The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Looking for Lafcadio" in my book "Matsue, Seven Walks Through Seventeen Centur...

After a recent trip to Japan I found myself a bit perplexed that there was no book about Matsue on the market (apart from Glimpses of an Unf...

Keio University in Tokyo is one of the most prestigious in Japan. It’s also the oldest seat of further education, being able to trace its ro...

Recently I had a small but satisfying episode in which I discovered the location of an old film clip from Japan that I’d been trying to tra...

Recently, I was using an online Japanese-English dictionary, looking up meanings for the character "zan" 残. I was going through al...

When I was in Japan, I found an old Orihon , a Japanese book which is one long sheet of paper folded over to make pages. It's not worth ...

In the years 1925-26, after the Great Kanto Earthquake, Watanabe went on a trip around the world. When he returned he began to renovate his ...

While walking around Japan and taking photos, I've become interested in occasions where kanji characters have become aged or distorted b...

Recently I heard about a Japanese art print dating from the 1850s which appears to predict the construction of the Skytree: Tokyo’s newest...

While reading about the history of mathematics in Japan I found a mathematical sequence which, for reasons I do not know, happens to contain...

While looking on Google Maps for places in Japan I’d been to, I saw that a walk I'd done now had street view images. So I looked at it, ...

And so the wheel turns full circle and I'm back where I started for a couple more days before I fly back. Tokyo gave me a bit of a shock...

Arrived yesterday, although the drop in temepature and driving wind and rain didn't make me feel too welcome. Tokyo's okay. Today h...

I arrived in Kyoto a couple of days ago and yesterday I decided to walk a mountain trail I had seen described in a book. And since I was goi...

While out for a walk, I sat in a park for a bit of a rest and to read a book. Before long an old man had come up to me, asked if I was Ameri...

One of the things high on my list of things to do was to visit the Takedao Tunnels. I'd read about them and found it interesting that a ...

I'm currently in an internet cafe in Osaka typing to you, and as I do, I'm imagining the words being spoken by a plummy 1930's B...