Authors
Albert Wolfe
Having struggled to learn Chinese outside of a classroom setting, Albert Wolfe understands how difficult and daunting learning a new language can be. He explores practical tips and tricks for becoming fluent in his book Chinese 24/7.
Andrew Horvat
Andrew Horvat lives in Tokyo. Formerly a reporter for the Associated Press, Tokyo correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and Tokyo Bureau Chief for American Public Radio, he is now a visiting professor at Tokyo Keizai University and lecturer at Showa Women's University, where he teaches courses on cross-cultural communication and language policy.
Andrew Osmond
Andrew Osmond is a freelance journalist who has written about anime for fifteen years. His articles and reviews have appeared in Animerica, Total Anime, Neo, Manga Max, SFX, Sight and Sound, Empire, and other outlets.
Arturo Silva
Arturo Silva spent 18 years in Tokyo and now lives in Vienna, Austria, where he teaches and writes about film.
Donald Richie
Praised by critics from Susan Sontag to Tom Wolfe, Donald Richie is considered the foremost writer on Japanese culture in English. Born in Ohio in 1924, he lived in Japan from 1947 until his death in 2013 at the age of 88, except during his time at Columbia University in the early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern Art from 1968-73.
Eve Kushner
Eve Kushner, based in Berkeley, California, has an insatiable passion for kanji. To give free rein to all that curiosity and love, she founded Joy o' Kanji (www.joyokanji.com). With this lifelong project she aims to write one essay about each of the 2,136 Joyo kanji (the characters the Japanese use in daily life). Her Japan-related writing has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Monthly, East Bay Express, and Japanophile, among other places. She has spoken about her love of kanji several times on the NPR-affiliated radio show "The World in Words."
Frank MacHovec
Frank MacHovec, a retired psychologist, has been a student of Eastern philosophies for decades and has previously published translations of several sacred works. He lives in eastern Virginia.
Frederik L. Schodt
Frederik L. Schodt is the author of several acclaimed works on Japan and Japanese culture. He was befriended by "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka in the late 1970s and maintained a close relationship with him until his death in 1989. Fluent in spoken and written Japanese, Schodt frequently served as Tezuka's interpreter and is the translator of several of Tezuka's manga, including the 23-volume Astro Boy series. He won the Osamu Tezuka Culture Award in 2000 for helping to popularize manga overseas. In 2009, Fred was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, by the Japanese Government for his work in helping to promote Japan's popular culture overseas. He lives in San Francisco.
Gil Asakawa
Gil Asakawa is the author of Being Japanese American (Stone Bridge Press, 2004) and co-author of The Toy Book (Knopf, 1991). He is a nationally-known speaker and commentator on Japanese American and Asian American identity and issues. He writes a blog, Nikkeiview.com, about pop culture and politics from an Asian American perspective. He also tweets, spends too much time on Facebook, and is a member of every social site and service he hears about.
Gilles Poitras
Gilles Poitras is a writer on anime, manga and Japanese culture. He has taken his popular anime website and created a print version in the form of The Anime Companion that's filled with curious details and fresh insights drawn from dozens of the most popular anime.
Gregg Krech
Gregg Krech is Executive Director of the ToDo Institute, a Naikan education and retreat center near Middlebury, Vermont.
H. E. Davey
H. E. Davey is Director of the Sennin Foundation Center for Japanese Cultural Arts. He has decades of training in Japanese yoga, healing arts, martial arts, and fine arts.
Helen McCarthy
Helen McCarthy is the former editor of Anime UK and Manga Mania magazines and the author of several books. A winner of the Japan Festival Award for outstanding contributions to the understanding of Japanese culture, McCarthy regularly curates films at the Barbican in London. She regularly appears in the media and at events worldwide.
Holly Thompson
Holly Thompson writes for children through adults and is the author of the novel Ash (Stone Bridge Press), the young adult verse novel Orchards (Delacorte/Random House), and the picture book The Wakame Gatherers (Shen's Books). Longtime resident of Japan, she serves as Regional Advisor for the Tokyo chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and teaches creative and academic writing at Yokohama City University.
