If you are looking for a great Japan-themed present for that special someone or if you need something to curl up with during the cold months ahead, you may want to pick up a copy of Picking Bongs From Ash, the debut novel of JAPUNDIT’s very own Marie Mockett.

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY calls it the gorgeous debut novel from Marie Mutsuki Mockett who “succeeds where others fail; making the reader care.”

THE STAR TRIBUNE says, “Mockett combines the best elements of a mystery story, ghost story, magical realism and the complex difficulties in deciding what is ‘best’ for our elders and offspring.”

Click here for more information.

So my Japanese roommate and her friend (also Japanese) were browsing through my bookshelf one day, looking at my English language literature, when they stumbled upon an old paperback of Matsuo Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road). They picked it off the shelf wondering how haiku, something so intimately Japanese, could be translated to English.

After just a few minutes browsing through the pages, my two fluent-in-English friends burst out into laughter. I overheard the uproar in an adjacent room and went over to ask what the fuss was about.. Apparently, the original message was so unbelievably lost in the translation from Japanese to English, they thought it was downright hilarious. They said it was way too modern and conjured up images of Basho wandering the forest with an iPod Nano, mobile phone (with bluetooth headset), and Macbook (which he of course used to write his haiku).

I have decided to take this idea and run with it for haloween. I’m tentatively calling it DJ Basho, and it’s gonna be rad.

More to come.

One of the more unexpected aspects of living in Japan as an American is the presence of political posters for candidates in the Japan Communist Party.

I’m pretty sure most people don’t think of the words “Japanese” and “Communist” together very often, but the surprising fact is that the JCP is Japan’s second largest minority party, with 400,000 members. Because the Parliamentary system in Japan makes it possible for small political parties to win some representation, there are currently 16 national Diet members who are affiliated with the JCP, something that wouldn’t be possible in the U.S. with our two-party system.

The Japan Communist Party isn’t pushing for the kind of Soviet-era ideas Americans usually associate with Communism — the Japanese are far too conservative politically for that — but they do oppose the special military relationship Japan has with the U.S., as well as any cooperation by Japan’s military with foreign wars, even in a support capacity, as going against Japan’s Constitution.

Supposedly a 1929 novel called Kanikousen (Crab-Canning Ship), which portrays the hard life of workers on a ship at sea, is experiencing a boom among younger readers, which is causing conjecture that larger numbers of young people will consider joining the JCP. On the other hand, this could just be the summer’s short-lived “My Boom,” as something that’s popular with an individual for a short time is called.

Check out this surreal story over at Danwei about a Chinese writer who visited North Korea, returned to China, and published a book about what he saw there, only to have the book banned from bookstores and wiped from the Web after the NORKS complained to the CHICOMS.

The first “trouble” it ran into was when a retired Chinese Foreign Ministry official called up the Foreign Ministry to report that The Real DPRK had “problems.” This individual had not read the book and did not go online; he had heard the audio version on Beijing Radio. When the Foreign Ministry received this old cadre’s report, it immediately telephoned Xinhua Lipin Book Co. to request a copy of the book for review. Xinhua Lipin couldn’t ignore this request, so it sent off a copy of The Real DPRK by courier to the Foreign Ministry. The company was quite nervous at the time, but then more than a month passed without the Foreign Ministry making any movements. This indicated that the book had its approval.

The real “trouble” for The Real DPRK began in the first part of July, 2008. The embassy of the DPRK in China sent a letter to the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanding that it halt circulation of The Real DPRK. The Foreign Ministry handed this matter over to GAPP, which issued an order banning the book.

However, “banning a book” is ultimately a process. At first, The Real DPRK was only taken off the shelves of major book stores. On 17 July, the DPRK embassy sent another letter to the Foreign Ministry, under the impression that many places in China were still selling The Real DPRK. So GAPP pressed bookstores across the country to remove book from their shelves.

Slate.com has a nice gallery of Hiroshi Hamaya photographs to accompany a post about his retrospective book (Fifty Years of Photography 1930-1981).

Born in 1915, Hiroshi Hamaya began his career studying aerial photography and started his Yukiguni (Snow Land) series, which focused on farming practices and daily life in the remote mountains of Niigata prefecture, in 1940, then followed it with his Ura Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast) series in 1954. His work was included in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Hamaya later became the first Japanese photographer to work for Magnum, in 1960. After covering the demonstration against the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, he returned to aerial and landscape photography, personally adopting an anti-government stance.

When Westerners first began to visit Japan in the mid-1500s they were struck by the refined beauty and quality of the country’s arts and crafts. It was a kind of beauty and quality that they had never seen before.

This special quality of Japanese things was so commonplace that the Japanese themselves did not consider it unusual. Everything they made, including simple household utensils, had the same quality.

Japan’s traditional arts and crafts owed their special character to a merging of cosmic and Shinto concepts of harmony, sensuality and spirituality — ­a cultural factor that remains very much in evidence and in force among Japanese artists and craftsmen in present-day Japan.

The Shinto concept of harmony included the size and shape of things, how they were to be used, and their relationship with people. The spiritual element in Japanese things incorporated the essence and spirit of the materials used, and was based on both respecting and revering these inherent qualities.

The sensual element in Japanese arts and crafts was reflected by the things that people automatically find attractive ­harmony in shape, in size, in the relationship of the parts, in the interaction of colors, in their feel when touched, and in the vibrations they project.

After generations of refining their designs and techniques, Japan’s master artists and craftsmen achieved a kind and quality of beauty that transcended the obvious surface manifestations of their materials ­a kind of beauty that was described as yugen , meaning “mystery” or “subtlety.”

Quoting from my book The Elements of Japanese Design:

Yugen beauty referred to a type of attractiveness ­ beneath the surface of the material but in delicate harmony with it ­ that registers on the conscious as well as the subconscious of the viewer. It radiates a kind of spiritual essence.

The skill and techniques that were going into Japan’s arts and crafts by the 10th century became so deeply embedded in the culture that they were not distinguished from daily life, and were reflected in everything the Japanese did, from designing and building castles, gardens, homes and palaces to the creation of hand-made paper.

Despite the mostly Western façade that today’s Japan presents to the world yugen beauty is still very much in evidence in the arts and crafts, in traditional restaurants, inns, shops, wearing apparel and elsewhere in many unexpected places.

Yugen is another Japanese word I recommend that other people learn and use because it clearly identifies a concept that in other languages requires several sentences to explain­and in itself is an example of the traditional Japanese propensity to refine things down to their essence.

This compulsive reduction tendency of the Japanese is also dramatically demonstrated in their ability to design and manufacture miniaturized hi-tech products and in using nanotechnology to create new processes and new materials.

For a definitive look at the Japanese view and creation of yugen beauty, see Elements of Japanese Design – Key Terms for Understanding & Using Japan’s Classic Wabi-Sabi-Shibui Concepts.

One of the funniest men on the planet, David Sedaris, has a new book out: When You’re Engulfed in Flames.  I saw him interviewed by Jon Stewart (another one of the funniest men on the planet) last night on The Daily Show.  In the interview, he discusses the new book in which he moves to Hiroshima to stop smoking.  I don’t know much about this book, but judging by his past books, it’s sure to be hilarious and at least part of the book takes place in Japan.

Diane Rehm interviewed (audio) Martha Sherrill the author of Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain.  Sherrill spent some time in Japan and found out about the story of the Akita, its near extinction, and its preservation by Morie Sawataishi around WWII.  If you’re a dog lover, you’re sure to enjoy the interview and the book.

