My latest short book, The Shunga Tales, now available at Amazon, is set in Japan. Its two main characters: a bored young American-Max, and Murasaki, an elegant female artist old enough to be Max’s grandma, have fun together drinking sake, enjoying erotic art and…making love. This is a fun, funny story that explores the themes

    Want to enjoy your visit to Japan? While you’re here, be sure to try some top-quality sake with some friends and good food—sushi, or yakitori are high on my list. Can you find good sake back home? Probably, but most of the sake available at your local liquor shop isn’t worth drinking. You

  My idea for this story happened in much the same way that little Koji-kun first realized who Crow was at the beginning of this tale: I was paging through a book of sumo ukiyo-e when I can upon one painting that stunned me: one of the wrestlers looked like he was black. Definitely NOT

  I admire courageous people. Horace is one of them. Starting at an early age (Horace and the Bird and Horace in New York) he displays the instinctual ability to do what is right in the toughest of situations. He doesn’t think, he just does. Later, as a teenager, Horace finds himself living in Japan

My wife Tomoko Kamishima, writing for Japan Tourist (www.japantourist.jp), has begun an intriguing series that she calls Foreign Footsteps in Yokohama. The concept is to go back in history, to the time after Commodore Perry’s black ships nudged Japan into opening her doors to the rest of the world in 1854. After the floodgates were

 Me & Japan Tourist One of the things that keeps me most busy these days is Japan Tourist (www.japantourist.jp). I am the regional partner for Kanagawa and Tochigi prefectures, and I spend a lot of time traveling around the country visiting beautiful, interesting places, photographing them, and then writing about them. Tough job, huh? Japan

JAPAN & FILM Living in Japan, I don’t always have access to the movies I want to see: Most new releases are no longer new by the time they reach Japan Many movies never make it here at all. My local DVD shop is fairly limited in what they offer. Netflix doesn’t exist. Foreign films

After visiting some of the areas in Tohoku hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and seeing what kind of damage took place, it’s no wonder that debris is starting to show up on shores all over the USA. This place was completely devastated, and along the hundreds of miles of shoreline, nothing much is

This little story is about two people mainly—Japanese baseball legend Sadaharu Oh, and American baseball legend Ted Williams. It is a story I often tell to my Japanese friends when they ask me if I like Japanese baseball. My answer is always: “Not anymore,” My story… and Oh When I first came to Japan in

  Helen Keller interests me. She really does.   Helen died in 1968, and forty years later, she is still almost as famous and admired now as she was then. There is no doubting that Helen was truly great. And thinking about the handicaps she had to overcome, and what she was able to accomplish,