Japan Archives

Japan

All Abroad

by Chris Marker,

From Le Dépays, which was published in May by Film Desk Books. You’re returning from Hong Kong, oyster of the hundred thousand pearls, and from the very first train (the…

Saturn Return

by Andrew Weil,

Scenes from the life of a psychedelic pioneer

The Great Wall of Steel

by Ian Buruma,

Xi Jinping remakes Chinese nationalism

The Sound of Vibrance

Translated by Robert Chapeskie,

From posts on DQN Today, a Japanese website that allows users to drop pins on neighborhood maps and note noise or other disturbances. Translated from the Japanese. Several families are…

Freedom from Choice

by Pico Iyer,

By Pico Iyer, from A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, out this month from Knopf. Iyer, a British-American essayist and novelist, has lived in Nara, Japan, since 1992. Japan is the…

The Fruits of Suffering

by Brandon Shimoda,

From descriptions of dreams in The Grave on the Wall, a memoir by Brandon Shimoda, out this month from City Lights. The book is an elegy for the author’s grandfather…

What China Threat?

by Kishore Mahbubani,

How the United States and China can avoid war

What Remains

by Richard Lloyd Parry,

By Richard Lloyd Parry, from Ghosts of the Tsunami, which was published this month by MCD. Parry is the Asia editor of the Times of London. On the afternoon of…

Potty Training

by Yusaku Furuya,

From sentences in Unko Kanji Doriru (“Poo Kanji Drills”), a series of writing-exercise books for elementary school students in Japan. The books were written by Yusaku Furuya and published in…

The Boy Without a Country

by Jessica Weisberg,

Tokyo’s painful exclusion of immigrants

Inside the April Issue

by James Marcus,

Leslie Jamison on the Women's March, Alan Feuer on Bill de Blasio, Yascha Mounk on the refugee crisis in Germany, and Jessica Weisberg on Tokyo's exclusion of immigrants