Since the publication in English of Yukio Mishima’s 1954 The Sound of Waves, an uncharacteristically romantic novel of young love flowering on an islet in the Seto Naikai, there has been a fondness for visualizing the Inland Sea and its islands of olives, oranges, sunburnt fisherfolk, and midday siestas, as somehow Mediterranean in flavor, its…

The skies of Provence are, to be sure, a rare and unique phenomena. The light they cast down over the sycamore, cypresses, plane trees, baked roof tiles and the high, aerial villages perched on their improbable rock escarpments, provides just the right touch of chiaroscuro and drama to enhance all the best loved components of…

Spain has always been regarded as the most exotic and barbarous country in Europe, and foreigners for their part have always tended to romanticize the country. Even the Muslims in the eighth century, casting covetous eyes across the 27-kilometer stretch of water that separates Morocco from Spain, idealized the place as a kind of Africa…

The single line train from Hashimoto to Koya-san is worth the entire trip in itself. The track cuts and winds into the side of mountains, creating an observation shelf down into steep, densely forested valleys. Glimpses onto the tiled rooftops of villages, narrow, fine tooth-combed fields fitted between forested slopes and unhurried stops at wooden…

Shanghai may have impressed early writers, but there is little affection or warmth for the city in their observations. Charles Halcombe, a gifted journalist who worked for the North China Daily News in the late 1880s, wrote of “ﾉnot wishing to enter the gloomy precincts of the French Concession, with its unpretentious buildings of miscellaneous…

If there is one place in Japan that makes the most of its unfulfilled destinies, it has to be Matsue, a luminous city along the atmospheric but otherwise lugubrious Sanﾕin coast. Corroborating this view is its massive castle, Matsue-jo, and its graceful Historical Museum, built in 1903 as a villa to accommodate the Meiji emperor,…

A lot of people don’t much like Nagoya, at least on first contact. The complaints about its heat and lack of greenery usually come later. The first thing most people feel when they alight at Nagoya Station is bewilderment. If you like this sort of thing — infinities of shops, the hum and thrum of…

The words are from a haiku by Matsuo Basho, evoking the multi-layered complexity of Nara, a city the Japanese have great affection for. In the sixth century Japan dipped its toes into the great flood of Chinese culture, when Buddhism first appeared; by the eighth century, it was swimming in it. Shinto, with its view…

In 1965, the Dutch anthropologist Cornelius Ouwehand and his wife Shizuko, sailed to the remote Okinawan island of Hateruma to undertake research. The series of monochrome images they took of daily life, work and ritual on the island were eventually published under the simple title, ‘Hateruma.’ Their journey to the island in a small craft…

If one of the by-functions of gardens in general is to bring us into alignment with nature and our inner selves, this is something, which, though rarely stated, is implicitly understood in the Japanese garden. So too is the idea, however vaguely sensed, that gardens can be healing and regenerative. How is it possible though,…