In America, when we think of bureaucracy, it doesn’t conjure the best associations. In Japan, meanwhile, the bureaucracy has a…
One of the questions I get asked a lot is about grad school: what’s it like, who’s it for, what…
Here we are again, my friends! It’s been two years since our last Q and A, and now it’s time…
This week, we’re talking about one of the oddest moments of the final years of feudalism: a spontaneous outbreak of…
This week, the Kawai family has finally made good in the world of feudal Wakayama–just in time for that world…
After a long hiatus, the diary of Kawai Koume picks back up in 1853, a year of absolutely no world-shaking…
This week, we’ll look at the first chunk of Kawai Koume’s diary, which deals with life in the 1830s–or as…
This week, we’re starting a new miniseries focused on the life of Kawai Koume, a samurai woman living in Wakayama…
This week, we wrap up our series on Hiroshige with a few lingering questions about his career. How much does…
This week, we’re covering Hiroshige’s emergence as an artist, which took 20 years after he finished his apprenticeship in the…