In this episode of the BOA podcast, host Amy Chavez talks with Azby Brown, author of Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture, and Design. Brown is an expert on Japanese architecture, design and environment. He has lived in Japan since 1985. His previous books include The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, Small Spaces, The Japanese Dream House, and The Very Small Home.
Some topics discussed in this episode are Edo Period sustainability measures, SDG’s, architecture of old Japanese houses, the Kamikatsu Zero Waste town, and future measures Japan is taking to become more sustainable.
In this episode of the BOA podcast, host Amy Chavez talks with Maud Rowell about her new book Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness (404 Ink, 2021). Maud is a freelance journalist and writer from London. She went blind at 19 while traveling in South Korea. Two months later, she went on to begin a four-year degree in Japanese Studies at University of Cambridge including one year at Doshisha University in Kyoto. She trained in journalism at City, University of London, and over the course of the pandemic, wrote her first book Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness. In the summer of 2021, she won the Holman Prize run by San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and received a grant to travel around Japan and write about her experiences.
On this episode of the BOA Podcast, Maud talks about traveling around Japan, and what makes Japan’s big cities so user-friendly for the visually impaired.
In this episode of the Books on Asia podcast, podcast host and island-dweller Amy Chavez and Gifu countryside village-dweller Iain Maloney discuss their experiences living in Japan’s countryside. Iain’s book The Only Gaijin in the Village: A Year Living in Rural Japan is dedicated to the subject of himself moving to the the countryside with his Japanese wife, while Amy in her latest book The Widow, the Priest and the Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island documents the countryside living experience with an emphasis on the Japanese people she lives among. See what similarities and differences these authors reveal in this “shared experience” of moving to, and living in, Japan’s countryside.
Podcast host Amy Chavez talks to Robert Weis, curator of Luxembourg’s National Museum of Natural History’s upcoming exhibit, “Spirit of Shizen – The Nature of Japan Through its 72 Seasons” running from July 1 to August 31, 2022. An accompanying catalogue, in the form of an anthology, is also available featuring essays on Japan’s seasons.
Podcast host Amy Chavez talks with author Cody Poulton about Japanese theater, in particular Noh theater. Poulton recently retired from University of Victoria in Canada, where he taught Japanese literature, theater and culture for over 30 years. He is also a translator of Japanese fiction and drama. He is author of Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001), A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japan, 1900-1930 (2010), and he is co-editor of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2017) with Thomas Rimer, Mitsuya Mori, et al.
Portraits of the lives of 31 members of a small community on a tiny island in Japan’s Inland Sea, spanning the Taisho to Reiwa periods (the past 100 years).
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…
This week author and translator John Stevens joins us from Hawaii. Stevens has penned many books over his long exalted career, mainly books dealing with Japanese martial arts, poetry and biography.
“A book should be enlightening for the writer, and for the people reading it.” —John Stevens
In this episode of the Books on Asia Podcast, sponsored by Stone Bridge Press, podcast host Amy Chavez talks with novelist David Joiner about his new novel that takes place in Kanazawa, a city in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture.
The novel introduces the city of Kanazawa, its connection to the famous Japanese literary master Izumi Kyōka, and provides the setting for a story that revolves around an American married to a Japanese, and the Japanese family’s dynamics. Highlighted are some of the differences between traditional and modern Japan and the foreigner’s place in it.
At the end of the podcast, Amy asks Joiner what his 3 favorite books on Japan are and he elaborates on his choices:
