John Einarsen: Waking up to snow in Kyoto...

John Einarsen, Kyoto Journal founding editor:

Waking up to snow in Kyoto is one of the best things in life. It is an event, an occasion when the world is totally transformed...

Here is one of my favorite Kyoto spots in the snow—Nanzenji

Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate - A transcendent journey in poems and photographs to Japan's ancient capital

A few years ago, when I received the chapbook incarnation of Edith Schiffert's and John Einarsen's Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate, I felt like I had been surprised by a dream of the ancient capital in the mail.  A new incarnation of this luminous book has been launched; with an IndieGoGo campaign to finance publishing costs. They are asking Kyoto lovers to help support and be a part of this beautiful project (JD):

                                                  Resting on the earth

                                                  who needs satori or faith?

                                                  Embrace what holds you!


Imagine a book enfolding some of the best expat poetry and photography of the 1200-year-old city of Kyoto, cultural and spiritual heart of Japan. For five decades Edith Shiffert, now age 97, has written haiku and poems inspired by the ancient capital. John Einarsen has been making striking yet serene photographs of Kyoto for more than three decades.

Now Edith and John share their vision and love of this magical city with the book Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate (144 pp, more than 100 duotone photographs and 30 poems). In addition, three renowned writers on Japanese culture, Marc P. Keane, Diane Durston and Takeda Yoshifumi, have contributed illuminating essays. Rona Conti's calligraphy is yet another treat for the eyes.

We plan to publish an edition of this singular book. Its design is complete to the last detail, but for this first edition to go to print we need your help.

Take this transcendent journey to Kyoto by contributing today. All donations are warmly appreciated. Those giving $60 or more will receive a signed edition of this remarkable book.

John Einarsen's In the Realm of the Bicycle up for People's Choice Award!

 Congratulations to John Einarsen for the nomination of his recent book of photography, In the Realm of the Bicycle, for a People's Choice Award.

The photographer (and KJ's founding editor, stylish art director) uses photography as a medium to expand and deepen perception. In this book, the focus is bicycles in Japan's ancient capital, but the field of vision is infinite:

Each encounter I had with a member of this vast race revealed an individual with a personality all its own, the result of a history at once common and mysterious. Inevitably, I came to see them as they really were: creatures who populated the niches and nooks and corners and alleys of neighborhoods and streets and lives....

Most of the images in the book were taken in Kyoto over the years.

Cycle Kyoto adds this note:

Each photo in In the Realm of the Bicycle is a haiku, a brief fleeting moment that contains a larger truth.

To view a sample some of the pages, go to: blurb.com.

The cover of In the Realm of the Bicycle is by long-time KJ graphic designer Tiery Le.

The Kyoto Journal: Perspectives From Asia (a/k/a KJ) emerged from Kyoto's international cultural milieu during the 1980's; the iconic English-language quarterly will embark a new incarnation online in September.

John Einarsen: In the Realm of the Bicycle

John Einarsen says this about his new book of photographs:

Each encounter I had with a member of this vast race revealed an individual with a personality all its own, the result of a history at once common and mysterious. Inevitably, I came to see them as they really were: creatures who populated the niches and nooks and corners and alleys of neighborhoods and streets and lives....

Most of the images in the book were taken in Kyoto over the years.

Cycle Kyoto adds this note:

Each photo in In the Realm of the Bicycle is a haiku, a brief fleeting moment that contains a larger truth.

To view a sample some of the pages, go to: blurb.com.

John Einarsen is the founding editor & art director of Kyoto Journal, an iconic English-language quarterly that emerged from Kyoto during the 1980's, about to embark a new incarnation online.

The cover is by Tiery Le.

"Connections become obvious when we destroy them" Winifred Bird on Biodiversity

Stewart Wachs of Kyoto Journal listens intently to Winifred's interpretation of biodiversity

What does "biodiversity" mean to you and me? Is it just another catch phrase for the corporate world to use in the mass media?

Or is it more?

With the intricate gardens of Eiun-in Temple painting a rich landscape behind her, Winifred Bird, a writer for Kyoto Journal, shares her awakening to the deep interconnections between the biodiversity of the natural world and the seemingly disconnected experience of human beings in today's societies at the Kyoto Journal Biodiversity Special Launch Party.

I’ve been thinking a lot about biodiversity lately. Actually, since last summer, biodiversity has pretty much taken over my life. Partly that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to be working on this great special issue of Kyoto Journal, and partly for a couple of other projects. I guess you could say I’ve hopped on the COP10 media bandwagon, but the funny thing is, I sometimes still don’t feel like I have a firm grasp on what biodiversity actually is and why it matters. This could have something to do with the fact that I haven’t formally studied biology since tenth grade, but I think a lot of the general public is also pretty hazy on the term, if they’ve heard it at all. It’s not one of those easy-access words like “nature” or “open space” or even “extinction,” that you hear and just immediately visualize. It’s not even really about individual species – a panda here, a tiger there - it’s about the whole picture, how everything works together and is connected, and for me, that’s been a hard thing to get my head around because it’s just so huge. But I had a bit of a biodiversity breakthrough earlier this summer that I’d like to share with you.