Homare Endo
Homare Endo was born in China in 1941 and arrived in Japan in 1953. She is a Doctor of Science, director of the Center of International Relations at Tokyo University and Graduate School of Social Welfare, and professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba. She has written several books on China, Chinese politics, and Japan–China relations.
Jeanette S. Arakawa
Jeanette Arakawa was born in San Francisco, California to Japanese immigrants. During World War II, she was part of a diaspora that took her to Stockton, California, Rohwer, Arkansas, and Denver, Colorado.
Jina Bacarr
Jina Bacarr, author of The Blonde Geisha and numerous other books and articles, was previously the Japan-based consultant on KCBS-TV and MSNBC. She lives in Southern California.
John Stevens
John Stevens lived in Japan for 35 years, where he was a professor of Buddhist Studies and an Aikido instructor at Tohoku Fukushi University in Sendai, Japan. He has written or translated over twenty books on Japan's martial, sacred, and erotic ways and is a respected authority on esoteric Japanese culture. He has practiced and taught Aikido all over the world.Stevens' Aikido rank is 7th dan Aikikai.
Jonathan Clements
Jonathan Clements is the former editor of Manga Max magazine and the translator of dozens of anime, including Samurai Gold, Slow Step, and Plastic Little. A winner of the Japan Festival Award for outstanding contributions to the understanding of Japanese culture, Clements regularly appears at events worldwide.
Kittredge Cherry
Author Kittredge Cherry studied in Japan on a Rotary International Journalism scholarship at Kobe College and International Christian University in Tokyo. She blogs about Japan at JapanAdvise.com.She has written about Japan for such publications as Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her popular “Cool Words” column was a regular feature at the Asahi Weekly from 2006 to 2009. The New York Times Book Review praised her “very graceful, erudite” writing style and her poetry has won several awards.
Ms. Cherry’s talent for analyzing language trends led to her first book, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women, originally published by Kodansha International in 1987. She went on to write six more books, including Art That Dares, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2007.
Her specialties include writing about women’s issues, language, culture, religion, LGBTQ issues, and communication. Ms. Cherry’s books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, and Polish.
A native of Iowa, she has bachelor’s degrees in journalism and art history from the University of Iowa, and a master’s degree from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA. Ms. Cherry and her spouse, Audrey Lockwood, live in Los Angeles.
Larry and Qin Herzberg
Larry and Qin Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Since 1984, Larry has taught first- through fourth-year Chinese language courses, as well as several courses on Chinese culture and society. In 2011, he was awarded the Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching, the highest honor that Calvin College bestows on a faculty member. Larry has visited mainland China numerous times over the past twenty-five years, most recently with twelve of his students on a study tour during the summer of 2007. He is also a full-time violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony.
Qin grew up in Beijing and has contributed to numerous Chinese magazines, including Marriage and the Family and China Educator's Journal, and to World Journal, America's leading Chinese newspaper.
Leonard Koren
Leonard Koren, who was trained as an artist and architect, writes books about design and aesthetics. Among his most popular books are Wabi-Sabi and Arranging Things. He lives in San Francisco.
Leza Lowitz
Leza Lowitz is an accidental global citizen--bicultural mother, modern yogini, and multi-genre author of over seventeen books. She has received the APALA Award in Young Adult Literature, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Award, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry, a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Humanities Independent Scholar Fellowship, and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.
Linda Watanabe McFerrin
Poet, travel writer, novelist and teacher Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a contributor to numerous journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and online publications including the San Francisco Examiner, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Modern Bride, Travelers' Tales, Salon.com, and Women.com. She is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of the 4th edition of Best Places Northern California.
Liza Dalby
Liza Dalby is an anthropologist (PhD Stanford) and writer (Geisha, The Tale of Murasaki, Kimono, East Wind Melts the Ice) best known for being the first Westerner to become a geisha. Her fiction and nonfiction have been praised for their rich historical imagination andilluminating prose. Hidden Buddhas: A Novel of Karma and Chaos is her first book with Stone Bridge Press. She lives in Berkeley, California.
Marc Peter Keane
Marc Peter Keane lived in Japan for 20 years, designing gardens for individuals, companies, and temples. He has written 3 other books on Japanese garden design. He is affiliated with the Research Center for Japanese Garden Art at the Kyoto University of Art and Design, the East Asian Program at Cornell University, and the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies at Columbia University.
Mark James Russell
Mark James Russell has been living in Korea since 1996, covering Korean pop culture for such publications as the New York Times, Billboard, and Newsweek. His 2008 book, Pop Goes Korea, looked at how Korea became a pop culture powerhouse.
Mark Schilling
Born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1949, Mark Schilling arrived in Tokyo in 1975 and has lived there ever since. He has been reviewing Japanese films for The Japan Times since 1989 and reported on the Japanese film industry for Screen International, a British film trade magazine, from 1990 to 2005. He is currently Japan correspondent for Variety. His articles on Japanese culture and society have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Asian Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Interview, The Japan Quarterly, Kinema Junpo and the Japan editions of Time, Newsweek, Vogue and Premiere.
Michael Rowley
Michael Rowley is the author of Kanji Pictographics, Kana Pictographix, and Michael Rowley's KanjiPictoGraphix Dragon
Pack. He runs Papernapkin.com, a creative studio for design, illustration, and photography. He is a best-selling author of visual books for understanding complex subjects about chemistry, Japanese, and geography. His latest project is the iPhone app Kanji PictoCards for the iTunes store.
Nadja Van Ghelue
Artist Nadja Van Ghelue has studied traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean calligraphy. She runs the online gallery www.theartofcalligraphy.com.
Patrick Drazen
Patrick Drazen has lectured on Japanese popular culture at the University of Chicago and Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he earned a Masters of Arts degree and worked as an announcer for WSIU-FM. He has been published in Channels of Communication and the Journal of Popular Culture. He and his wife live in Chicago.
Patrick Galloway
Patrick Galloway is the author of Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook and Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand. He writes often about Asian film and culture and has been a lifelong student of Asian philosophy. He has traveled in Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, India, and Nepal.Shouhua Qi
Shouhua Qi ("Chi") is an associate professor of English at Western Connecticut State University. Qi is the author of Red Guard Fantasies and Other Stories and When the Purple Mountain Burns. He is one of the foremost experts on (and translators of) the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Shun Medoruma
Akutagawa Prize–winner and activist Shun Medoruma was born in Okinawa. He has written unique novels that are based on Okinawan nature, history, and climate, focusing especially on the Battle of Okinawa and memories of that war experience. Medoruma often expresses his strong anti-base political views through his articles in the local newspapers—and in his blog.Soji Shimada
Soji Shimada, author of over 100 mystery novels, is a designer, musician, and astrology writer.Stuart D. B. Picken
Rev. Stuart Picken, an ordained minister, has taught religion in Japan since 1972 and is international adviser to the High Priest of Tsubaki Grand Shrine. He is author of Essentials of Shinto.
Suzanne Kamata
Formerly fiction editor of Being A Broad, a magazine for foreign women living in Japan, Suzanne Kamata now serves as fiction editor for the popular e-zine Literary Mama, and edits and publishes the literary magazine Yomimono. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a special mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.
Takuma Sminkey
Takuma Sminkey is a university English teacher and translator living in Naha, Japan.Wayne P. Lammers
Wayne P. Lammers has taught Japanese at the college level and is an award-winning literary and commercial translator. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Wes "Scoop" Nisker
Wes "Scoop" Nisker is a Buddhist meditation teacher, author and performer. His books include the newly edited version of his national bestseller, Essential Crazy Wisdom (Ten Speed Press), The Big Bang, The Buddha, and the Baby Boom (Harper San Francisco), Buddha's Nature (Bantam), and his most recent book Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again! (Stone Bridge Press). Mr. Nisker is also the founder and co-editor of the international Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind.
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