Colin Marshall sits down in Osaka, Japan’s Senri-Chūō with Brian Ashcraft, Senior Contributing Editor for video game site Kotaku, contributor at Wired, and author of the books Arcade Mania! and Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential. They discuss the kind of arcade gaming best (and now only) seen in Japan; the Expo 70-developed north of Osaka versus the city’s “real” […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Kyoto, Japan’s efish café with Michael Lambe, Deep Kyoto blogger, teacher, and Public Relations Representative for the Kyoto Journal. They discuss the city’s flummoxing preponderance of Irish pubs and the “celebrated infamy” of one in particular; the rich cultural heritage that brings foreigners to Kyoto, the modernization that foreigners bewail, and the preservation efforts that certain Japanese […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Kobe, Japan with guitarist, improviser, and sound artist Tim Olive, whose latest album is 33 Bays with Alfredo Costa Monteiro. They discuss Japan’s importance to global experimental music culture; his own swerve toward experimentation after a western Canadian childhood spent listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; his early exploration of Javanese music […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Nara, Japan’s Nara Hotel with writer of place Pico Iyer, author of such books as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and most recently The Man Within My Head. They discuss the discovery that Japan looks exactly like Japan, and the “piercing sense of […]
Name your favorite film. Now define favorite. Is it the one you admire the most? The one you watch most often? The one that keeps surfacing in your thoughts with the least prompting? Or simply the one you name when asked, hoping to project an affiliated identity in so doing? Your definition of the term, […]
Scott Adams once posted this tip for getting to sleep: Don’t think words. By that I mean don’t imagine conversations that you plan to have, and don’t replay in your head conversations you’ve had. It’s impossible to clear your mind of all thoughts. But I find it somewhat easy to switch off the language center […]
Suggestions for a truly modern traveler’s Japanese phrasebook: “Does this coffee-shop have wi-fi?” “Then what do those stickers on your windows with the word ‘wi-fi’ mean?” “But why would I have to do all that just to connect?” “Why don’t you know?” In Japan, one doesn’t come by wi-fi hotspots easily; one doesn’t come by reliable […]
At some point, I was just delaying going to Japan. Making the journey, once a faint but seemingly unrealizable desire, passed silently into inevitability. The question of Japan turned from whether to when, and from when to how often. This dual-purpose round of Notebook on Cities and Culture interview-gathering and mandatory birthday departure from the […]
Only natural, I figure, to go from the Images of America book on where I live in Los Angeles to the Images of America book on a neighborhood that first fired up my interest in Los Angeles. Before I moved, visits to Little Tokyo underscored Santa Barbara’s failure to provide certain necessities: ramen shops, sit-down […]
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, I talk to Alan Nakagawa; sound artist; visual artist; installation artist; founding member of Los Angeles’ long-running, multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic, soon-to-be-dissolved arts collective Collage Ensemble; director of the experimental music Ear Meal webcast; L.A. Metro public art executive; member of Otonomiyaki, the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble and Ear Diorama […]