My reading last year was shaped by my travels – in Japan and Korea in April and May, and South America in the second half of the year. I was surprised at the paucity of titles on Japan and Korea in English – reflecting, I suppose, white Australians’ indifference...
Seoul is like an equation with all the messy working out left in, the false starts, crossed out, taking up half the page. And so, despite the many surface similarities to Tokyo – the organic wend of its streets; the shops and restaurants that reproduce, perfectly,...
I wondered if going from Tokyo to Kyoto would be like going from Hanoi to Hoi An: from a working city that pays visitors no special attention to a place, with all the historical trimmings, that exists mainly for tourists. We’ve found that Kyoto has its own...
Tokyo makes me question some of my assumptions, my likes and dislikes. At home, I’d avoid malls and railway concourses as impersonal, artificial; here, where the smog is often so heavy that people go about in masks, malls are clean, controlled spaces. Often we...
