English-language preschool in Fuchu, near the American School in Japan. In sort of an emergency for the place, the teacher who was doing a solid job for the past year or two suddenly decided that she would be […]
I wrote this thing to be posted on Nippon.com as part of this series of articles on Yasukuni. When the Japanese document I was half-translating, half-simply-eyeballing as I put this together got tossed in the reject bin, the English went along with it . . . so here I am with a big thing to […]
A little something we published in Japan Echo in 2005, the sixtieth year after the end of the war. I like to revisit it when August rolls around. Remembering Hiroshima August has arrived. Soon Hiroshima will commemorate the anniversary of its atomic bombing. At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, a call for silent […]
In 2003 Tokyo celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of its designation as Japan’s political capital. In that year and the next, Japan Echo magazine commissioned a series of articles by Edo-period specialists outlining interesting and little-known details of life in and one of the world’s greatest cities of that age. They’re still available online, in all […]
Me and the president Originally uploaded by Durf Martti Ahtisaari is a former Finnish president and the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He came to Japan to speak on conflict resolution and then toured the tsunami-stricken areas near Sendai. I got to tag along and interview him for around a half-hour in the […]