hmmn

For some reason I end up viewing past years as Year of…something. For example, 2005 was “The Year I Studied Japanese,” 2004 was “My Year of Shooting” (photos, mind you), 2003 was “The Year I Became a Father” (sub-head: “…and bought a Leica”), 2002 “The Year I Moved to Japan” (sub-head: “…and started a blog”), [...]

I recently read two books about organized crime in Japan, which of course means books about the yakuza. I will summarize my thoughts briefly below. Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, Expanded Edition David E. Kaplan, Alec Dubro (University of California Press, 2003) Originally published in 1986, this “expanded edition” was published a few years ago, and [...]

Here’s another book “review” (the quotes mean the term should be taken loosely) in the spirit of the previous one I wrote a couple of weeks ago. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 Simon Winchester (Harper Collins, 2005)

I’ve been on a reading binge of late. But the problem is that, unlike films or photo exhibits and the like, it’s rare I ever get a chance to discuss a book with others. I might sometimes seek out online reviews or other information about the book or author on the web, but that’s about [...]

Once again, I intended to go out taking photos and ended up shopping instead. This time it was Kinokuniya‘s Foreign Book Sale which was held this past weekend in the Shinjuku Takashimaya department store. About two-and-a-half hours after getting there, I was loaded down with books, less loaded with cash than I was before, and [...]

I spent the better part of last Saturday wandering in and around my favorite Tokyo neighborhood, Kanda-Jimbocho. K-J, if you don’t know, is, for lack of a better description, Tokyo’s “booktown” (in the same way that Akihabara is Tokyo’s “Electric Town”). Within a several block radius, there must be upwards of 30 – 40 bookstores, [...]