Cultural Concepts

A child opens the lid of their bento box at school. Inside: a flat field of white rice, almost the entire surface, and at the dead center, a single dark red plum. Nothing else. No protein,…

You’re at a traditional Japanese inn in the morning. A breakfast tray arrives. There is rice, miso soup, grilled fish, pickled vegetables, and a small ceramic cup containing a quivering brown mass laced with thick white…

A Japanese couple is about to name their child. They have a shortlist of possible kanji combinations that produce the same phonetic name. The grandparents are consulted. A naming specialist is sometimes consulted. The choice is…

You’re at a Japanese shrine. There’s a small wooden box near the offering area with a slot in the lid. You drop a 100-yen coin into a separate box, pick up the cylinder, shake it, and…

A pine tree, fifty centimeters tall, in a shallow ceramic pot. The trunk is gnarled in a way pine trunks usually only get after a hundred and fifty years on a windswept ridge. The needles are…

You walk into a Japanese stationery shop in early January and notice a row of round, red, scowling dolls on a shelf — squat, eyebrow-heavy, with white circles where eyes should be. The shop owner picks…

You walk into a small Japanese restaurant and miss it for a moment. There, on a shelf near the entrance, a small ceramic cat with one paw raised, looking faintly cheerful. You’ve seen these before —…

An American at a tech conference introduces himself by mentioning, casually and proudly, that he’s “an anime otaku.” A Japanese counterpart at the same conference, who also happens to watch a lot of anime, would not…

A wooden tea house on the edge of a temple compound. A tea bowl glazed in a deep iron-grey. A kimono in a navy so dark it almost reads as black. An older man in a…

You’re walking on a soft path through a forest in Nagano. The pace is slow, slower than a hike. You aren’t trying to reach anywhere. The instructor — a certified one, in this case — has…