After listening to やさしい民俗学‘s series on the history of the kimono, I decided to read Kimono – A Modern History and brush up on my knowledge of the kimono. As the title indicates, this book is about the kimono from 1850 onwards, till about 2014 when the book was published. Split into six very long… Read More Book Review: Kimono – A Modern History by Terry Satsuki Milhaupt
I am being haunted by memories of Japan. One minute, I’m in the MRT – the Singapore train system – on my way home and the next minute, I’m on the Chuo line in Tokyo. It’s a bright sunny summer morning and I’m out with one of my language school friends. She’s dating a fellow-Singapore,… Read More A Primer on Japanese Aesthetics
I chanced upon this book at an online bookstore and immediately bought it because of its title. But when I read it, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was quite a lot of substance in this beautiful book! Broken into five sections, Kimono Now aims to explore the world of the contemporary kimono (at… Read More Book Review: Kimono Now by Manami Okazaki
So, I apologise that this post is coming far too late to be useful to anyone, but I went to the Chado ~ The Spirit of the Way of Tea ~ exhibition on Saturday (which also happens to be the last day it was open). It was pretty interesting, so I thought I’d just write… Read More Visiting a Chado Exhibition @ Japan Creative Centre
It’s been some time since my post on the different types of kimono but I really wanted to write a follow-up post to further explore the variations in kimono. Since I covered the different levels of formality kimonos can have in the first post, I thought I’d focus a bit more on how kimonos come… Read More Reading in Japanese: Kimono Fabric, Seasons, and the Obi
A while back, I wrote a post on Three Things from The Tale of Genji that still exists, which is why when this thread called 源氏物語で現代でも通じると思うエピソード (Episodes from the Tale of Genji that can be understood today) appeared, I was immediately intrigued. It’s a fairly long thread, but I’d still recommend reading the whole thing… Read More Things From Genji that Still Exist (Crowdsourced Version)
I bought a new Japanese book! Way back when I was living in Japan, I went for lessons with Morita-sensei. As part of my lessons, I bought a book on how to put on kimono correctly but I didn’t have anything more general about kimono. So I figured it was time to get another one… Read More Reading in Japanese: Formal and Casual Kimono
I would like to introduce you to the book you should be reading instead of Memoirs of a Geisha. Because not only is Memoirs of a Geisha incorrect, it was also based on Iwasaki Mineko’s life (just that Arthur Golden mis-represented things by portraying certain events negatively instead of positively, etc etc. You can read… Read More Rereading: Geisha of Gion by Iwasaki Mineko
I first heard about this book when Nicole at Tea for Me Please wrote a review on it. Since scholarly works don’t scare me, I decided to download the free ebook and give it a go. Cultivating Femininity makes the case that women have been involved in the tea ceremony as far back as Edo-period… Read More Tea Book Review: Cultivating Femininity by Rebecca Corbett
It’s always interesting when a part of Japanese culture (that isn’t anime or manga) becomes really popular across the world. When I was job hunting in my last year of university, I heard the term “やりがい (yarigai)” so many times! And as it turns out, yarigai (which can be translated as “the motivation to work”… Read More Book Review: The Little Book of Ikigai by Ken Mogi