The Widow, the Priest and the Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island Review by Tina deBellegarde With The Widow, the Priest and the Octopus Hunter, Amy Chavez has presented us with a gift of cultural preservation. The author conducted a year-long oral history project on the Island of More…
Category: Travel
Excerpt—The Cat With Three Passports
By CJ Fentiman From Chapter 3: A Cat’s Resentment (toward those who help it) (猫の逆恨み / Neko No Sakaurami) I’d had kittens before, but none with such a destructive nature. Finally, I decided it was time to take him to the vets and get some advice. Maybe there was something physically wrong with him that More…
Review—The Gion Festival: Exploring its Mysteries
Review by Cody Poulton It’s a bitter irony that a festival that is nearly as old as Kyoto, dedicated to ridding the city of pestilence in the hot and sticky month of July, was cancelled by the world-wide coronavirus pandemic last year. 2021 bodes no better: the great processions of splendid floats through the city, More…
Review—Lonely Planet Best Day Hikes Japan
Review by Wes Lang My time in Japan coincides directly with the history of Lonely Planet’s Hiking in Japan guidebook. I arrived on these shores in March of 2001, just one month after the release of the first edition of the guide. I soon picked up a copy of the teal and black cover and More…
Excerpt—Angkor’s Temples in the Modern Era
The following is an excerpt from a new release by John Burgess, Angkor’s Temples in the Modern Era: War, Pride, and Tourist Dollars (River Books, 2021). During the research for this book, the author’s fifth on Angkor, he found an abiding theme: tensions between the foreigners who came to Angkor—the capital of a great empire More…
Book Excerpt—Walking in Circles: Finding Happiness in Lost Japan
Todd Wassel walks the 750-Mile, 88-Temple Pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan and finds some surprising things along the way.