작년에 나는 한국에 살면서 일본에 다섯 번 여행을 갔고 거기에 도착할 때마다 일본에 있는 것에 대하여 기뻐했다. 다른 서양인들이 가끔 나에게 한국과 일본이 기본적으로 똑같지 않냐고 물어봐서 나는 그렇지 않다고 대답한다. 미국인이나 유럽인의 시각에서 보면 같은 아시아에 있는 한국과 일본이 비슷해 보일 수도 있지만 서로 비교하면 비슷한점들이 거의 없고 공통점도 거의 없다. 한국에 살고 싶었던 […]
I had to step out of Korea this past weekend, and Peach, my discount airline of choice, offered three possible destinations: Osaka, the first city I ever visited in Japan and still the one in which I spend the most time; Tokyo, which I could stand to explore some more but which Peach only flies into […]
Forty years ago, four Japanese writers and photographers came to town and invented Los Angeles. Or rather, they invented an image of Los Angeles they could distill, package, and sell — first to Japan, then to the rest of the world — with the debut issue of Popeye, published July 1976. Described in its own […]
“IT IS PERHAPS TRUE that the best way to get to know a people is to sleep with them,” writes Donald Richie about halfway into The Inland Sea, “but this is complicated in Japan.” That hardly stops him from trying, however. In this account of a journey through the towns and villages of the titular […]
I began writing for Open Culture with a post on In Search of Haruki Murakami, a BBC documentary on the elusiveness of the novelist and his work. In the years since, I do believe I’ve written more about Murakami there than I have any other culture figure, Western or Eastern, living or dead. (Orson Welles probably […]
The Notebook on Cities and Culture Guide to Japan indexes all the show’s Japan-recorded and Japan-related interviews. Stay tuned for much more and about the Land of the Rising Sun. Osaka: Brian Ashcraft, Senior Contributing Editor for video game site Kotaku, contributor at Wired, and author of Arcade Mania! and Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential Josh Parkin, luthier and proprietor of Josh […]
On January 25, 2015 Colin and “The City in Cinema” come live to Portland, Oregon’s Hollywood Theatre – for details and tickets, visit hollywoodtheatre.org In the mid-1990s, Takeshi Kitano, who made his name in Japan as a television comedian, broke into the west as an auteur. Did it with Sonatine, a tale of a Tokyo yakuza exiled […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Sawtelle (also known as Los Angeles’ “Little Osaka”) with Eric Nakamura, founder of Asian-American aesthetic culture and lifestyle brand Giant Robot. They discuss the differences between the Sawtelle he grew up in and the Sawtelle he finds himself in today; how and where he got his doses of Japanese pop […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile district with photographer Mark Edward Harris, author of such books as Inside North Korea, Inside Iran, The Art of the Japanese Bath, and Faces of the Twentieth Century. They discuss filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s introduction to his Iran book, and his rule about always excluding people from his own photographs; the importance […]
PITY THE WESTERN JAPANOPHILE who longs to become Japanese. He either takes on every trapping he can manage of what he imagines as the Japanese existence, going as native as possible and in the process turning into a grotesque, or, having collided with one too many of the invisible barriers honeycombing his adopted homeland, throws […]