Oden with Tanaka, Ken

It was a rainy and slightly muggy Tuesday evening as I caught up with Ken Tanaka in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Amidst the neon blur of Shinjuku, we found ourselves enjoying Japanese “oden” and sharing some wonderful conversation. Thank you Ken for taking the time to meet up and converse.
I hope you will find the [...]

Shiritori and Connection

Today I observed two people playing the game known as “Shiritori.” I was not involved in the game, only an observer. Basically, the game known as “shiritori,” involves connecting words by their last letter. In this way, “snake” can connect to “elephant” and so on creating a chain of connected words. The two people drew [...]

Spoken and Unspoken Japanese

I move between two languages on a daily basis, English and Japanese. When I say that I “move between” these two languages, I mean that I dive into conversations, jokes, sarcasms, criticisms, small-talk and office politics in both languages throughout the day. I am surrounded by others who do the same. I am also surrounded [...]

Interface Toward Philosophy: A Translated Excerpt from Kiyokazu Washida’s “The Plastics” (Nature Interface Magazine)

This is my original translation of the first two paragraphs from Kiyokazu Washida’s essay “The Plastics” as published in Nature Interface magazine. I believe this to be the first time this is being presented in English.
The Plastics
It is far from normal to say that human beings are natural. Inside the body, humans are carried [...]

Kiyokazu Washida: “My Body…Dead Body…Corpse” from “The Screaming Body” (JP title: 悲鳴をあげる身体)

This is my unpublished (amateur) translation of Prof. Washida’s work. My tools were a Kanji dictionary and a Japanese-English dictionary. I hope you find this stimulating.
Then there is the question of “whose body is this?” Namely, the person that is my body becomes a problem in the fact that the relationship of “me” to “my” [...]

An Explication of Bernard Rudofsky’s Advertisement from “The Kimono Mind: An Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese”

The image of Japan when viewed through the medium of an advertisement is deceptive for their exists a gap between the seduction of the advertisement and the reality of the modern country of Japan. Moreover, approaching Japan may prove frightening for one who recognizes this difference, yet has had no [...]

An Explication of Bernard Rudofsky’s On Language from “The Kimono Mind: An Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese”

Upon entering into a Japanese conversation with a native-Japanese speaker, one may find oneself at a crossroads of misunderstanding, incomprehensibility, extreme conversational nuance and tremendously polite speech. That this communicative mountain shall serve to block one’s attempts at deciphering the conversation or inspire one to imitate one’s Japanese conversant, depend on one’s capacities for minding [...]

Selected Translated Poems from Mariko Mori’s book “Zero, Zero, Zero”

I bought “Zero, Zero, Zero” on a trip to Osaka, Japan in the summer of 2001. I think that these translations, although amateur (i.e. unpublished), capture the sense that Mori wishes to express. Enjoy.
Mariko Mori: Zero, Zero, Zero
I look at the clouds as they suddenly tear away from each other.
Somewhere, someone is calling [...]