Around July I had a lull in my writing work, so I went up to Gifu to help my husband out with a project he was doing there. He’s a carpenter, and he was building a cabin up in this vacation development way out in the mountains near Gujo Hachiman, and to cut costs we were camping at the worksite. It’s a vacation area, so during the week the place is a real ghost town, and it became our own little world. One morning, we’d set up our breakfast table, which was actually a plank balanced on top of some boxes, and we were sitting across from each other drinking our tea, and suddenly it was just like I had fallen inside a cheesy love song. It just struck me that we were made for each other. Not just on a personal level, but on a biological one, the level of elemental man and woman. We fit together perfectly and we literally can’t live without each other, in the sense that we need each other in order to procreate our species. And the amazing thing is that this not only works on a utilitarian level, but this interdependence is also incredibly beautiful. It’s not only procreation, but also love. And then it hit me really strong that the same thing is true for the whole world – that the fox and the rabbit, the flower and the bee, everything, is made for each other, everything fits together in the most immense and beautiful pattern.

Of course, it’s the most obvious of clichés to say that we’re all connected and that that every piece of the puzzle matters. These are things that I know on an intellectual level, as I’m sure you all do, but how often is it that we really feel that connection? How often does the pattern flash before our eyes in all its Technicolor complexity? I said a second ago that it’s completely obvious that everything is connected, but in another sense it’s not obvious at all. It’s not like the connections are visible, like a giant string net tying me to that tree to that cat to that mosquito. My basic instinct, admittedly as an American and someone who’s neither a biologist nor a Buddhist, is to think of myself as an independent unit, rather than as part of something larger, a part that doesn’t work when it’s isolated from that larger picture.

The connections become obvious, of course, when we destroy them. When we hunt all the sea otters and then the urchins that they used to feed on explode out of control and eat the kelp forests where they live down to the nub, and then the fish that breed in these kelp beds decline and we go fishing and there aren’t any fish out there, then we understand that nature is a network where every piece matters. The trick is to see it before we’ve destroyed it, to somehow raise our awareness enough to protect what we’re used to taking for granted.

I was talking to a scientist recently who gave me another example of how we often don’t become aware of the value of biodiversity until a disaster strikes. His name is Thomas Elmqvist, and he teaches natural resource management at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University, and he’ll also be in Nagoya for COP 10 as part of the Swedish delegation. For about twenty years, Elmqvist has been studying a forest in Samoa where two different types of flying fox play a key role in dispersing seeds. Basically they eat tree fruit then drop the seeds throughout the forest. One species, the dominant one, did most of this work while the other was less abundant and played a fairly minor role in the forest.

In the early nineties, a major hurricane hit the forest and knocked down a lot of trees. What happened afterwards with the flying foxes is really fascinating. The dominant species went down to the forest floor to search for fallen fruit, and when these animals are on the ground they’re very slow, they kind of creep along, so this species was essentially wiped out by predators. Meanwhile, the subdominant species stayed up in the trees and survived by eating young leaves. When flowers and fruits started to appear in the remaining trees again, this formerly inconsequential flying fox was the one that was still around to carry on seed dispersal.

Elmqvist says he suspects that if there hadn’t been this diversity in the flying fox species – he calls it “response diversity within functional groups” – it’s quite likely many of the plant species in the forest would not have been propagated, and alien plant seeds would have blow in on the wind and been able to gain a foothold in the forest, possibly causing it to flip to a very different kind of environment. His point in telling this story was that diversity is what gives ecosystems their resilience when disaster inevitably strikes. It’s kind of like biodiversity is the ultimate life insurance policy: it ensures that in one form or another, life will go on.

But on a more basic level, what this story illustrates for me is that there is a whole lot of stuff going on in the natural world that I’m unaware of, yet completely dependent on for all sorts of goods and services. We don’t want to mess around out there too much. We don’t want to start saying, why do we need two kinds of flying fox? One is doing the job just fine. We’ve got to keep reminding ourselves of the limits to our own knowledge. At the same time we’ve got to keep trying to learn more and become more aware of how everything, including ourselves, is interrelated. Hopefully this issue of Kyoto Journal can be a part of that.

-Posted by Jen Teeter. (Thank you Winifred for sharing your speech with us!)

Beyond History as Antagonism—"Silk Roads: Samarkand to Nara"

Some political scientists and writers—seeking to legitimate preemptive permanent war—have propagated an image of "clashing civilizations" as the dominant theme of history.  This perspective overlooks the significance peaceful trading, cooperation, intercultural merging in the ongoing co-creation of our shared history. Although territorial conflicts betweeen empires as well as more mundane forms of violence took place during this period, the Silk Roads exemplifes an elevated period of global civilization in which peaceful trading and collaborative exchanges predominated.