 Here’s the Publishers Weekly review via Amazon.com:

Morie Sawataishi had never owned a dog, but in 1944, when the Japanese man was 30 years old, the desire for one came over him like a sudden… craving. During WWII, snow country dogs were being slaughtered for pelts to line officers’ coats; working for Mitsubishi in the remote snow country, Morie decided to rescue Japan’s noble, ancient Akita breed—whose numbers had already dwindled before the war—from certain extinction. Raised in an elegant Tokyo neighborhood, his long-suffering wife, Kitako, hated country life, and his children resented the affection he lavished on his dogs rather than on them. The book brims with colorful characters, both human and canine: sweet-tempered redhead Three Good Lucks, who may have been poisoned to death by a rival dog owner; high-spirited One Hundred Tigers, who lost his tail in an accident; and wild mountain man Uesugi. To Western readers Morie’s single-mindedness may seem selfish and Kitako’s passivity in the face of his stubbornness incomprehensible, but former Washington Post staffer Sherrill imbues their traditional Japanese lifestyle with dignity, and Morie’s adventures (he is now 94) should be enjoyed by dog lovers, breeders and trainers.

I often have conversations with a slightly older generation of people in Japan about how cultural values have changed, and how youth no longer respect their elders. An izakaya owner put it to me like this: “They are now more individual, but they do not have the respect for tradition that we did.” It’s a lament you hear constantly.

It was interesting, therefore, to read Haruki Murakami’s thoughts on the subject in a somewhat rare interview published in the Japan Times, which I’d encourage all of you interested in contemporary Japan to read. Some salient quotes:

Murakami, 59, is a baby boomer who is deeply interested in the problems of his generation. “Our generation tended to pick the best of everything by upholding idealism while engaged in a revolutionary struggle without believing in a revolution.”

But once members of this generation graduated from school, many became company employees. “This time, they became corporate soldiers, developed the economy, created a bubble and called it quits by bursting it. The baby-boom generation was at its core. So, I think someone has to take responsibility.”

I found this notion that Murakami’s generation was engaged in revolution–without actually believing in revolution–fascinating, as though there really is a half-way commitment to change. Certainly Japundit has fostered numerous conversations over the years about how slowly change takes place, and how uncommitted people are to seeing it through.

The collapse of the bubble economy in the first half of the 1990s coincided with the collapse of the Cold War structure. Everybody thought peace was at hand, but what came was a chaotic world.

“Especially after Sept. 11 (2001), we live in a world in which nobody knows what will happen next. My novels are about stories in which nobody knows what will happen next. That may be the reason readers have an affinity for my novels.”

The Japanese also harbored the illusion that if they worked hard, they would become rich and happy, but that has been totally crushed. “So, they were forced to face the facts about what they are. But that is very uncomfortable.”

On a somewhat related note, I was curious to see very few Louis Vuitton handbags in Japan this time around. Even a few years ago, the outrageously expensive (and to my eye, bland) Hermes tote bag seemed to be everywhere. I have no real way of proving what I saw–aside from a bunch of photos of people in trains not carrying designer gear. Perhaps there is a change of sorts, more in attitude than anything else, about wealth and the future and relating to the world at large. Others disagree, and perhaps are completely correct.

What do all of you out there think: is the baby boomer generation, as Murakami suggests, not committed to change? And on a shallow note, do you see fewer brand items circulating around?

Do you know the story of the “homeless junior high school student”?

When Hiroshi Tamura was was just ten, his mother died of an illness, which was a terrible shock to his family. A bigger surprise was in store five years later, however, when Hiroshi and his older brother and sister arrived home to find their house repossessed.

Their father appeared soon after, explaining the situation: the family was penniless and had lost everything. “So we’ll all go our separate ways now. Family, dismissed!”

Determined not to drop out of school, he moved to a nearby park where he lived, sleeping on a sliding board for several months, eating rice when he could get it and cardboard boxes when he couldn’t and washing himself with rain water. Through hard work, he was eventually able to graduate from high school, and now he’s part of a successful Japanese comedian duo called Kirin.

When he mentioned his sad experiences on the air once, an editor saw it and suggested he write a book about it. Homuresu Chugakusei became a huge hit, selling more than 2 million copies in Japan and spawning a movie deal.

The story of a young person who’s able to be thankful for something that we all take for granted — the availability of hot water — really struck a chord with modern Japanese readers.