Baby step: Bought a book at a local independent book store. Goal: support local retail culture Baby step: Baby step: Planted a begonia in a pot, placed next to my apartment door. Goal: beautify neighborhood, support local retail culture. Baby step: Baked a bread and shared with a neighbor whom I don’t know well. Goal:…

KYOTOGRAPHIE has been successful partly because photographic images have the ability to transcend linguistic differences through ishin denshin: wordless communication, heartstrings vibrating in harmony.“Vibe,” which situates ishin denshin within a specific locale, is a fitting theme for the photography festival, now in its seventh year. Of the eleven main venues, “The Forms of Nature: 100…

SORA MAMÉ Fava Beans Fava beans have been part of the eastern Mediterranean diet (Egypt, Greece, Italy) for at least 4000 years. There are stories of monks from India traveling through China bringing favas to Japan in the Nara Period (710-794 AD). However, the first written evidence they were consumed in Japan is mention in…

From Steve Beimel: I interviewed Pico Iyer in 1993 about his book, The Lady and the Monk, for first issue my former publication, The Kyoto Diary. He had been living for a short while in Japan at that time, and we discussed many aspects of his book and Japan in general. Now, 26 years later,…

No matter how much a woman enjoys lovemaking, it has to be fit in around the more mundane activities of life, whether that be cooking, child rearing or work. It therefore seems appropriate that a new exhibition examining the lives of Japanese women as pictured in ukiyo-e paintings and prints, originally envisioned as a show…

For National Geographic magazine’s Cities Issue, I walked across Tokyo, the world’s most populous city. The distance, from boundary to boundary, is about 60 miles. But photographers, like me, never walk in a straight line. Searching for pictures, we zigzag and we back-track. We wander in circles. We get lost. So, by the end of…

The foodie’s foodie, Mora Chartrand-Grant, shares about her donabe. Steve Beimel: Mora—So you finally bought a donabe??? Mora Chartrand-Grant: Yes, and I’m really proud of it. I always come back from Japan with yet another piece of rustic Japanese pottery to add to our home collection, which I regularly use in the kitchen…the crustier and…

One of the great delights of Japan travelis to literally stumble uponan ingenious work of art under your feet. Many towns in Japanhave designedtheir own distinctive manhole covers.These capture the town’s identityin bold graphic form. Over years I have made rubbings of these manhole covers. When you are down on your kneeson the street or…

Call her works playful. Call them sensuous. Call them decorative, even, and ceramic artist Yuriko Matsuda won’t mind a bit.  “It’s such a shame that the term “decoration” is so often applied as a pejorative,” Matsuda told me, using the Japanese word sōshoku. “The implication seems to be that anything that is decorative or ornamental…