Book Review: ‘Fallout: The Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world’

Not particularly just about the nuclear bomb itself the book is more about the covering up of both the immediate and ensuing adverse aftereffects of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima on the city’s inhabitants, the US Government’s and US Military’s propaganda and censorship to play these down, and the subsequent exposé by the WWII journalist, and author, John Hersey.

Book Review: ‘Honoured and Dishonoured Guests: Westerners in Wartime Japan’

For a subject that seems rarely to have been written about this is a welcome publication highlighting (and that is the operative term being used in this review) the experience of foreigners in Japan during WWII albeit in this review with reservations about some of the assertions it makes.

Book Review: Midnight in Broad Daylight

A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds!

Though the title of this book is taken from Sankichi Tōge’s poem about the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima this book isn’t actually all about that event; one chapter late on in the book is dedicated to the event with its post traumatic effects on the populace, and the family in particular, covered in subsequent chapters. It is quite frankly an astonishing and incredibly moving account of one Japanese-American family’s experience of immigrant status in the USA and the effect of the Great Depression, racism, movements of various members of the family back and forth between Japan and the USA in the lead up to the Second World War, the consequences for the various members of the family in situ in both countries during

Review: The Newly Refurbished Toshiba Gallery At The Victoria And Albert Museum

‘Design is not for philosophy, it’s for life’ (Issey Miyake)

After the post Second World War attempt by the Allies in occupied Japan to disband the zaibatsu business conglomerates, which was partially successful, Japanese industry began setting itself strategies at regular intervals for the development and manufacture of products. Each revolved around particular group of five facets of design and manufacture – for instance a single strategic phase might involve something like:

Exhibition: Paintings From Hiroshima

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Date: 5 – 13 Aug 2015

Venue: Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation 13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent’s Park), London NW1 4QP

This year in August will be the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  An Englishman, Mike Stevenson, has in his possession two collections of art works made by children in Japan in the aftermath of World War II.  The 34 works in one collection were made by students of a Christian girls’ school in Hiroshima, which suffered the deaths of over 300 students.  The school building was destroyed, but it was said to be the first to re-open following the atomic bombing of that city.

East Meets West – The Marriage Of German Ballerina Hedi Wekel and Japanese Cellist Yukichi Koh

Hedi Koh (born Hedwig Wekel) (1909 – 2012)

Hedi Koh who had died aged 103 was born on the 20^th February 1909 as Hedwig Wekel in Leipzig. She was a highly talented ballerina, nearly 19 years old, at the Leipzig opera when she met Yukichi Koh. He was the first Japanese man she had ever seen and she was surprised at this good looking, beautiful man. Till then she had only known Japanese faces from Japanese Ukiyo e, woodcut prints and had formed some strange perceptions about the appearance of Japanese people, expecting them to be yellow skinned and

Film Review: KanZeOn – A Celebration of Buddhism And Music

Flows like a stream of serenity, gently and naturally going from one sequence to the next!

Zen Buddhism has influenced many Japanese art forms, including the tea ceremony, calligraphy, martial arts and music. It is the latter in which KanZeOn, another word for Kanon the Buddhist goddess of compassion, she who hears the cries of the world, and written as