Despite all the time I have spent in Tokyo, I have not taken that many day trips out of the city. I have been to Kamakura a couple of times, for example, and Nikko and Fuji Five Lakes, but that’s about it. When I lived here I preferred to go far from the city — … Continue reading »
The house I always stay at here in Tokyo is a five minute walk to Roppongi’s main drag and the favoured lodging for the women who come to Tokyo to make their money in Roppongi’s stripclubs, hostess clubs and bars. Right now it is quiet. So quiet. Quiet enough that I can almost hear the … Continue reading »
I could lose myself just wandering through Tokyo’s streets: from the back alleys bursting with tiny bars and restaurants; below the noisy underpasses, and along the wide tree-lined boulevards. When I lived in Tokyo I wandered for hours but I always had someplace to be at 8 p.m. Work. Now, I just wander, unanchored, and … Continue reading »
I’m home. Back in my beloved, precious Japan for a few weeks.
I didn’t travel as much or as far as I would have liked this year, a state of affairs perhaps perfectly encapsulated by my final trip of 2012: a few days in Canada, just a few hundred miles north of home. It was my first time in Montréal though it felt comfortably familiar, like a … Continue reading »
“It gets into your system … the force and power of nonviolence.” The above quotation is taken from a Guernica essay by Eamon Kircher Allen that was published in April this year. In April I had just returned from Egypt and was about to embark on a summer course through the International Center for Nonviolent … Continue reading »
As nights start to draw in and the winter air begins to chill, my thoughts always turn east to the Nordic countries. There’s just something about thinking about those cool, crisp countries that comforts me in long winter nights. I pick up my (guiltily) beloved Nordic crime novels, hunt for episodes of The Killing and … Continue reading »
Condom Couture is a Project Runway-style annual event where local students create dresses entirely out of condoms, modeled by people from the community. The show was inspired by a 2008 study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that one in four teenage girls in the United States has a sexually transmitted infection. … Continue reading »
The Voladores de Papantla at the Museo Nacional de Antropología. The ceremony of the voladores de papantla comes from Veracruz and dates back to the precolonial era. The ritual begins with five men circling a 30-foot pole. The men then begin to climb the pole. One stays at the bottom (he collects tips). At the … Continue reading »
“I have been thinking a lot about the question of sex and innocence because sex is usually framed in the context of innocence and its loss—an enormously dangerous idea. We need to address this because as long as innocence is the definition of the right to be a sexual person, we will always lose. Because … Continue reading »