Kyoto Journal's latest issue, "Silk Roads: Samarkand to Nara," revisits this time period when the Silk Roads connected the myriad, interrelated cultures of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and all of Asia.

"10,000 Miles Away: Chang’an and Nara” introduces the issue by challenging British Poet Rudyard Kipling’s assumption that never the "East" and "West” shall meet:

Instead, the very opposite has been happening ever since humans moved out of Africa and into Eurasian crossroads. Groups did not just split off, but continued to meet again and again throughout history, re-merging their cultures every time around.

Contributor Eiji Hattori's essay, "Civilizations Never Clash. Ignorance Does Clash," the moral center of the issue, refutes the view of world history as antagonism, and eloquently sets forth an alternative paradigm of the history of collaborative civilization:

If we look at human history, we can see that “civilizations have consistently encountered one another, and have grown and developed through those encounters”. That is what “dialogue between civilizations” means. Dialogue, in fact, indicates cross-fertilization, not negotiation.

Hattori also challenges the idea that "civilization" was created by the "West."

The illusion that Western civilization is the one and only civilization has been shared not only by people of Europe and the United States, but also by non-Westerners until quite recently. Why? It is because textbooks written by colonial powers during the colonial period spread around the world. The singular view of “civilization” was fed to children through “education”.

Guest editor Leanne Ogasawara's Tang Dynasty Times, from which four contributions were sourced, is linked here; four articles are available online at the KJ site:

 "Of Bonds, 'the Word' and Trade: There are no straight lines through mountains" by Jeff Fuchs:

“There are no straight lines through the mountains.” This ‘truth’ rumbles out of Lobsang’s mouth, a mouth that seems as unyielding and direct as the words that pass through it. I have heard these words before from ancient traders who still remember a time when mule and camel caravans wound their way to and from the great market towns of Asia and the Middle East...

"Beauty and Power on China's Silk Road" by Sam Crane:

The tour guide opened the door and we stepped into darkness. It took a moment for us to adjust visually but slowly, slowly the interior of the small cave came into view.

In front of us stood a statue of Buddha, about three meters high, surrounded by swirling painted blues and reds and browns — flanked by two smaller statues of guardians. The light from the open doorway fell on the Buddha and suffused throughout the space...

Into Dasht-e Kavir: Notes From the Great Salt Desert.

Story and photos by Steven Tizzard:


In Iran it is the year 1388, a new year, the spring, the month of Farvardin. It is the celebration of Norouz, a Zoroastrian festival that has survived, despite being usurped in this land by Islam, its heir; despite being turned outlaw for a time in the most vigorous days of the Revolution. This celebration of the vernal equinox flourishes again, the most important holiday in ancient Persia and modern Iran...

 "A Minute and 100 Meters Down the Road" by David Maney:

(Copyright: David Maney)

Urumqi, Xinjiang, Sept. 3, 2009. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station.

Welcome to west China.

I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4,000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang....

The issue includes an interview with composer Minoru Miki who revived Japan's traditional musical exchanges through his project, the "Orchestra Asia."

Miki explains his impetus:

The Japanese society of the eighth century was extremely internationalized and integrated with the rest of Asia. Foreigners comprised much of the skilled labor force and, like England in the 16th and 17th centuries, there was an active exchange of artists, musicians and statesmen with the mainland. It is one of my dreams to re-create an active musical exchange with the rest of Asia.

Miki, a timeless visionary, has an English-language page at his website.

For a further glimpse of the contents of the issue, visit Kyoto Journal's website.

Satoko Norimatsu: "We Need to Eliminate War in Our Own Minds"

Via a Kyoto Journal online interview, "We Need to Eliminate War in Our Own Minds," with Satoko Norimatsu of Peace Philosophy Centre and Vancouver Save Article 9:

Article 9 represents to me the souls of 20 million people killed in Japan's wars in the Asia-Pacific. More broadly, Article 9 represents to me the more than 90 million people that state violence killed in the 20th century –– the bloodiest century in human history. And, of course, the millions of survivors of the wars who are still suffering.

Those who say we should change it simply because of the current geopolitical situation are so narrow-sighted. Shuichi Kato (Article 9 Association co-founder) said we learn history so that we can detect signs in the current society that could lead us to repeat our past mistakes. We learn about the Nanjing Massacre and check whether in our present society the kind of racism that fueled those crimes still remains in our mind. Article 9 is the hard––the hardest lesson –– learnt from Japan’s history. We should never detach the Article 9 debate from its historical context.

When we think about Article 9 with its wartime historical perspective, I can't believe anybody would want to change it.